The routines...

Yesterday I had the chance to take a group to from my work site for a tour of St. George Orthodox Church in West St. Paul. Although my assignment is at St. Elias there are times when I assist as services or otherwise get the chance to visit my "home" parish and this visit had a bittersweet quality to it.

The sweetness was the church itself, so beautiful and familiar. Even the smell says home and everything is in its proper place. The bitterness was in what I myself was missing as I watched the new Priest tend to his chores. It was the sense of belonging to a place, of having those ministry routines, the little things that sometimes bother us but are really tasks that identify the place as home.

For the time being I live in suspension, somewhere between being the Priest I was called to be and the Activity Coordinator I must be to keep a roof over my head. Each is a ministry of a kind and neither is to be despised but in life between the two each overlaps the other and both, in some ways, suffer in the divide. And I miss all those little things, the time to visit the sick, to really dig in and prepare good homilies, the freedom to keep ahead of the administrative tasks and stay in the loop, as it were, in the comings and goings of the Diocese. I miss being able to do all those "other" services like Kneeling Prayers that are so important even if hardly anyone shows up.

I sometimes tell the people at St. Elias that what we're struggling for, what all our work is about is really just the ability to be a "normal" Orthodox Parish. And what I miss sometimes, especially when I visit St. George, is just being a normal Priest.

Some day. Some day.