Exquisite Grief

In seminary, nobody tells you how hard it is to say goodbye to a loving church community when one is called to another church. What is it like to leave a congregation one has loved and served through many joys, sorrows, challenges, and surprises? How does one do it well–for oneself and for everyone else?

For me, it’s an odd kind of grief because it is self-imposed. Normally, we feel grief when we have lost someone we love very much, and we did not want to lose them. No one is dying here, but a particular type of precious relationship is ending, and it cannot return in its same form.

This isn’t divorce, either. I’m not leaving a relationship that has caused damage and pain, but rather a series of relationships that have fed me and changed me. In addition, I am moving on to another church, St. John’s Episcopal Church in Boulder, Colorado, where I expect to have just as rich a life-giving set of relationships.

These transitions don’t happen quickly in the Episcopal Church. One doesn’t give two weeks’ notice, pack up the desk, and head out quickly. Our diocesan Canon to the Ordinary suggested I give two months’ notice, and so our congregation has been planning for my departure and engaging interim rectors who will take care of the congregation while it begins a discernment and search process for the next rector, a process that can take approximately a year.

That gave the church and me two months to arrive at this moment. I am fortunate to have led a healthy church with strong leaders, a church whose members work hard at caring for one another, including me. I am fortunate to work in a diocese that helps us through this moments, too. I have received beautiful notes from people, had goodbye coffees, lunches and dinners with others, cleaned up some loose ends at the church office, and cleared out my office.

But mostly, I’ve been experiencing the most exquisite grief—finding myself laughing one moment and crying for two seconds at another. It’s a strange mixture of joy and pain similar to what I felt on my daughter’s wedding day. It’s the beginning and the end, and yet something of this love will continue, in a very different form. As I write this before the third Sunday of Easter, I notice the exquisite grief the disciples must have felt when Jesus returned briefly to say goodbye. He took 50 days to do it and had a series of goodbye parties, too.

As my spiritual director said, this exquisite grief is a wonderful sign of the profound relationships that we have had, and that’s a good thing. So that is what I will hold onto in the coming days, allowing excitement and exquisite grief to live alongside one another.