Twenty-seven years ago this week I moved back to Victoria after a decade’s absence.
I returned to this beautiful city to take a job in a church in Oak Bay. It is almost impossible to believe that all these years later I remain at work in the same church.
To some the longevity of my stay in one place may seem a failure to fulfill my potential to ascend the ladder of institutional achievement. But I cannot imagine anything more rich and fulfilling than the privilege of spending twenty-seven years in the same place, doing the same thing, with the same people.
I have performed weddings for young adults I knew as small children. In some cases I have baptized their children and have walked with them during their parents’ final days. I have had the privilege of sharing many intimate and important moments in the lives of families I have watched grow and mature over nearly three decades.
It is not that we have always agreed, or have always got along all that well or even found it comfortable to be together. But, we have stuck it out because we believe in a reality that transcends separation and we believe that the only way to truly know this reality is to embody it in relationships even when they are messy, confusing, and frustrating.
Of course the church in which I serve is not the same place it was when I arrived and, in many cases, the people with whom I minister are not the same people in whose lives I shared nearly three decades ago. People come and go a lot these days. People who stick it out with the same community over the long haul are rare in our consumer culture where relationships are so easily disposed of, and commitments are so readily abandoned.
We are a culture of nomads who travel wherever the material benefits appear to be the most promising. We do not stay put easily. Hanging in for the long haul seems to be an alien concept.
In Christian tradition, Jesus is reported to have encouraged his friends by saying to them, “remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” (Matthew 28:20)
I am blessed to have found a place in which to experience and embody this steady faithfulness that I believe is a fundamental characteristic of that power at the centre of the universe I call “God”. By remaining in the same place all this time, I have learned deep in my being that, although everything may change around me, there is an unchanging reality at the heart of existence that never fails.
Wendell Berry, the patron saint of staying put, has written, “There is no ‘better place’ than this, not in this world. And it is by the place we’ve got, and our love for it and our keeping of it, that this world is joined to Heaven.”
Tending the same place and some of the same people for these past twenty-seven years has opened my heart to the depths of a love that reflects the God in whom I trust. In the faithfulness of abiding with the same people in the same place, I have discovered that “this world” is indeed “joined to Heaven”. In the faithfulness of the people around me, I see a glimmer of light for the fragmented human family.
Christopher Page is the rector of St. Philip Anglican Church in Oak Bay, and the Archdeacon of Tolmie in the Anglican Diocese of B.C. He writes regularly at: www.inaspaciousplace.wordpress.com
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