Making sense of being a priest

My most confronting encounter this week has been with Jason. 

After the Traditional Mass he wandered into the porch , thank God for the open Church.  He just wanted to sit down, or so it seemed, and though I was ready to ‘up and go’ I thought the least I should do was give him some time.
He was clearly in some distress, and his speech was almost unintelligible.The Grandpa in me tells me that you just have to give this some time…try talking to a two year old . It’s not that they are not talking it is that I am not hearing.
Jason sat quietly in front of the glorious image of the risen Jesus with the open wounded hands and tears were flooding.
Oh shit! What am I going to do? This guy has come wanting to receive and can I deliver? Pretty obviously, not!
It is as this point I have to realise thatI am not the one who has to deliver. Why would he want what I have to offer?
“I’ll just sit here, and you just take your time!”  It was the least I could do, and yet I rather begrudged it.
“Do you want me to pray for you?”  I asked. 
Fairly confident that I know how to pray. Not just ritualistically, but with meaning and with the courage to pray for deliverance if necessary.
“Maybe later,” he says. 
So I go and sit down quietly behind him. And for once say nothing!
His tears were flowing, makes me cry now just writing about it. 
His barely intelligible utterances talked of a woman who had been raped and told she would never have children.
That broken woman had met this broken man and they had borne a child…I wrote that they had  fathered a child….and I think that was important for Jason he was a father and felt totally incapable being so. 
In his ramblings he alluded to three others, I am not sure if he was the father. Possibly…even probably.
Then he lapsed into “I don’t want to go to jail, they are just horrible to me in there.”
What had happened I do not want to know, but we can all imagine. 
I do not want to know. But maybe my turning away is part of the problem.
I had waves of fear about him because he seemed erratic, crazed. 
I asked him if he was taking drugs.
He told me he wasn’t. And I believe him. 
But I knew, and he knew that I knew that his mind had been crippled by f&$%in’ meth. 
Don’t use that term lightly.
This was a beautiful man, of gentle spirit  whose humanity has been crippled by the careless greed of the pushers,
I repeat again:
“Oh shit! What am I going to do? This guy has come wanting to receive and can I deliver? Pretty obviously, not!”
We couldn’t sit there for ever, 
I prayed with him.
A gentle prayer, and prayer for deliverance (exorcism)…I am not afeared to pray so [ thank you A J Davies…who though a curious man taught me to trust the prayer …. and deliver us from evil]
As we took a quarter of an hour to leave 
he talked about Her…the mother of the children, 
who was coming in on an interstate bus.
“She will love this place.”
I had to tell him the Church was not open all the time, Tuesdays and Thursdays and of course Sundays.
I really hope we see them ...our prayers   genuine prayers   will be there for them

I was totally struck that he knew how he had been touched by our Shrine.
 
And my heart thrilled, whilst also being sad that he had to blow his nose on his tee shirt because he was so overcome. (  I wanted him to have my used handkerchief, but thought that was a bit disgusting....on reflection it was probably not)
 
Let us not ever begin to think that we live in a country where everyone is equal!!
 
And God forgive me for my failure to be Jesus to this beautiful man.

Another remarkable man

Another remarkable man and Anglican, Malcolm Boyd,  who is also a priest ( oh my goodness you lay people have it easy) died this week.

Boyd was 93. He was one of those wonderful thinkers who was able to challenge the community of faith to "look/live outside   the square". That is,  to think creatively. (a full newspaper eulogy in The LA Times is here)

Part of the article tells us quite a lot 

" Boyd was elected president of PEN, an advocacy group for writers' freedom of speech. He started living with Mark Thompson, who was a senior editor for the Advocate, a national gay and lesbian newspaper. At the time, it was generally expected that gay Episcopal clergy remain celibate.

Twenty years later in 2004, when Boyd and Thompson renewed their vows in a church ceremony, the majority of Episcopalians had approved of gay marriage at a national conference. Boyd's anniversary service was held at the Episcopal Cathedral Center of St. Paul in Los Angeles with five bishops among the guests and Bishop Jon Bruno presiding.

Boyd and Thompson married in July 2013, after Proposition 8 was overturned and same-sex unions resumed in California.

“Malcolm lives on in our hearts and minds through the wise words and courageous example he has shared with us through the years,” Bruno, bishop of the six-county diocese, said Friday in a statement. “We pray in thanksgiving for Malcolm’s life and ministry, for his tireless advocacy for civil rights, and for his faithful devotion to Jesus who now welcomes him to eternal life and comforts us in our sense of loss.” 

In his later years, Boyd was writer-in-residence at the Cathedral Center of St. Paul. He also worked as a chaplain for AIDS patients and helped to establish a gay history archive at USC.

He continued to write. In a 2014 Huffington Post column, he asked, in his down-to-earth style, for a chat with Pope Francis about religious discrimination against gay people.

"Is this asking too much?" he wrote. "Pope Francis, are you on board?

"I'd like to spend a reflective evening with you, send out for a pizza from a great place near the Vatican, open a bottle of Chianti, put our feet up, relax, and share thoughts and aspirations."

RIP another good priest.