On Sunday I will be ordained a deacon in the Church of England. By any measure, this will be quite a momentous occasion – the culmination of more than six years of discernment and training. It’s curious, therefore, to notice how unremarkable I’m feeling. Over the past six years I’ve spent countless hours fantasising about wearing the clerical collar... yet now fantasy is about to become reality, and I feel strangely measured and detached.
Pondering this, I’m reminded of something a friend once said to me, as he reflected back over his first year of marriage: ‘I’m glad I fell out of love before the wedding’.At the time, I was taken aback.What on earth did he mean, ‘fell out of love’? Surely being in love is essential for marriage! It is only now, as my own ‘big day’ approaches, that I think I finally understand what he meant. Often when we think we’re in love with someone, we’re really in love with our own fantasies and projections. For love to really endure - for its worth to be truly proven - it has to be tested and purified, stripped of its anxious demands and delusions. The heady fantasies of our imagination must give way to the steadier truths of reality.
The pursuit of Christian vocation is, I think, always rather like this. We have to escape the wiles of our ego - to fall out of love with our fears and our fantasies - in order to glimpse the deeper truth to which we are called. This can be difficult, painful work – and it certainly requires time. Hearts are not broken and healed in an instant! Perhaps the most important thing that I have learnt during my time at St Mary’s has been the virtue of patience. At our best, we are a community that gives people the time to fall out of love - and the space to discern a deeper truth - at their own pace.
So please pray for me on this threshold of ordination. Please pray that I would not be afraid of falling out of love, and of helping others to do the same. For it is only when we finally fall away from our fears and our fantasies that we discover something truly astonishing: we have fallen straight into the arms of God.
Andrew Bennison
