Charge to ordinands and new members

At our community retreat this past weekend, the Lindisfarne Community welcomed one new member, professed five novices, and ordained three new deacons and two priests.  Each person addressed the community, sharing some part of their story they felt was pertinent to that moment.  And then, on behalf of the community, I addressed the new members and ordinands.  This message is called the charge, and its purpose is to present a goal or guiding principle for the newly professed or ordained to keep in mind going forward.  In addition, the charge may include a message for the broader community, which this one does as well.  The text appears below.

Charge to ordinands, novices, and newly professed                       June 11, 2021

Good afternoon, good evening, my dear friends. It is always so very moving to address our community on a solemn and joyful occasion such as this.  Even though tonight we cannot lay physical hands on one another, we are, in fact, gathered in the Spirit to celebrate the fact that we are kin in Christ, and that we are continually growing and developing as a community.

 

Our service this evening marks an important turning point for all of us.  For Thomas, it is his initial commitment to join the Lindisfarne Community – to officially declare himself “one of us,” and to continue his exploration of how this community receives the gifts of the Spirit, and how we pass them on.

 

For Wagner and Anastasios, Teddy, Shanti, and Renee, it is an affirmation of your discoveries so far, a turning point from “novice” to “professed.”  It is the beginning of a new relationship with Lindisfarne, one in which we depend upon each of you to be part of the glue that holds this disparate and dispersed community together.

 

For Nick, Anastasios, and Teddy, this is your first step into ordained life.  As deacons, your primary responsibility will be to serve the needs of others – in your household, your religious community, and in your own corner of God’s wide world.  As we discussed at our last community retreat, the commitment to serve is a deep and complex challenge, one that each of us in deacon’s orders engages every day.

 

For Wagner and Renee, today marks the beginning of your life as a priest of the Lindisfarne Community, and the embodiment of Christ to your people.  The vows you will take this evening represent a transformation in how you live and how you will be seen by others.  While you have always been a priest in God’s eyes, now you will bear the responsibility of living up to your vows – to study, to pray, to consult with your bishops – in a much more overt way.

 

For each of you, today is a new beginning, and that, my friends, is the heart of my charge to you: to adopt and retain what our companions in the Zen tradition call “beginner’s mind.”  I know you have prepared yourselves for this moment, this new transition, and I know you have thought long and hard about your call, your sense of belonging, your desire for God and for the support of the community.  In truth, however, there is no way to prepare for what comes after this ritual.  This is the leap of faith that says, “I don’t know what comes next.  I choose to trust that I will not encounter it alone.”  Beginner’s mind says, “I do not know what the day will bring, but I choose to meet it with an open heart and seek the heart of Christ in each moment.”

 

I want to share with you a story about my own experience of beginner’s mind.  Way back in the previous millennium I earned a bachelor’s degree in music education.  I studied voice and conducting, I passed proficiency exams on three different instruments, and conducted choral and orchestral performances at my university.  Then, several years later I saw someone playing a Celtic harp.  I fell in love.  As soon as I could I went to a music shop to try one out.  The dealer handed me a harp, and I immediately embraced it – backwards.  He had to turn it around so that I could begin to pluck the strings.  I bought a harp that very day, and signed up for lessons, confident that my background would make me a pro in no time!  I went to my first lesson, and was assigned the magnificent Irish tune, Twinkle Twinkle Little Star!  As Master Yoda would say, “How embarrassing!”  I quickly discovered that all my prior learning couldn’t make my hands play a new instrument smoothly and melodiously.  And that was the real lesson -- before I could learn to play the harp I had to learn how to be a beginner all over again. 

 

It was such an important lesson, one I’ve had to remind myself about more often than I care to admit.  But here’s the advantage of keeping a beginner’s mind:  no matter how many times we’ve prayed the Office, or opened the Bible for study, or sat in meditation, or consecrated the bread and wine of the Eucharist, or comforted a friend in pain, each moment will hold its own gifts, its own insights, its own unique experience of God’s presence in that moment.  If we assume we know from previous experience what the next moment will bring, we will never see the next, the new, the deeper, broader truth that God has in store for us.  Each encounter – with God, with our neighbor, and with ourselves – holds the promise of revelation within it, but only if we remain open to that possibility.

Today is a new beginning for all of us. Not only for our new members and ordinands, but for the wider community as well.  Our Understandings remind us that “our way of living will always be incomplete,” and that the arrival of new members will inevitably change the dynamic of the community as a whole.  Lindisfarne today is not the same community I first enquired with a decade ago – nor should it be!  The Spirit is continually blowing where She will, and that is who we are called to follow.  I charge us all to remain faithful to our sense of openness and incompleteness, our commitment to being a community in process.

 

It's ok to be beginners.  In fact, it’s all we ever are.  May we embrace our collective sense of newness and wonder, now and every day.  Amen.