Two vigils

Tonight is the Great Vigil of Easter, in which we await and then celebrate the Resurrection. I know my part in that Vigil. I am the "understudy" for the Exsultet, since our Deacon (a fine singer) may not be able to make it. I am also serving as thurifer and reading one of the Old Testament Lessons. And I know how that Vigil will end: with the Blessed Sacrament and shouts of "Alleluia!"

I am observing another vigil, however, whose end is not so clear, and in which my role is rather less well-defined. I am awaiting my first meeting with the Bishop about my aspirancy for Holy Orders. Having been approved by my parish discernment committee and then the Vestry, I am eager to begin the finals steps before what I hope will be my admission to postulancy.

My Rector assures me that the Bishop is keen on moving me along, so it's not that I'm worried about being turned down or even made to wait, even though my expectation that I will be ordained a priest eventually is not yet a "sure and certain hope." I will admit to a certain trepidation about the event itself, along the lines of a good but diffident schoolboy awaiting a meeting with a kind but imposing headmaster. But I very much like our Bishop, and I have no reason to think things will go badly in that meeting, or in my interviews with the Commission on Ministry (assuming the Bishop gives the go-ahead for those). I found the probing and challenging questions of my discernment committee and Vestry invigorating rather than nerve-wracking, so I have every reason to expect that I will leave those meetings with renewed energy for the road ahead.

One looming uncertainty concerns the sort of training the Bishop will want for me. I am a tenured academic in a field related to theology, with a respectable list of publications of theological interest, so I am hopeful that he will not want much. I will be on sabbatical for the next academic year writing a book (on a pre-Reformation Archbishop of Canterbury, as it happens). To me this means that I will have ample to time to prepare to take the General Ordination Examination, do a quarter of Clinical Pastoral Education, and so forth. But I will spend most of that time outside the Diocese, so I can imagine that the Bishop may prefer to put me on hold for a while. As I told my Rector, now that I've been approved by the Vestry, I feel the eagerness of an athlete who is all suited up for the competition. I really hope I won't be told that the game has been postponed.

There are other uncertainties as well, which I will be blogging about over the next few days, until I actually meet with the Bishop. My hope is that the exercise of writing will help me sort through my thoughts and thus assist my discernment of God's will. And if anyone happens to stumble across this blog, perhaps it will be of interest to someone else who is discerning a call to ordained ministry or is interested in the formation of a priest in the Episcopal Church.