Yesterday afternoon my best friend and I boarded a Lufthansa plane for a nine hour flight to Frankfurt. We had a few hour stay over at the airport before boarding another one hour Lufthansa flight to Copenhagen where we had another few hours stay over before boarding a two or so hour Atlantic Airlines flight to Vagur in the Faroe Islands.

You really, really have to want to go to the Faroes. Which my best friend and I do—this being our third trip.

This trip is the beginning of my retirement travels. I’m still sorting out in my head what it means to not have an endless list of things left undone at my job. Now I’m discovering a new rhythm of priorities and spiritual practices.

Leaving the quotidian is a good way to shake up and reframe.

And what better place than Frankfurt, Copenhagen, and the Faroe Islands?

This is my last month to serve as a full-time stipendiary priest. After September 30, I’ll take six months to discern what God has in store for me next, but I’ll be surprised if it doesn’t mean serving somehow, somewhere as a priest. For today, I am treasuring every day of this very busy September.

My 97 year old mom continues to slowly decline. I came to Chambersville a few days ago to work remotely while I assisted my brother as caregiver.

Today is Sunday, and it is very difficult for my mom to leave home. Worship for a couple of years for this cradle Southern Baptist has been joining the tv worship offered by the Roman Catholic Diocese of Dallas. It always blows my mind. Who would have thought?

I love to sit with her and join her for worship. She especially enjoys it when I sing along with the service. Most of the music is very familiar.

During the online distribution of communion, they show the music leaders singing. Today it was “As the deer panteth for the waters,” a song I’ve sung since St. Cuthbert days forty years ago. As I sang along today, my heart went back to those early St. Cuthbert Sundays, and singing it with my hand on my heart from a place of deep yearning.

I do spend an awful lot of time pondering the past these pre-retirement days.

Halfway through communion, my mother needed to go to the bathroom. I assisted her as she got up from her recliner, got situated with her walker, and began the slow, stooped-over walk.

As I walked behind my dear mom, spotting her from a possible fall, I continued to sing. Once again placing my hand over my heart, following slowly behind my precious mother tending to the most basic of needs, I realized that this was a sacred walk. I was having the most Holy Communion one could have.

From Psalm 42

As the deer pants for the water
So my soul longs after you
You alone are my heart’s desire
And I long to worship you

You alone are my strength, my shield
To You alone may my spirit yield
You alone are my heart’s desire
And I long to worship you

You’re my friend
And You are my brother
Even though You are a King
I love You more than any other
So much more than anything

You alone are my strength, my shield
To You alone may my spirit yield
You alone are my heart’s desire
And I long to worship Thee

I don’t know why after 31 years I can’t remember the date of my ordination to the diaconate. I know it’s the end of June, but I have to look at my ordination certificate to know for sure of the date.

I had great delight this morning when leading Facebook live prayers when one participant remembered my ordination and give thanks.

I spent the morning remembering that day and the people that were there as I drove from Houston to McKinney to be with my 97 year old mom. Yesterday she was admitted to the hospital via ambulance due to confusion, slurred speech and breathing difficulties. Diagnosis still pending.

Just a little over a week ago many of us were together at my mom’s for a modified Jernigan family reunion. Part of my brother’s family had COVID (yep, it’s still around), and we had to do an all too familiar COVID pivot (yep, still doing that)—since he and his wife had planned to host.

Through moving outside in the 90+ degree weather (my mother loved being warm) and smaller family groups gathering, it wasn’t the reunion we’d planned, but it was a great reunion.

As I sit by my mother’s bedside, I am so thankful we had those connections.

On the 31st anniversary of my ordination to the diaconate, I am especially mindful of the many I love that were in Houston at Christ Church Cathedral that hot June day, and especially those I won’t see again this side of heaven.

My Episcopal Aunt Mary who sat on the back porch of my house at the party afterwards with my mother in law, Jeannine, smoking, and proud to have a priest in the family. My sending priest, The Rev. Tom Brindley, who had more influence on my formation than any other clergy. My dad, who would read a lesson at my ordination to the priesthood and with whom I’d go on mission to the newly independent Ukraine.

