For the first time this season, the ground is ever so lightly covered with a dusting of snow. It's late in the year and discouraging that we haven't had a decent snowstorm yet. The four feet of snow covering the front yard in April 2001 is a very distant memory. Last winter was such a bust; I do hope we will get much more snow than then. If we are going to put up with sunless and cold days in Vermont, we should at least be rewarded with snow.
The cold is now moving into my chest. That is small progress; at least I can breathe again. I haven't been able to row since last Thursday, which is really messing up my ability to crank out 200K by Christmas Eve. If I were to row every day between now and then, I'd have to do 8.5K. It is doable, but given that I feel waterlogged, I am not so sure about rowing today even.
I still don't really have the brains to comment on the ordinations I attended last week but this close up of our laying hands on a woman who was ordained to the priesthood on Saturday sums up a lot of it.
There's a particularity and universality to an ordination. The particularity comes from the ordination taking place in a local context. I had the sense both last Wednesday at the diaconal ordinations in my parish, and then the priesting at the cathedral on Saturday that it was a diocesan event and, since we are a small diocese, an intimate occasion. The people being ordained have connections to the diocese ranging from over 35 to under 10 years. At the same time, the ordinations are universal. Watching the two people kneel before the bishop last Wednesday and then standing next to the woman about to be ordained priest on Saturday, I thought about how we priests/deacons had also knelt before a bishop at some point in time, and how our bishops had done likewise. Apostolic succession becomes very real at that moment. Finally, the invocation of the Holy Spirit and that rich, dripping moment of utter silence before the bishop moves into the prayer of consecration moves across all time and all places.
Particularly when ordained priest, I had the sensation of being passive in an event where all these hands did things to me. Thirty-five, thirty-eight, I no longer remember, priests put their hands on top of the bishop's hands as he ordained me. And then hands put a stole around my neck (one of the Philadelphia 11 and the third woman to be ordained priest in my former diocese -- women's apostolic succession), and more hands put the chasuble over my head, and then the bishop anointed my hands -- probably the most significant piece of it all, something I still remember when I look at the palms of my hands -- and he placed a bible in my hands. It wasn't until I stood up, transformed from without and within that I regained an active state.
Ordinations tend to render me speechless because of how close we beckon the Holy to come -- they are one of those liminal places where we can only be still, because of the sheer weight and enormity of what we are about to do.
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