The Yoked Work

On losing and finding a Prayer Book

It’s not like I haven’t done it before. Get up early, disarm the alarm, walk the halls before anyone else arrives. Maybe, if I’m feeling particularly devout that day, I say a prayer for the people the halls will hold before the morning is over. On other days I ask for the grace simply to get through it.

I was a priest for twenty years before, all of a sudden, I wasn't — at least, not doing the job anymore, not putting on the collar and showing up early to disarm the alarm. Not working on sermons and dreading the ding of my email. Not feeling the weight of a congregation around my shoulders, the yoke my master claims is both easy and light. That was the stole, literal and metaphorical, that my parents placed around my neck the day the Episcopal Church ordained me to do the weirdest work in the world: to take spiritual responsible for a particular gathering of people, some of them strangers. A group of total randos. Anybody can join!

My body never forgot how to do it, and when I started doing it again after a year and a half away it was like a putting on an old shoe that had once shaped itself around my foot: oh, this old thing. Shake the hands, make the jokes, take a second piece of cake at coffee hour, I know how to do this. I even had the shirts ready to go, freshly laundered in the back of my closet. The only thing I couldn't find was my prayer book.

The women’s guild (we still had those then) at Christ Church, Ridgewood NJ gave it to me when I was ordained. Every priest I knew carried one. It lived in the sacristy of every church I worked for: black leather, my name with “The Reverend” (spelled out, not abbreviated) embossed in garish gold across the cover. It held twenty years of dried mud crusting the pages of the Burial Service, twenty years of couples' names penciled into the Marriage Rite. It held my little edits and emendations: the prayers I won't say without a judicious revision, and the ones I know by heart (but use the book for anyway). It was my book of spells, the thing I carried like a talisman into every service I led, even after my congregation shifted to virtual leaflets and everything I needed was on an iPad. I carried it with me for the hymns, at least that’s what I told myself. It defined me and my colleagues, equal parts reviled and revered, the thing we tossed into the glove compartment on our way to the hospital when somebody called in a crisis. I don't know what happened to it — sometime in that year and a half when I put my stuff in storage and locked the door to the sacristy one last time, I must have misplaced it along with just about everything else that went along with the life of being a priest.

I couldn’t lay my hands on my prayer book when I needed it, that first morning back, a church whose smell I didn’t know yet but recognized instantly. So I used my spare. Not the sacristy prayer book that had lived in my cubby. This was the glove compartment edition I had thrown into my car years ago and used exclusively on the road. The retired priests at Trinity Cathedral had given it to me when I first came on staff, and a bunch of them had written notes in the blank front pages. I’d never given much thought to those messages (the book lived in my glove compartment, after all) but when I opened it in a new sacristy that first Sunday back in harness, they were the first ones there to greet me, my communion of saints. By that time I’d presided at a couple of their funerals.

Welcome back, we’ve missed you at the party.

We would go around the room during our monthly clergy lunches — “how many years have you been ordained?” — and somebody would add up the total. When I joined the circle I heard “forty years,” “forty-five years,” and I chimed in with my piddly “three!” It was probably at one of those gatherings when they’d given me this prayer book, the one I threw in my glove box and forgot about. It had been waiting there all these years — cover stained where I spilled a milkshake on it, shoved in between the napkins and the mechanic receipts— a message in a bottle that finally found its way back to me when I needed it most: “Remember your first love,” one had written. Another: “Continue to speak wisely and boldly.” It was their signatures - their names - that hit me like a punch to the gut. Maureen Tighe, John Scannell, Catherine Nichols, Bob Ladehoff, Bill McKenzie, Roy Coulter, Joe Dubay, Bill Lupfer, Marianne Borg, Val Ivey, Lin Knight. The names written in ink, and all the other names written on the fleshly tablet of my heart, the people who showed me what the yoked work looks like lived. The yoke ate some of them alive. A few aren’t technically priests anymore. She can be an abusive mistress, the Episcopal Church. “Just remember,” my friend Sonia once told me, “the Church is no respecter of persons.” Ain’t that the truth.

It’s is the yoke I tried so hard to shake, and yet here I was: standing in another church’s sacristy, putting on a different congregation’s wireless mic, kissing the back of my stole before I put it around my neck once more. Maybe it took abandoning the office to find the vocation again. In any case, here they all were, the ones I love but see no longer, ready to welcome me — the only reasons, I think, I managed to stay a priest at all.

So that’s the prayer book I carry now.