Perhaps There Were Two Services of Ordination?

“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you…” (Jeremiah 1:5a)

“Then the king will say to those at his right hand, ‘Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.’

“And the king will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family,           you did it to me.’”(Matthew 25: 34-36, 40)

God calls each of us across the lifespan through hundreds of thousands of movements and experiences, joys and struggles, in the places and, most importantly, in the people that mark our lives.

None can hear and respond to God’s calling without being changes and inspired, challenges and formed, confronted and encouraged.

Such is the media through which the Holy Spirit speaks, the holy mingling of God’s grace with the stuff of our everyday living; the alchemy God’s Calling, the mystery of our truest knowing our own deepest gladness meeting the greatest hungers of our world.

In putting together my service of ordination, I prayed to keep my heart open to the leading of the Holy Spirit. And, I kept central in my thought my work among the longing, anxious, grieving hearts who come to the hospital, where I am Chaplain specializing in mental health and perinatal bereavement, to find health, hope and healing for their living.   

The service, celebrated on All Saints Day, was dedicated to the glory of God’s Calling in all our lives, and to my parents, William and Frances Symonds, raised among the Saints Eternal over three decades. By God’s good grace, the service somehow wove together a the President of a Lutheran (ELCA) congregation—the most holy man I know; my Jesuit Spiritual Director of 15 years; dear noble friends, a Buddhist Bhikkhuni and Bhante; a reformation hearted Mormon Bishop friend and coworker; Presbyterians of every sort and station; all leaning upon the good and solid bones of traditional Reformed worship and the great and classic hymns of the Church.

As I was driving to my beautiful and blessed service of ordination my mobile rang. Could I come see a woman whose baby died a while back?  On that same drive, a text message from a friend, could I recommend a therapist for a family member? The following day, a phone call from an old friend I haven’t seen in years who I had invited to the service, could I recommend an inpatient treatment facility?

Then on Tuesday, there was a beautiful email from a friend that had traveled with his wife from Chicago to attend my ordination service. Attached was a script of a one-man play wrote, and performed on Monday, about the real-life journey in faith and prayer, healing and friendship of the past 28 months of his beloved wife’s journey with stage-4 cancer. The play celebrates the fact that she is now cancer free; it celebrates in his gratitude to God and the rich tapestry of blessed prayers from friends representing more religions than the Parliament of Word Religions that he credits for her healing. The conclusion of the play, my friend wrote, was inspired by my blessed and beautiful service.

We are all members of God’s family. I am left wondering, if there were not two beautiful and blessed celebrations of my ordination last week: one in the Church which ordained me to Ministry of Word and Sacrament, Teaching Elder and one in the world where the mystery of my truest knowing and my own deepest gladness kept meeting up with the greatest hungers of our world.

Prayer for the Saints

All Saints Day



“For All the Saints”, v. 4, 5


“O blest communion, fellowship divine!
We feebly struggle, they in glory shine;
yet all are one in thee, for all are thine.
Alleluia, Alleluia


“And when the strife is fierce, the warfare long,
steals on the ear the distant triumph song,
and hearts are brave again, and arms are strong.
Alleluia, Alleluia”

(Link: Praying with the imagination in the tradition of Francis and Ignatius.)

I’ve been living with an image in my imagination for several months now, perhaps; better, Christ has been praying it within me, for I could never have come to this of my own accord. In my childhood bedroom, I am in my bed and my parents are kneeling beside as they did nightly for prayer. Jesus is present too, in the way that he is frequently present in such imagining prayers, at once palpably real and, too, indiscernibly present. My parents too are so real that I want to weep and run to them and hold on forever, and yet they too are difficult to define and discern.

Lord Jesus Christ, how I miss them, they have been dead for so long. I was 25 when I was orphaned for a second time I my life. My mother died that year, four years after my father’s dying. Neither had been well for so many long years, endless days of years filled with sickness and pain. My father a “dead man walking” through my growing up years struggling with the declines of congestive heart failure and my mother, a disappointed, angry, drunk with a venomous heart whose ridicule was flung at those closest to her, my dying father and me. Our very breathing simply seemed to fall short and disillusion.

Lord Jesus, I miss my parents more than I can say. They have been dead for so long; my father for 33 years, my mother for 29. In this prayer, you, Jesus, are holding us all so tightly together that we seem bound, one to the other in ways that in our living together and in their dying, were impossible to discern. Difficult days, so many of which flowed with pain and renting grief, your presence, impossible to discern. (Especially in her dying, Lord, so alone as she cursed you and died; succumbing to the poisons of her own heart.)

Yet, you are here now, dearest One, holding us in blessed communion, the struggles of their days in flesh and blood, grief and pain far behind them; your glory shining from deep within them in ways I can only begin to see thorough the dim mirror of this praying. The communion of saints and the forgiveness of sins are not simply words on a page committed to memory, ideas to share in a community of belonging. No, they are  prayers for our living: to forgive and be forgiven of that which separates me from these most beloved saints, blessedly, now and for so long, at rest in you, is to begin to accept your forgiveness and to begin the forgiving. Of them, of you, most especially of myself.

For you healed them, blessed Jesus, tired and worn as they were, pain-riddled and grief-soaked in their beings, into the gentle and merciful heart of your divine fellowship so long ago. It is my heart which has labored on for all these years, longing for that which I can only know in surrendering the feeble struggle shared with them to you who has held us all so gently for years beyond our knowing. May my ear hear your distant song in these days. May my heart find courage and strength in you. May I know in this prayer of us united with you in love and peace is the communion of saints, the divine fellowship I pray to find with all whose feeble struggles I share. Amen.