A day in the life of a curate 3

I have been asked to explain what priests do on Monday to Saturday, and so I am dipping into random days to answer the question. Yesterday, the main events were a coffee morning, lunch with the pastoral team, a series of phone calls working on a green project I am involved in, and a home group in the evening:

Coffee Morning - this is open to the community every Thursday in the Brill URC. It is run by church volunteers and provides a great opportunity for people to meet and chat. There is a lot of laughter too. It is mainly retired people who come along. From the church's viewpoint it gives us a chance to serve the community and also to get to know people so that if they are unwell we can be aware and call in.

Lunch with the pastoral Team. The people who serve on this team run the coffee mornings in Brill, Ludgershall and Ashendon and visit those in the community who are unwell. They are a group who all have the gift of encouraging, every one of them has shown me immense kindness and support and they would be the first people to drop in on if I was feeling low.

Green Project. I am a great believer in saving the planet and have a few ideas up my sleeve.. more on this at some other time.

Home Group. It was the Ludgershall Home Group last night. I love it. We discussed the Great Commission:

Then Jesus came to them and said, "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age."

What I love about it is that we are able to discuss things and be very real, it is refreshing to be in a place that  supportive and honest, where everyone's views are respected. I love praying in that group too.

In amongst that was some emailing, and on reflection I realised that the most wonderful part of my job is I regularly see acts of kindness and immense generosity, between others and towards me. Here is a letter I received yesterday:

Dear Lesley

I do hope I can call you that for I feel as if I have known you for a long time.
However, I specially wanted to thank you again for the gentle and lovely way you conducted my daughter's funeral. It was also good to see you later but I was worried about you getting home safely.
I do hope you will find what you are looking for in life and that you will be happy.
Take good care of yourself - I shall remember you fondly.

x x

I often think I have the best job in the world.

Day in the Life of a Curate 2

Today has been mostly concerned with a funeral, speaking to the undertakers, doing a visit, planning the service and writing the sermon. I have also put together a rota for our all age services over the next three months and done my expenses for the month (didn't include the duck house).

The most difficult thing for me since I have been ordained is the becoming aware of so much pain and suffering. It takes my breath away at times and I often find myself in tears either after the funeral visit or when writing the Eulogy and quite often I have to fight off the tears during the service. There seems no way to insulate myself from the suffering I find around me and so now I just bear it as part of the job. I don't know whether it gets easier with time.

Some funeral sermons are easier to write than others. In the tragic cases my computer seems to shout at me 'How could this have happened? Explain it!' And my response is 'I don't know, but I wish it hadn't!' It is then I suppose a question of writing a sermon that says that, in softer words, perhaps.

Funnily enough, though, I love doing funerals. It feels like an honour to be at such an important time in people's lives, and to somehow hold people in the service so that they grieve and say and do symbolic things to express their love and their sorrow.

What shall I say in my sermon?

I said in an earlier post that I would describe some of the things that I do as a curate. One of the more obvious of these is writing sermons. However, of all the things I could say in ten minutes on a Sunday morning, what would be the best?

There are people there of different ages, different experiences, different cultures, some who have been on the Christian journey for much longer than me and others who have only just become interested. How can anything be meaningful to everyone?

I have only one rule, and that is that my sermon should move me on my spiritual journey, and in so doing it might help others. I have a metaphor, which is the labyrinth (see video below from the Living Faith DVD). The labyrinth is a method of prayer by which you walk prayerfully into the centre and then walk out. This is done alongside others and although they might be on a different part of the journey, for a while you may walk shoulder to shoulder with them. The prayerfulness of others helps me with my attentiveness to God and it becomes a corporate activity, although the journey is my own and can be lonely at times.

I feel the same about my sermons, if they are causing me to move spiritually, to engender deeper prayerfulness and connection with God, then I hope that will add to the corporate experience of journeying.
Hence, when I come to write a sermon, I read the passage and ask myself what the hardest question is for me, where the point of greatest challenge or confusion is for me, and then wrestle with Bible commentaries, go for a walk and try to work out what I believe, talk to people, pray. Often I don't answer the question, but I find that in the course of wrestling I will have found stories, parables, jokes and ideas to share. I'd love some comments on this one to say what people would find more helpful :)

Day in the life of a Curate

I have been asked to explain what Vicars and trainee Vicars (Curates) like me do. There is much puzzlement what happens the other six days of the week. Problem is it is so varied, no one day is like another. But today I did the following:

Prayed,
Wrote two sermons,
Confirmed that we had people to read the lessons and do prayers at the Christmas services,
Tried to find a speaker for an upcoming environmental conference,
Tried to get some photos for our website of people in the Benefice,
Got the Blogs working better with the website using a new app,
Listened to a Radio Station when a curate friend was DJing for an hour, talking about faith.

Looking at the list I think I will post separately the more interesting of these activities

PS this isn't a snowman we made today, but we did put the tree up and decorate it today :)