Last Sunday, we said goodbye to our beloved Rector of eight years, Bishop Dean Wolfe, and his wife Ellen. Dean’s impact on St. Bart’s has been tremendous and transformative—much of the thriving we have experienced in recent years is due to his leadership—and our celebrations last weekend were appropriately grand: brass, balloons, and all.
Things have felt sparer this week. I couldn’t turn to Dean in our liturgy meeting to ask for his opinion on the upcoming Sunday’s hymns; his comforting charge to “go in safety” was missing from our Ash Wednesday services. The routines upon which I had come to rely over the course of the past six years have already been upended. I’m sure you’ll have your own moments over the next few weeks in which Dean’s absence will become particularly apparent to you.
I’m well aware that giving up a Rector for Lent is not like giving up alcohol or chocolate. We won’t have the option to take Dean back once the Paschal fire is kindled at the Easter Vigil. Dean and Ellen will be safely settled in Dallas by then, and they’ll only return to St. Bart’s in the future for the occasional special event. A shift in leadership is more permanent than the ephemeral Lenten discipline.
But Lent still seems like an appropriate time to adjust to a missing Rector. Lent is all about absence, from the absence of food in Jesus’ stomach as he wrestles in the wilderness to the absence of Alleluias at our Eucharistic feast. Lent reminds us that absence is a persistent reality of human life and of the Christian experience in particular. Our fervent faith in the resurrection does not protect us entirely from the inevitability of loss.
Of course, absence can be painful. Just ask Jesus, who, by the end of his forty days of fasting, was famished. But absence can also be clarifying, offering a real opportunity for growth. Jesus emerged from his forty days of fasting to begin his public ministry, seemingly prepared by his time in the wilderness to commence the work he had been born to do.
I don’t yet know what we as St. Bart’s are growing towards. I don’t yet know how this time of absence will prepare us for a new phase of ministry. But I’m confident that, whether it takes forty days or four hundred, our period of fasting from a permanent Rector will eventually come to an end. And, by then, once again, we’ll be ready for a new beginning.
