Make her a priest...

On Friday June 24 Sally and Beverly were ordained to the priesthood, together with Doris and Renee. But Sally and Beverly are especially dear to us at St Mark's. Sally has been a member of St Mark's on and off throughout her life and was active in the parish before her discernment group was formed and she has worked with me on our 5 p.m. Saturday service since she was ordained transitional deacon. She also worked with our confirmation class, bonding with the youth in particular in just minutes. Sally is going to be curate at Grace Church in Kirkwood and among her responsibilities will be children and youth, at which she is a natural. And Beverly came to us in the fall of 2003 for an internship, so she could experience her pastoral identity in a congregation other than that in which her call had been discerned (and in which her husband Peter is the rector) and, as she puts it, "she refused to leave." But now she is going to be priest in charge for redevelopment of Trinity Church in De Soto, Missouri and she will do a fantastic job.

It was a very hot night which seemed hotter because we knew that not far away there had been a catastrophic fire at a company which makes propane and other bottled gasses. The airconditioning in the cathedral seemed unable to keep up with the heat of a full cathedral and vestments didn't help. Curiously, it didn't seem hot at all as the priests in attendance gathered around each of the four candidates to join the bishop in laying hands on them. We were sharing in a ritual which had changed the lives of each of us in ways we would never have exptected on our own ordination days. We were connecting the newly ordained by that simple gesture of touch with each of us and those who had laid hands on us and two thousand years of Christian clergy whose names we know because of their preaching or teaching or writing or holy lives and whose names we will never know. In that holy huddle we remember that we are called and connected by the Holy Spirit.