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This final blog post is now three days overdue and I’m having trouble pushing “send”.

It’s the same way with that final part of the sermon for tomorrow that wakes me at 2 in the morning and sets me scribbling with yet more things I want to say and not enough time to say it all.

These past three months of saying goodbye have been truly life-changing for me.  I’ve learned to open myself to receiving – receiving expressions of love and gratitude and sharing myself in the messiness of my tears.  Receiving the gift of time to just be together when there’s nothing more to fix, solve, worry over  – but just the incredible gift of time to be together.  As I have felt myself emptying from my place in this ministry I found myself already being refashioned into the new man and pastor I will be in the next season of my life.  And how is it that it takes saying goodbye for all of this to happen?   And yes, of course it does.

And so, amidst all the tears, it’s a gift to have a chance to say goodbye.   And no, we don’t always get the chance to do so.  So many times endings come with abruptness and disruption and there is no time for the gifts of a parting.  Such a gift of grace when a goodbye happens full of tears of love and gratitude as these months have been for me.  The faith, hope and love I have met here in serving this congregation that now gives me the faith – in fear and trembling, hope and expectation – to set my sails wide and allow the Spirit of the Living God to guide me into the unfolding of the next chapter of my life.  And yes, an invitation for you as well, and this church to do the same.

A few weeks ago I came across an article for our church newsletter written thirty years ago by Bert Rutan.  Bert was retiring from his ministry here thirty years ago and he wrote an article to the future minister that would serve in his place. I shared with Bert that I could echo the same things he said about his experience with the congregation here.  He said that I could share his letter again and have us both sign off on it.  So here, future ministers of UCUCC is a word written thirty years ago – and lifted up again this present day – from two pastors who served here a generation apart about our experience in this congregation that has changed our lives.  We hold in prayer and hope that it will be for you as well…

 

To Our Future Ministers….

We don’t know your names yet, of course.  We will eventually, when the Search Committees have completed their work and the Council has acted on the recommendation.  For whatever help it may be, let us indicate some things we have experienced that you can expect….

Expect to find colleagues here who genuinely like each other and who will warmly welcome you, care about you, challenge you, and help you grow.  Expect a staff that will work hard to make your ministry possible, a staff deserving frequent expressions of appreciation from you.  

Expect a congregation that cares both about this church and this world, supporting each other but ministering beyond this building in Christian compassion.  You’ll find here a ready willingness to disagree and an individualized articulation of faith and commitment that makes this congregation stimulating rather than bland.

You’ll need to be there for them in their times of grief and doubt, in their frustrations and their failures.  But that will be balanced by the joys you will share:  weddings, baptisms, confirmation class, supper.  (They do like to eat!)

Occasionally you will question your effectiveness in a sermon or counseling situation or class.  But if they know that you care deeply about them, and if there is congruity between what you say and who you really are, you will discover that mysterious thing we call Christian love sustaining their lives through you and deepening your relationship with them.

Concerning things you would like to see done – you may have to prod a bit at times.  You may also have to learn to let go.  (Bert and I both sometimes had trouble with that!)  But you will find that, due to dedicated people on boards, committees, task forces and Council, you certainly won’t have to do it all yourself.  You’ll meet retired professionals who rise early to make doughnut delivery runs to a mission downtown; families deeply involved in refugee or emergency feeding or mission programs; members willing to spend hours on the phone concerning pastoral care matters or stewardship; and many faithful people constant with their encouragement. 

Expect something else.  Though you may begin overwhelmed by the extent of activities and responsibilities here, as we did, you are apt to end up feeling that these were some of the best years of your life as we do.  You will hear appreciation expressed when you feel that you don’t really deserve it and you will have someone tell you how much a sermon helped when you thought it was one of your least memorable ones.  We give you fair warning:  these folks will grow on you.

In the midst of it you may wonder if the long hours and the endless meetings, the frustration of not visiting enough or not knowing or doing enough, are worth it.  But at the end of it, from the appreciation and encouragement that you have received, and from the love that you will have felt for them and from them, you will know it was all worth it.

As you seek to follow in the footsteps of Christ in this church, you will discover that you are walking with some of Christ’s finest disciples.  And you will be thankful for all the joys experienced in serving God in and through the life of this congregation.  Shalom!

Thank you Bert for reminding me, us, of all that stays the same in all that changes in life including the gifts of grace that this congregation has been and will be.

In faith, hope and love,

Peter Ilgenfritz – and Bert Rutan

The forest is emptying itself

Releasing a brown canopy

Leaving bare stems pointing

To a dark sky.

