A Letter on the Second Anniversary of My Ordination to the Priesthood
Dear All Souls,
In 2010, I stepped into my first pastoral role. I can still feel the utter sense of bewilderment as I sat in my office, wondering what I had gotten myself into and what exactly I was supposed to do. Sixteen years later, those questions remain close, though their tenor has changed.
In the season before becoming the Senior Pastor of All Souls in 2021, I weighed a career change. I'd seen enough of the Church, and of my fellow clergy, to begin to wonder if this was no longer for me. I loved the Church, though I was increasingly unsure whether I could continue to give my life to her.
Around that time, I came across a used collection of R. S. Thomas's poetry at Blue Whale Books on the Downtown Mall. A week before exploring those shelves I had been introduced to an old Welsh saying that if you want to know anything about God, go talk with the poets. Thomas was a Welsh poet and a priest, so I purchased the book without looking at the penciled price on the inside cover.
Among its pages is a poem that begins:
“I was vicar of large things
in a small parish.”
Thomas goes on to write of the curious depths he encountered in the people entrusted to his care. There were places in the lives of his parishioners that he could neither understand nor reach. He speaks of the difficulty of offering words about God to people whose suffering and silence seemed bottomless. And yet, even in his bewilderment, he remained. In both his poetry and in his life, Thomas embodies the work of remaining.
So much of my anxiety in those early years of ministry grew from the suspicion that I was supposed to know more than I did. That somehow the task of pastoring required me to possess a particular confidence about God, the Church, humanity, evil, and especially the people entrusted to my care. Looking back now, I have a hunch I was confusing faithfulness with responsibility, and responsibility with the ability to handle what could never finally be handled.
Thomas, and a handful of others, helped me imagine another possibility. Perhaps there was a way to remain among great mysteries, even when the life of God seemed hidden from view. Though I could not articulate it as I do now, I was beginning to wonder whether the very bewilderment I had come to fear might actually belong to the vocation itself.
Several years later, when my bishop began speaking with me about ordination to the priesthood, I was surprised by the urgency he sensed. I had already spent more than a decade in pastoral ministry. Why priesthood? Why now?
He spoke of something I had not considered: that priesthood could offer me a particular and sturdy spaciousness. A way of inhabiting my pastoral vocation that would free me from many of the anxious postures I had learned over the years. A way to remain near the people entrusted to me without carrying the burden of their lives as though they were mine to resolve, handle, or control.
On November 3, 2024, in our sanctuary here at All Souls, when the bishops and priests laid their hands upon me and prayed for the Holy Spirit, something changed. To be more specific, something was healed in me that continues to heal.
The Church has long understood the sacrament of ordination to involve a change in one's being. That can sound abstract, because it is a mystery. Some theologians call it an “ontological change, ” but I remain cautious about the ways this kind of language has been used to elevate clergy above the people they are called to serve. Not only would that kind of understanding make it impossible for R.S. Thomas to write the poem he did, but it would diminish the very grace I will spend a lifetime wrestling to describe.
Still, even in just two years, I have come to understand that something real happened in me in that moment. Something deeper than a new title or a clarified set of responsibilities. I was made a priest, and with that came a grace I am still learning how to receive.
Whatever happened to me that November morning was never meant to be mine alone. The grace of priesthood was given for the sake of and in service to the Church, for the people with whom I have been called to share my life.
There is a translation in the Latin Vulgate, from Paul's first letter to the Corinthians: dispensatores mysteriorum Dei—stewards of the mysteries of God. Paul is describing his ministry, and the ministry of his fellow workers then and all who would come after. A steward is entrusted with something that belongs to another. And what a strange thing to be entrusted with: the mysteries of God.
Each week, I stand at the altar and speak words that have been spoken by countless priests before me. I take bread into my hands. I lift a cup. I ask the Holy Spirit to come among us. And somehow, amid these ordinary gestures, we are drawn together into the life of Christ. The mystery has never grown smaller through familiarity. And the longer I stand at that altar, the more I come to recognize that the mystery we encounter there extends into the whole of our life together.
I see it when we bring children to the waters of baptism, speaking promises over lives whose futures remain entirely hidden to us. I see it when someone comes forward for anointing and prayer, carrying a grief for which there are no words. I see it in the quiet faithfulness of those who continue to show up when God seems distant, and in the sometimes ordinary, sometimes extraordinary ways you have learned to care for one another.
I think often of how much of the life of God unfolds beyond my attention and sight. There are depths in each of you I will never fully know. There are prayers you have prayed, joys you have shared, sorrows you have carried, small acts of love and generosity that will never be known beyond the people who received them. And yet, all of this belongs to the life of the Church. All of it is being gathered into the great mystery of Christ.
Over these years, you have taught me something of what it means to be a steward of such things. I am entrusted with the care of your souls, but your lives belong to God long before they are ever entrusted to me. And the Church, this beautiful and sometimes perplexing body of Christ, has a life that exceeds any of our efforts to understand, handle, order, or explain.
I think this is something of what Bishop Chris meant when he spoke of spaciousness.
Priesthood has slowly been teaching me how to inhabit these mysteries with benevolent detachment. How to remain close to you, close to myself, and close to God, without confusing any of these for the other. I am learning more and more that there is a particular kind of rest in recognizing that I have been invited into something I cannot possibly hold together on my own.
We are a people who have been given to one another, drawn by the Spirit into a life we could never have arranged for ourselves. There is much about that life we cannot foresee, much about one another we will never fully understand. We will sometimes disappoint each other. We will also encounter graces we could never have imagined. And through it all, Christ continues to give himself to us, gathering us again and again around his Table.
Two years into the priesthood, I find that the questions I first asked in that little office in 2010 have not disappeared. There are still days when I feel terribly inadequate to the work, when I cannot find words for what is happening in someone's life, or when I wonder whether anything I have said or done has made a difference. But I am less frightened by those questions than I once was.
There is a way in which the mysteries themselves have become a place of rest. They remind me that we are participating in a life far larger than our capacity to comprehend it. And that has been among the greatest gifts of priesthood: the freedom to be a small and ordinary man within the immeasurable life of God.
Near the end of his poem, Thomas describes himself still at work among his parishioners:
speaking of light and love
in the thickening shadows of their kitchens.
I suppose that is what I hope to spend the rest of my life doing. To be found among the Church, in whatever light or shadow our lives bring, tending faithfully to the mysteries entrusted to us. To remain near enough to share in the joys and sorrows of lives, and humble enough to recognize that the God who meets us there is always greater than anything I might say about God.
Thank you for allowing me to be your priest and pastor. Thank you for your patience and generosity. For the ways you have received my family and me, and for all that your lives continue to teach me about the mystery of God's love.
There is still so much I do not know about being a priest or pastor. But I am grateful beyond words that I get to continue learning what it means to be one among you.
for the sake of Christ and His Church,
Fr. Bliss
Post script:
Here is the full version of the poem by R.S. Thomas titled “I Was a Vicar of Large Things”
I was vicar of large things
in a small parish. Small-minded
I will not say, there were depths
in some of them I shrank back
from, wells that the word “God”
fell into and died away,
and for all I know is still
falling. Who goes for water
to such must prepare for a long
wait. Their eyes looked at me
and were the remains of flowers
on an old grave. I was there,
I felt, to blow on ashes
that were too long cold. Often,
when I thought they were about
to unbar to me, the draught
out of their empty places
came whistling so that I wrapped
myself in the heavier clothing
of my calling, speaking of light and love
in the thickening shadows of their kitchens.