claudine_c

Tomorrow I'm going to an Anglican Benedictine Abbey in Camperdown, western Victoria for three days. Then on Friday I will be grilled by have a few nice chats with a panel of people who will decide whether to recommend me for training for ordination. I think I am as ready as I'll ever be. Time has passed quickly -- when I started inquiring into this process about 18 months ago, I wouldn't have thought that I'd be ready to face the panel so soon.

The following Monday I leave for a Student Christian Movement conference in the Blue Mountains, followed by a few days in Sydney. I'll be taking my laptop and some work that I need to catch up on, but I don't expect to have internet access during the conference, so I will probably be mostly offline until 10 July.

To take my mind off the interviews, I was given 70 undergraduate essays on the history of psychiatry to mark last week, and still have five left to mark this evening. This is my first attempt at marking, and it's been an eye-opener; hopefully I won't be so anxious about my own writing, now that I see that a tutor can only give about 30 minutes' attention to each essay!

Yesterday evening I went to my first Year of discernment session, the first session for a new cohort. About twenty people attended, with a broad age range but a slight imbalance in favour of men. There will be about one session a month for the next twelve months, and apart from this introductory one they will be taken with another group of people who are six months ahead of us.

This session introduced perspectives on discernment. Two established priests spoke; one focused on trying to learn about oneself through prayer, counsel and Bible study, while the other introduced the basic principles behind the Spiritual exercises of Ignatius of Loyola. Over the coming year we'll be hearing about various aspects of ministry in the Anglican church.

I've had moments of terror since I realised that I was starting this process. (I can't pin down a specific time when I made the decision to take the possibility of ordination seriously. Various people slowly extracted the decision from me over a period of about half a year.) The discernment process is meant to help me decide: yes, I should be considered for ordination; or no, I should look at other opportunities. I don't know what those other opportunities might be. If, one year from now, I don't have a better sense of my future direction, I'm afraid I'll feel more lost and useless than I did a year ago.

But we were told that this is not a question of success or failure. We make a decision. (I hate making decisions!) If our choice is God's will, He will guide us further along that path. If it is not God's will, He will guide us along a different path. We have to trust that we'll eventually end up where we're supposed to be.

[I haven't been writing much lately, and it's not for lack of interesting things happening. I think it's fear of this semi-permanent recording of the discernment process as it happens. It might come back to bite me later; but it probably won't. Here is another fear that I need to confront.]