FORTY FIVE YEARS ON. AN ANNIVERSARY


 NOTES    (1)  My ordination certificate is beautifully framed, so this photo' is taken from  behind glass, hence its lack of clarity.  (2)  It's the custom in the Church of England for the Bishop to use the name of hos See City on official documents.  The ordaining Bishop in this case was John Tinsley, but here he signs it as "John Bristol".

It was forty five years ago to the date that I was ordained Deacon in the Cathedral Church of the Holy and Undivided Trinity, Bristol U.K.

Some tender memories.

1).Those to be ordained had been at a mandatory retreat since the previous Thursday.  We'd been strictly cloistered. We were transported by mini-bus from the Retreat Centre to the Cathedral on a gorgeous June day.  As we exited the 'bus the Cathedral bells rang out in gorgeous peals.  What a glorious welcome!


2. We dressed for Ordination in a Norman (Romanesque) Chapter Room.  I got shivers thinking about all the Church activity which that room had witnessed for about eight hundred years.


3. My mother (Dad had died two years previously) and eight of my nine siblings (with partners) were in the congregation.


4.  My friend James Kibe, a priest from Kenya was there too. Thirty four years later I ran into James again, in Cambridge MA. By then he was married and known as James Kibe Karanja; married to Mary Karanja.  (The Kikuyu Tribe in Kenya, and maybe others, had been Matriarchal until the Missionaries came).


5.  This is cool!   After the service I heard a woman calling out "Povey, Povey" in her distinctive German accent.  It was Greta Meyer, who with her husband Martin had in 1939 fled the Nazi terror machine in their native Germany. She had taken the time to be present for my ordination.

Their son Stephen Meyer and I were best pals in high school (we remain in touch to this day). ( In my high school the boys were always and only  called by their surnames, so Greta knew me only as Povey.)

=========================================

Brief reflections, forty five years on.

I cringe as I recall those all too many times in my ordained ministry I acted as though the messenger was more important than the message.

I smile broadly when I think of those hundreds of parishioners who cared for me, loved me, prayed for me, and encouraged me in 4 1/2  congregations.  I am deeply grateful.



Bristol Cathedral





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