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.’
I took that blog offline long ago. My takes weren’t terribly useful and didn’t age well under the light of time and experience. I had been in the habit of posting some of my sermons, but as I evolved toward more and more extemporaneous preaching from a well-prepared outline, I found I had fewer and fewer manuscripts to archive. In time, I reasoned an unmaintained website would become a magnet for hacking, and I took it offline, saved what was worth saving in documents on my computer, and mothballed the rest.
Beginning in September, I’ll be taking the first sabbatical in fourteen (!) years of ordained ministry as a solo priest. Our family will be camping in the National Parks of the American West, which seems primed for many memories to be made, and practically begs for a place to archive some of those memories. At the same time folks in my parish, St. Paul’s in Walla Walla, Washington, will undoubtedly like to know what, exactly, their priest is up to during this three-month period of sabbatical leave – particularly after their last experience of a priest on sabbatical leave was beyond fraught. I’m also taking part in a D.Min. program at Sewanee’s School of Theology, and I know I’ll need a place to store my more academic curiosities along the way – a kind of library for intellectual side projects have so often eluded me in day-to-day parish ministry.
So it seems as good a time as any to bring the domain out of storage, and set up a place where the happenings of sabbatical, study, and the various reflections and musings that may happen on the way can be stored for my own recollection – and yes, for those who wish to read them, shared.