I spent the rest of that afternoon pacing the church grounds with my pipe (my crutch at that time) and trying to think, but by suppertime nothing had really gelled, and I also learned that my organist had suddenly come down with the flu. By nine-thirty I had an outline in my head and headed over to the office to type out my notes. I threw my coat over one of the benches (we were using the parish hall until the new church was ready), and at about ten o’clock I added the final touches to my sermon. Then I smelled smoke. I dashed down the stairs three at a time and into the hall and stood there, transfixed with shock, as flames leapt five feet high from my overcoat and the bench, which was also on fire. I realized I must have forgotten to empty my pipe of its ashes before putting it into my pocket. Fortunately, a rush of adrenalin freed me from my immobility, and after several pails of water I had the fire out, but it left the hall completely filled with clouds of acrid, choking black smoke. The service was due to begin in less than an hour. I tore around, opening as many windows as I could, and to my relief blasts of freezing air soon cleared most of the haze. But the place simply stank of burned cloth and paint, and by now it seemed to be bordering on too cold to serve as a church. I felt on the verge of a nervous breakdown! I ran for my car, drove to the nearest convenience store and purchased several cans of air freshener, drove back, closed the windows and furiously sprayed in all directions.
By the time the congregation began to arrive, there was the oddest scent in the air, but nobody remarked on it.
Preaching is either a clergyman’s greatest delight or the one thing that can keep him tossing at night like a harpooned fish. At that time, sermons were prepared with great diligence in an effort to impart something original and inspiring. Usually I enjoyed it, but there were times when I would have given anything for a copy of a medieval collection of prepared sermons aptly titled Dormi Securi (“sleep without a worry in your head”), reportedly much used by clerics of that feisty period in Church history. Interestingly, the Internet has enabled some clerics today to use generic sermons. They’re easy to spot because they invariably conclude with a question: “How would you [pointing a finger at a sweep of pews] respond to such a commandment today?”
Soon after I was ordained a deacon and during my first year of theological training, I was sent on weekends to a country charge with three churches. All the services were in the morning, beginning with the farthest point at nine o’clock, where I did a “preach and run” and then moved on to the next and the next in order to get everyone home for their Sunday dinner at one p.m. My very first morning was a beautiful, sunny fall day that was so warm all the windows in the little rural church were wide open. I mounted the pulpit feeling confident, apart from a certain tension I always had while gazing down into such trusting eyes. It was a harvest home service and the oaken pews were crammed with families, including the front rows, a rare phenomenon in Anglican churches even then.
Unfortunately, I got off to a rather shaky start. There was a banner attached to the reading stand on the pulpit by a piece of elasticized ribbon. As I gave the opening prayer, I inadvertently toyed with the ribbon. I said, “Amen,” looked up to announce my text, accidentally freed the elastic, and with a whoosh the banner shot into the lap of a matronly woman wearing a straw hat. She stared at me as if I had done it on purpose. I apologized and waded into the homily, but found it hard to keep up the enthusiastic momentum my notes called for. As I laboured on, the congregation took on that fixed, glazed look of those whose minds have wandered far away. Then an extraordinary thing happened. A sudden, quirky gust of wind came in the window, lifted the paper with my sermon notes on it and gently wafted it outside, where it tumbled like a falling leaf to the lawn below.
Now the congregation came to life and started to look interested for the first time. I did my best to smile and, putting a look on my face that I hoped would show I was better off without the notes anyway, tried to improvise. It was a losing battle until I suddenly remembered my concluding points. I seized on them like a drowning man and worked and reworked them until I had successfully filled the remaining ten minutes.
Afterwards, several parishioners told me they had enjoyed such an “interesting” sermon, but I knew that “roast parson” would be the main course at Sunday dinner in more than one home that day.
“The cure of souls” is an old-fashioned way of speaking about ministering to people’s spiritual needs. A good deal of time in the parish was spent presiding over the rites of passage of funerals and weddings, and administering the sacraments of baptism and Holy Communion. During the course of my ministry I had, like all clergy, to face human tragedy and sorrow times without number. I found it a tremendous privilege and responsibility to be admitted into the tender arena of grief and attempt to bring comfort, renewed courage and hope. There can be no point at which a minister comes closer to people, who are very often today total strangers to him or her, than when a death occurs.
The one thing I tried to avoid at all costs was the habit of some overzealous clerics of seizing the occasion of a funeral, where one has a captive audience, as an opportunity to preach to the “unsaved.” It still goes on today and has always seemed to me an unfair tactic. Words of comfort—yes, of course, but anything more is not truly compassionate. My very first funeral was that of a three-year-old. She was a little girl, the joy of her parents and grandparents, who lived on a farm together at the edge of town. The only grandchild, she was tragically run over by the grandfather’s tractor one morning as she ran to him unaware that he was going to back out of a nearby shed. Everyone was devastated and my heart was particularly touched to the depths by the plight of the old man. He was utterly inconsolable. I visited him and his wife, as well as the young parents, several times before the funeral—mostly just to be with them, saying very little, except to try to assure them of the presence and love of the Eternal always with and within them and their darling little one. At the service I studiously stayed away from syrupy truisms or the, to my mind, wholly misleading pronouncements often heard at such events as people try to make sense of the incomprehensible, to the effect that “God took her because he needed her in heaven” or “She was too good for this world.” But it was very difficult, even at times exhausting work, if you really loved your people.
So close a walk with death and dying takes its toll on many ministers and priests. If not for the ability to receive the gift of humour, most clergy would find it impossible to continue. You could even, with no disrespect, call it “putting the fun back in funerals.” Often I found that when hearing about amusing things the deceased person said or did, the bereaved may begin to sense that healing is taking place. This was especially true when the deceased was on in years and had lived a full life. In the midst of the saddest funerals, I sometimes found my own spirits start to lift, for example, at the incongruity of the professional grief of the undertaker and his staff in their mourning clothes or the syrupy and sentimental funeral chapel hymns.
Once, I was conducting a funeral in mid-winter. I felt I looked rather resplendent in my new floor-length black funeral cloak, which was designed to ward off the chill that only cemeteries in winter provide. However, as I strode by a group of mourners, a young lad of about eight pointed at me and, tugging at his mother’s arm, said: “Look, Mum, it’s Zorro!” It helped my humility, but it did more—it introduced a note of laughter and saved an otherwise very bleak day. I was reminded of Robert Frost’s poem “Dust of Snow,” about being in the woods on a depressing winter’s day. He wrote that the way a crow in a hemlock tree shook down a dusting of snow on him lifted his mood and “saved some part of a day I had rued.”
Weddings are usually a pleasant part of any minister’s duties. It’s a privilege to be close to a couple at such a key existential moment. The pitfalls are many, however. Often I would find that the reception hall, flowers, rented tuxedos and