Retirement

I remember when my father took early retirement from the federal government, for which he had worked since the end of World War II. He had reached the highest civil service level he could. For a man who had no college degree, it was quite an achievement, but he was disappointed that he couldn't go higher. He was frustrated by his situation; his superiors were giving him less and less work to do. He had gone as far as he could go in the office--and now they wanted him to leave altogether. When the opportunity to retire came along--one of those budget-cutting actions--he took the package.

He was a young man--I think he must have been in his early fifties. Fortunately, my mother had begun a career in banking and was by then an officer. He could be a house-husband if he wanted to. For awhile he worked for a hardware store and then hooked up with H&R Block, doing "executive taxes" instead of sitting in a walk-in office. He enjoyed numbers and the job suited him. But he also did the cooking--he always loved to cook.

I think it was unsettling for me, when he retired, because everyone seemed worried he wouldn't do anything, that he would just sit around. He didn't. In our family you didn't just sit around.

I had my first job when I was fifteen, although I had worked previous years mowing lawns and babysitting. I'll be sixty-three this month--so I've been working in some way or another for fifty years. Most men my age would expect to work longer, perhaps until seventy. I'm too young to retire, just as my father was.

But this week I am retiring in one official way: as a deacon in the Episcopal Church. My wife and I will also start looking for a cheaper place than New York City to live. There is no doubt I will continue to work in some sense, as a consultant or in some little enterprise of my own. I don't plan to just sit around. But I don't plan to take another full-time job in a company (unless someone wants to make me an irresistable offer--always possible).

Being a deacon is an odd thing. Most deacons don't get paid. I am unusual in having worked in two jobs for the church in which I was classified and paid as clergy. So I have a clergy pension and can retire. Circumstances that I need not go into here make it necessary I do that.

It is an odd feeling, to retire. I will continue to behave as a deacon, particularly as I see my prophetic role as a writer and speaker--very much part of the diaconal calling. Once we move I may want to work in a parish (as a traditional deacon volunteer in parish life), but the truth is I need to rethink my role in this church. And the action of retirement will help me do that.

I had a letter this week from a deacon who was ordained when I was, nine years ago, reminding me and my fellow ordinands from that ceremony that our tenth anniversary is coming up. I spent almost as much time trying to become ordained as I've spent in a collar. Before ordination, one of the key questions is: Why do you think you need to be ordained? Now that I'm about to retire from active duty, as it were, I wonder if I did need to be ordained. What good did it do me or the church? (Other than the modest pension, which was an accident anyway--and not what I mean by the question.)

We don't become ordained for ourselves, of course. Especially deacons: there are not many personal advantages to being one. And yet ordination changes our lives, alters who we are. And if we are right in thinking we are called to ordination, it ought to change the church in some way.

I have a sense of being freed but I can't articulate what I mean by that yet. I only know that this week I am retiring and I don't plan to sit around and do nothing. I'm too young for that. But what has happened to the deacon, the guy who thought God was calling him, through the community of the church. to a particular service? What becomes of him and his vocation?

Sunday Morning

Since I'm fasting from religion during Lent--note, please, that the issue is religion not belief or faith--Sunday mornings remind me of the sixteen years I dropped out of religion between my sophomore year in college and my inexplicable return in 1979. I suppose a primary alternative to church is the New York Times, if you happen to have developed the Times habit over the years, as my wife and I have. So we read the Times. We have brunch. Because I'm not serving on an altar, I don't have to spend most of the day in the church, returning late afternoon with a kind of fatigue that I feel after no other work or activity. It isn't hard to do something different--when the weather's good, take a long bike ride as I did yesterday--although I must say that reading the New York Times is hardly an edifying experience or a ritual that leads to spiritual insight. (My wife says for her it is.)

But then a church service often fails to be edifying or spiritually insightful as well.

Well, this morning I was watching the workmen in the lot across the street from our apartment as they completed the erection of a fifteen-storey crane with an arm that reaches another ten storeys into the air. They began the work yesterday at dawn (the workers arrive at the construction site every day before dawn, even on the coldest days). Building has been going on at the site for a few months now, with interruptions of one sort or another. I know nothing about these things, so I can't say why there are delays. I assume it's about the arrival of materials. Watching the crane go up this weekend, I expect to see flat-bed trucks arrive tomorrow with long steel girders. The workers will then proceed to put the girders in place and erect a condominium skyscraper, the Platinum Tower, that will block a good part of our apartment's southern light. But that's just a fact of life in New York. Light will be blocked by buildings.

Anyway, as I've observed the workmen at the construction site over these few months, and seen them this weekend, I've been struck by how much of their time seems to be spent wandering around somewhat aimlessly. I can see a dozen men walking about in the morning, perhaps carrying something, but seldom do they seem to stop to do anything. Their motions appear random, and then at the end of the day the site has changed. There are walls, platforms rising out of the concrete bathtub in which it all rests. On Friday, there was not a crane, and then on Sunday there is. A few men were on the girders of the crane, some on the ground held ropes (I think). The whole thing balanced on a slim pile of steel seemed improbable. One man crawls out on the extended arm 100 feet up, without a safety belt, his feet balanced on the girders. The height doesn't seem to bother them.

It's a possible answer to the question, Why is there anything at all? Stuff mills around until it comes together and then you have something.

This morning they started up a smokey engine at the back of the platform on which the crane operator sits, enclosed in his glass casing (nice in this cold weather), and try out various moves. The man on the crane arm stays there while it is moved this way and that. Others crawl around on another platform above the operator's cab doing who knows what. Every now and then I look up from the Times to see how they are doing. They are standing or wandering or looking.

I mention to my wife that it's hard to think of these men in their hard hats as typical guys from the Bronx, say, with beer guts, whose views I am unlikely agree with, when I see them in this effortless motion erect a structure that does not look like it can stand. But it does. They're not in church either, of course.

It occurred to me that life is a bit like this, random motion or effort, that may or may not feel purposeful, but in the end, who knows. A few guys show up and after a day leave a twenty-storey crane behind. They go to a bar maybe, have a beer. No big deal. The main thing is the crane doesn't fall down. Amazing.