For folks who are following along, I have a big backlog of posts from our journey – then days have been filled with incredible natural beauty and wonder…
…but it leads to a need for rest.
I hope to be posting a backlog tonight as I sit in the laundromat, but in the meantime, you can browse photos from our journey online – I’ve been posting on my Flickr page at flickr.com/sibleydc.
Thanks for your forebearance…
Hello from the road! Things have been both remarkably busy and remarkably slow – which is exactly what I hoped for in this sabbatical trip. We left town on Thursday, albeit much later than we planned, actually leaving Walla Walla around 3:00 pm. We couldn’t help notice the air getting hazier as we moved northward; western wildfires would come to define the travel days of our trip.
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Inevitably, when parish clergy and leadership inform congregations about the clergy sabbaticals, the question of “why?” arises – after all, for most secular work, the equivalent of 3 months’ paid leave for every 5 years of service is non-existent. A New York Times article from 2010, “Evidence Grows of Problem of Clergy Burnout” chronicles some of the unseen consequences of the pastoral ministry of clergy among them higher rates of obesity, hypertension, asthma and depression than the American population and a growing rate of clergy who leave active ministry in only their first four years of service. The reality of the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated this trend among the clergy – a 2022 Opinion piece by Tish Harrison Warren chronicled some of the realities of the pandemic on clergy. Fascinatingly, the secular world is catching up – a recent Harvard Business Review article made “The Case for Sabbaticals — and How to Take a Successful One.” So what does this look like in my context as Rector of St. Paul’s, and an Episcopal Priest? Why a sabbatical, and why now?
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Over a decade ago, not too long after I was ordained as a priest, I “kept” a blog (kept is being used extremely generously here…) that was called “Feeding on Manna.”
I titled it from a favorite line from John Newton’s text “Glorious things of thee are spoken,” which is commonly sung in the Episcopal Church as a hymn to the Franz Joseph Haydn’s Austria or Cyril Taylor’sAbbot’s Leigh. That website was long mothballed, but the hymn has only grown as a favorite. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve only become more and more aware of my sheer dependence on grace, which “like the Lord, the giver, never fails from age to age.” I’ve become ever more thankful for the reality that I’ve been led by God in ways and to places I never would have expected, and have grown and been spiritually fed not necessarily with the outcomes I hoped for or imagined, but instead, am nourished by the manna – the “just enough” – that God gives, and watched it blossom beyond my imagining. The title holds, and is more of a felt reality for me than ever before.’
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