​From the Rector: Rest and Return

Dear friends,

I’m back!

After a sweet, sacred, and restorative three months’ sabbatical, I returned to the office this week and I’m eager to be back together around God’s table this Sunday. I am so grateful to have had this time for rest and refreshment.

Sabbatical is a special thing. It isn’t quite the same as a vacation, a course of study, or a leave of absence. The name comes, of course, from a word special to us in our faith tradition: “sabbath.” Like the sabbath day, a sabbatical is a time for rest, worship, and restoration. Just as a field set aside to lie fallow for a season renews its capacity to bear fruit, a person on sabbatical comes apart from the regular course of activity to lie fallow for a time so their capacity to bear fruit might be nourished and renewed. It’s a great privilege to have been given this time, and I’m grateful that in our diocese (and many others) it’s customary for clergy serving parishes to do so every five years.

My sabbatical divided itself neatly into three phases. In June I worked on a writing project: a chapter on children’s worship in the Anglican Communion which my former dissertation advisor Ruth Meyers invited me to contribute to a volume she’s co-editing: the Oxford Handbook to the Book of Common Prayer. While I’ve been working on this for about a year, I needed the protected time of this first month of sabbatical to get it finished. The draft will now go for editing and will likely be published sometime next year after some revisions. (If you’re interested, you can see it here.)

In July our family did some traveling. We spent a beautiful week at family camp at Bishop’s Ranch in Healdsburg (it was fun to have the Kendall family from Incarnation there with us!). We visited my mother at Lake Tahoe, and finally we spent eight days in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, where we practiced our Spanish, explored the beautiful city and some surrounding towns, and had a lot of wonderful beach time.

August was a time for reentry: Julia went back to work, the girls resumed school and preschool, and I spent the month working on Spanish as well as doing all kinds of household tasks that had been going neglected for months if not years. Organizing the bathroom may not sound profound, but having the space and time to do it with intentionality in a life that often feels full to the margins made it feel like a spiritual retreat.

Speaking of retreat, during my last week of sabbatical, I went on a personal retreat to the monastery of New Camaldoli in Big Sur. I was excited to be there, to pray the Daily Offices with the brothers of that community, to hike, and to journal about my hopes for this next five years at Incarnation. Unfortunately, the morning after I arrived, I woke up with sniffles, aches, and a fever. I isolated myself in my guest room, then drove back the next day to discover that, yes, after three years, COVID had finally caught up with me. It wasn’t the way I’d planned to finish out my sabbatical, but I’m thankful I had a mild course.

I’m grateful to our sabbatical pastor Rod McAulay, to our wardens, vestry, staff, ministry leaders, associate clergy, and everyone who offered their gifts of leadership and service this summer, and to all of you for the gift of sabbatical. Now let’s get about the next steps in following Jesus together!

In Christ's love,

Stephen