The Best Laid Retirement Plans

 When I first read John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, I discovered, “The best laid schemes o' mice an' men / Gang aft a-gley.” I use that line from a Robert Burns’ poem to explain why, no matter how carefully I have planned a project, something goes wrong. When things go wrong despite my best intentions and efforts, I comfort myself by reciting, ‘the best laid plans….’

 Through my life I have been a planner.  I wrote a letter to my mother-in-law while I was courting her daughter to explain how I planned to live the next twenty-five years of my life so that I would become President. The letter worked in gaining her approval of my plan for her daughter to become my bride.  As for the rest of the plan, well, ‘the best laid plans….’

 After a lifetime of planning, two years ago I planned my retirement with a team of colleagues at our church.  We planned for me to retire from full time ministry four days from now. This would have been my last Saturday Stirrings.  Then ‘the pandemic’ happened. You may have heard of it.  ‘The best laid plans….’

 Plan B: wait a year. In June 2021, begin a search process for my successor, so that I would retire one year hence.  As the calendar turned to June, that bride I mentioned above, my partner of 46 years, she and I came to the same conclusion.  I am not ready to retire. There is more work to be done with the people of Hope Church, and anyway, there is nothing she wants me to fix around the house since everything I touch breaks on contact. ‘The best laid plans….’

 The church leadership agrees. Not that I break things, but that there is more work for me to do.  The wonderful people of Hope agree, or at least the majority do.  For the first time in my adult life my plan is to have no plan.  Having no plan there is nothing to ‘gang aft a-gley’. What happens next is God’s plan.

 To God alone be the glory.

 “Even when I am old and gray, do not forsake me, my God, till I declare your power to the next generation, your mighty acts to all who are to come.” Psalm 71:18

Someone's Got to be the Pope Pt. 1

Benedict XVI is no longer the Pope.  That this happened by his decision and not by death makes this event not only an enormously historic one for the church he has faithfully served, but also for him personally, as a human being.  While I am not a Roman Catholic, I respect the historic office of the Pope as one which has provided spiritual leadership to billions of people across the centuries.  I do not of course subscribe to all the tenets which establish the authority of the office a pope holds, but that doesn’t mean that I do not think the man who serves in that office is not important. It makes a difference who serves in what the Roman Catholic church teaches to be the office first held by St. Peter 2000 years ago.  I have difficulty thinking of another position in life that makes a more significant claim to its historic importance.

Which is what makes the decision of the man who was Benedict XVI so fascinating.  He moves from being the authoritative voice for over a billion souls to being, in his own words,  a  “pilgrim on the last stop on this earth.”  I do not know what all went into his decision to “renounce” his office and to become a praying pilgrim, but what I see in that decision is the humble recognition that our work does not define us.   Our vocation, as opposed to our occupation, is what is important for everyone who desires to serve God.  Our “calling” is to serve God;  to please what one writer famously describes as  “the audience of One.”  Retirement from any position, even from the wearing of “the shoes of the fisherman”, neither changes who we are nor does it diminish our value as human beings.  We work to earn a living, but in the end we are all just pilgrims on our way home, on our way to a glorious home that is beyond human comprehension.  It is the recognition of this reality, that our earthly occupation does not define our value to God, which perhaps ultimately informed the retirement decision of the man who is no longer Pope.  I wish the man a peaceful pilgrimage, that he may “finish well.”

But, someone’s got to be the pope. While he will not be “my pope”,  someone will be called to speak to a world-wide audience as the most recognized of religious voices. And it is for that reason that I will pray for the Cardinals as they assemble to discover whom God has called to as leader of the world’s largest “denomination”, representing  over half of the Christians in the world. My prayer will be that the man whom God is calling will remember that the most important audience he serves occupies the only seat in the house.  What matters most for the successor to Benedict XVI is not what the world thinks of his work, but what God thinks of it. And so it is for all of us.