This day of thinking and praying backwards and forwards has been a kind of retreat. I’ve had so many texts from folks telling of people’s prayers for me and my family. Tomorrow I’ll pull out my computer and work from my mom’s hospital room.

It’s not lost on me that from the view outside my mother’s window I can see a cross.

I went to Oregon this past weekend to be present for my grandson, Austin’s, Black Belt graduation. When my son picked me up at the airport on Thursday, he asked me if there was anything else special I wanted to do this weekend, and I said that I’d like to go to church.

When I went to seminary over thirty years ago, I found studying about God and theology and the Bible and liturgy really messed with my relationship with God. How to find the Holy One when God was a test to be taken, a paper to be written, and another chapter to be read? I found my way, thankfully, to a deeper relationship with God.

I find myself in a similar place after serving as a priest on the Diocesan staff. This time, God and I are really good, but I have my struggles with the church.

Worshipping nearly every week in a different church, I find myself without a church community or home. When I am at church, I am usually there to problem solve and listen. I do my very best to worship, but all too often I am present to work. It’s messing with finding Church (the gathered body of Christ)when I am at church (a building with people gathered).

I am craving the Holy in the gathered community.

Sunday when my Bend family got up, my son announced we were all going to church (the grandboys doing the nooooooo! that greets so many Sunday morning families). They aren’t attending church on a regular basis, so I got to choose where we would go. I had worshipped in a local mainline Protestant church on another visit, so I chose that.

The worship space was nearly filled with people whose hair color was the same as mine. The ushers expressed delight at seeing a young family (tip: I don’t think it’s a best practice to welcome with the words, “Oh! Young people!” It may only point out that the congregation is of riper years, and the words can have a feel of desperation rather welcome).

Disappointingly, I could not move myself from work-mode to worship. I did find a Holy center in the music and the pastor’s prayer at communion. But in the post-pandemic search for who the church is to be in this new world, almost everything else in the service, for me, could have been experienced at any other well-intentioned gathering. It was too safe.

I know that we receive what we put into worship, so I take my own responsibility for my experience. I will say that the things I missed helped me in my own discernment of what is Church. I need to hear Scripture read with respect and a little awe; I need corporate prayer that is not words read but prayed; I need times to pause to let words sink in.

I know that worship is not about what we feel but about our presence. I was present and my family was, too, and I know that whether we feel or know it or not, God blessed us.

Which leads me to karate.

But I’m thinking about how we are Church when most people won’t ever walk through church doors.

On the occasions when I took my grandboys to karate and had the gift to watch their classes, I had been impressed with the values that were being taught. I told Mr. White, that although God is never mentioned, there was a glimpse into God’s hope for the world in what I see happen there.

After Black Belt graduation, I had a rich conversation with Mr. White, the karate instructor. I knew that he had been a youth pastor before he began to teach karate. He told me about his journey from ministry in the church to (my words) ministry in the world.

I told Mr. White the Christian values I saw in the karate studio even when Jesus’ name was never mentioned. I saw people who would never enter a church for one reason or another be respected and welcomed.

I told him I saw an amazing diversity of people who are challenged to rise to their very best. I saw the gift of discipline; encouragement when encouragement was needed; correction when that was necessary. I saw an unlikely group of people working together in community as they worked through their own individual program. There were intentional opportunities for the karate students to serve outside of class. These are some of the characteristics of church.

Mr. White told me about a vision someone had had about God’s call on his life. Mr. White understood the vision to mean that he would be a senior pastor in a church. He told me about the day in the karate studio that he realized that he had misunderstood; that this was exactly “the church” where God wanted him.

In the sermon yesterday, the pastor said this (more or less):

In the 1960s, a Japanese theologian, Kosuke Koyama, wrote a book, Three Mile an Hour God (SCM Press). He noticed that the average speed that human beings walk at is three miles per hour. Jesus, who is God, walked at three miles per hour. God, who is love, walks at three miles per hour. Love has a speed, Koyama says, and that speed is slow. That speed is gentle. That speed is tender.

I keep thinking and praying about church. I keep thinking and praying about Church.

Knowing that God is slow and gentle and tender, how am I to be church wherever Church may be?

I guess I did find Church this weekend. And the Holy, too.