We do not come easily as the forest to such a time

Putting down, letting be,

And dying to what has been

So what may be will come in its time

Which is not yet.

 

We fuss, cling, wail, hold on

To what has been

And is no longer.

Spin out in endless “what if”…

We had only done it differently

Worked at it more

Been better people

Made better decisions

That it might not have had to come to this.

As if this emptying were our fault somehow

That we could and should have prevented it all.

 

No, we are not at peace.

Do not want it this way.

So aware of who is not here

All that has changed

The deaths and loss we see and bear

The futility of fixing or escaping any of it.

 

The forest does not suffer as we do.

It did not fail at keeping summer.

The earth rotates,

The axis tilts,

The forest releases into its emptying

That must come before all filling.

Truly this emptying

Makes room for everything

That yes, will come,

In its good season.

 

Peter Ilgenfritz

 

 

 

I was told if you ever hear God’s voice calling you, you should first check it out with some trusted friends.

I’d heard a call that I didn’t know if I wanted to follow – a call to leave my beloved kindred, place and home – and go to where God was showing me.  And so I checked it out with some trusted friends.

Sometimes I talked about it as a longing, something I was called to discover.

Sometimes I talked about it as wanting to continue to grow and use the gifts I have in new ways.

Sometimes it felt like some new work was calling me that I needed to do in the world.

Sometimes I talked about what I discovered in learning how to sail – stepping into my fear and off the dock, being in a new environment which required new language, ways of navigating.  Something about the deep conversations that happened there when we were out of our “Sunday clothes” and in our sailing clothes – I wanted more of that.  There was something about being outside.  Something about inviting people to sail, and encouraging them that they could in fact take the tiller and sail the boat themselves.  I wanted more of all that I was finding there.

Sometimes I said more practical things – like I’m 56 and if I am going to step out I need to do that now.

Sometimes I talked about work that was coming to completion here and my conviction that it was ready for new imagination.

But at the heart of it was something that was beyond rational or practical explanation and that I didn’t know how to explain.  I felt called to go.  Something was stirring in me, opening me to step into my fear, into my resistance to change, and risk changing my life to have a new life that I was called to embody.

So I checked it out with well over thirty trusted souls waiting for someone to please tell me what a terrible idea this was and that I most certainly should stay home!  Instead, each beloved listener reflected that they heard an authentic call and encouraged me to go.  Darn!

My listeners knew that stepping out from the beloved familiarity of my work, ministry and community was a huge thing, a terrifying thing for me to consider.  And they heard in this stirring in my heart and imagination that it was in fact it a good thing, a necessary thing even for my own growth in life and faith. And besides, they reminded me, God was calling.  Who knew where this might lead?

And so, after years of wondering, and a year of deep conversations, with others and my own discernment I decided in fear and trembling to actually say out loud that I am going and my last Sunday is December 30.

In the stepping out and naming that I was following a call and stepping out into the unknown, I became someone different.  It’s really felt like that.  No, perhaps not a whole new person, but so much more of me.

I became the pastor who cries.  The pastor who found his place in the simplicity of conversations that have not been about doing, solving, fixing anything but the simple profundity of being together, giving thanks,  remembering, wishing God-speed. It’s been a time of heart-opening connection to a community I have loved that I’ve never experienced in just this way.

Members of this community here have reminded me of stories of their own experiences in leaving the lives they had for the new lives they discovered.

Reminded me that in order to continue to grow you need to have times of disequilibrium.

Called me to remember that the best way for me to spend this fall is not in fact to worry about what happens in January but to be present here and now with this community – to say goodbye, release, let go, grieve – and that this will be the best preparation for what lies in the new year ahead.

In the past weeks, my faith has deepened.  I have come to believe that the healing of our world and ourselves depends on our listening more deeply to call.  That is, the stirrings of the still-speaking, still-creating God who is calling us all out of our familiar patterns and places.  A God in who is calling us to return to ancient and neglected ways of being community with and for each other.  A God who knows that our survival depends not on our keeping things all the same but in becoming radically new.

So yes, for you, for me, in fear and trembling we are called again and again to Go – to leave what frames we have made of our lives for the way the God who is creating still calls us to step into and through our fear and become God’s new creation.  For some it means leaving a familiar place, for others being there in new ways.  For all, a journey.

On the day this congregation was to vote on calling me and Dave as associate pastors, we ended our sermon by quoting St. John of the Cross.

I said to the man who stood at the gate, “Give me a light that I may see my way into the darkness!”

“Put your hand out into the darkness”, he said, “that is safer and better than a known way.”

On that Sunday the congregation put out their hand.

Now, decades later, recalled to the faith and trust I have had instilled in me here, I put out my own….

It feels like dying.  Or I imagine this is what dying might feel like.  The impossibility of saying goodbye to people you have loved and for a long time.  The impossibility of anyone else really understanding what it’s like as they go about the work that we must do among the living – filling the gaps, carrying on.  It’s the closest time in my life that I have gotten a glimpse of understanding what it might be like to be the one propped in the chair with months to live, and calling friends and family to offer words of apology, thank you, love and goodbye.  How many such chairs and bedsides have I sat beside with members and friends here as they sought to navigate that impossible gap to understand, to speech, when someone is dying and someone else carrying on.

I don’t mean all this to be morose because it’s not.  It’s also a time full of such grace, such opening of tears and love, a connection, a realness that perhaps I have never experienced exactly in this way before.  A time full of such deep learning about myself, my way of being in the world, my shadows and my gifts.  Such an amazing time.  And the only way to this time coming in the saying goodbye.  For me, sharing with the congregation a few weeks ago that December 30 would be my last Sunday here.  I’m not actually dying, no, or at least I don’t think so.  But grieving well, and in that preparing the possibility, making the way for the new life, the resurrection, there on the other side of every death and goodbye for me and for this congregation.

I wrote this poem years ago and I remember it now as I make space for the only space there really is in such days as this, for the conversations that matter most – for forgiveness, thank you, love and goodbye.  Making room for everything new.

The Good Death

Roger died last Monday night,
and though it sounds strange to say,
he died a good death –

That is not to say
that there has not been grief
and the ache of deep missing,
the empty rooms
and things packed away
that will never be shared again.

No, it’s not mine to “judge”
what such a death means
for all who mourn,
but only to witness
the goodness I have seen:

For the past three months
since he sat propped in his hospital bed
and was told of his cancer
for which there was no cure,
Roger has been emptying his life in
forgiveness, thank you, love and good-bye.

Remarkable really, to witness his path,
as he summoned family and friends
for the conversations he needed to have,
the regret of words and deeds,
some long since forgotten,
but caught in his soul and needing release.

Privilege, really to walk in and out
of the home of care his family had made –
his recliner by the window,
the feeder outside and
songbirds praising.

To witness amidst all the fluttering and duty,
patient care and restless nights,
that such a long death requires,
a stilling, deepening, quieting as well –
the sharing of memories, and holding of hands.

For some, there will be no time like this.
So many other deaths we have born and seen
full of other words than “good” –
but of “tragedy” and “heartbreak”,
“longing” and “incompletion”.

The tear and ache of deaths
that have been a wrenching out of life
with no time for kind words
and a parting kiss.

No, we do not often get to choose –
but what if today we did  –
and chose here among the living,
with so many deaths before us –
that in all the filling of today
might be an emptying as well
of forgiveness, thank you, love and good-bye.

Roger told us months ago,
“I am ready to die,
and now, I am ready to live.”

Today, as I mourn and remember,
I pause, give thanks,
for a man who showed me the way to do both.

Peter Ilgenfritz
May 11, 2013

Turn back, he said, it’s all fogged in, 

you can’t see a thing up top –

We waited half an hour,  he went on – 

pressing his frustration on us,

then gave up.

We paused listening

wondering if we should go with his experience

or make our own

wondering if this weather report was relevant

to what brought us here to climb the peak

this Monday afternoon

this last day of vacation

before turning to home.

Do you come for the view or to make the climb?

Come to get out in the woods or reach your destination?

Come because you know where you are going or to find out where it all leads?

Thanks, but we need the exercise, my nephew offered.

We turned, moved on.

Kept on climbing the rutted trail

over gnarled roots,

granite rocks covered with green moss,

trillium and alderberry,

the river far below – until the trail turned from the river,

leading us off further

deeper into the woods,

steadily higher, higher

climbing on to the summit

where we stepped out of the trees, and the wall of white lifted before us

revealing the valley below, the lake, and road from which we came, the railroad line

this great crest of a green valley the memory of which

brought us here.

If he’d waited another minute, he would have seen it,

the man at the rock outcropping says, stirring his pot of brown soup,

the raven circling above.

I don’t know where it all leads – or what the summit will reveal —

and sometimes, have no need

but to keep on climbing in anticipation of whatever’s there –

the fog, the clearing,

the what might be and what might come next.

Peter Ilgenfritz

August 16, 2018