"Living Out the Verbs of Our Lives: Transitioning into Retirement"

  by David A. Shirey 

I retired last year after forty years of congregational ministry. Parishioners offered well wishes. "Congratulations." "We're happy for you but sad for us." Friends asked, "Are you going to do some traveling?" "Will you move closer to your grandchildren?" Colleagues asked, "What made you decide it was time?" "What's it like?"

I answer, "It's a transition. I'm figuring it out as I go." Here is my six-month report.

The Decision

My last Sunday was August 21, 2022. Eighteen months earlier, I realized significant anniversaries were approaching – the fiftieth anniversary of my baptism and the fortieth anniversary of ministry. The second twenty of those forty years were spent starting a new church from scratch and then revitalizing a congregation established in 1816. The symmetry of the numbers 50-40-20 signified a completeness and wholeness that invited my prayerful consideration. Is it time?

I knew pastors who overstayed their effectiveness; they retired before they retired. Years ago, I told my wife to get out the hook and exit me stage left if I showed signs of being past my shelf life. I determined that if my retirement were to be critiqued, it would be for being too soon rather than too late. Someone quipped, "It's better they ask, 'Why did he retire?' than 'Why doesn't he retire?"

I evaluated my ministry by the ordination question asked of Presbyterian colleagues, "Will you pray for and seek to serve the people with energy, intelligence, imagination, and love?" Those four qualities were still motivating my ministry. But having led the church through COVID and knowing it was in a solid missional, spiritual, financial, and administrative place suggested a wholeness and completeness that complemented my 50-40-20 anniversaries.

I sensed it was time.

The clincher came via an epiphany. A lifelong distance runner, I had a marathoner's mindset. My call was to keep going for 65, 67, 70+ years, pressing on in ministry even if it meant crawling over the finish line on all fours. What dawned on me is that ministry is not a marathon, but a relay race. I received the baton from those before me. My calling is to run my leg and make a clean pass of the baton to my successor. It hurts the team for me to hand off while slowing down, limping, or walking. The best thing I can do is pass off the baton at top speed to fresh leadership.

Having shared my discernment with my wife, adult children, and trusted others, I confided in my senior associate. Always motivated by a challenge, I told her, "My challenge now is to finish well and make a smooth hand-off. Between now and my final Sunday, I want you and the staff to please answer two questions: What do you need to thrive in my absence? What does the congregation need from me before I go?" In the ensuing five months, I responded to their requests, including assimilating many asked-for documents and files on a thumb drive that I handed to our Director of Operations & Finance on my last day.

Years ago, I attended a preaching conference keynoted by Fred Craddock. Interested in how to put the finishing touches on a sermon, someone asked, "How do you know when you're done with a sermon?" Dr. Craddock paused, then said, "You're done when you can lay it on the altar." When you can lay your years of ministry on the altar before God, a baton to be received by succeeding generations, you can retire.

A Sabbath Pause

Then what? When I was in discernment about retiring, I voiced my emerging anxiety to my spiritual director of 10+ years: What will I do? I wrote her sage advice in my journal: "First, let the field lie fallow." So began what my wife calls our gap year, a Jubilee Year of Sabbath pause. At a contemplative retreat we attended in month two in a remote, forested stretch of Lake Superior, we were welcomed with the story of native guides leading explorers toward a destination. After days of rigorous travel, the explorers were up at dawn, ready to press on, but the guides demurred, explaining, "We will go no further today. We're waiting for our souls to catch up to us." When someone asks me, "What are you doing now?" I answer, "I'm letting the field lie fallow." That phrase and all it implies permits me to wait for my soul to catch up before embarking on my life's next chapter.

At retirement, the momentum of decades of activity continued to course through me. Three months in, I had a series of dreams that were variations on the same theme. I was responsible for leading a worship service, meeting, class, or planning retreat but I was unprepared. Anxiety welled up over my inability to fulfill my assigned role until I'd wake up, recognize it was a dream, and breathe a sigh of relief that I was retired and had no such responsibilities any longer. After a dozen of these dreams I wrote in my journal, "I'm grateful that the weighty residue of responsibility is oozing away."

Another indispensable tool for preserving the first year of retirement for Sabbath pause is the word No. At a retreat I attended in the Sonoran desert at the five-month mark, a colleague explained the difference between competency and calling. "Though I am competent at many things and am inclined to say Yes to doing them, I remind myself that I am called to only a few things. If I say Yes to my competencies, it will dilute my Yes to my calling." She then asked, "What will you say yes to and what will you say no to? Grinning, she added, "And what will you say Hell yes! to and Hell no! to? We got the point. For me, it meant declining invitations early on with a respectful No in order to be able to speak a Yes born of my best self and deepest calling in the future.

Discerning a Polar Star Question

At month six I am in a new season of discernment. What will I plant in the fallow field and when? To what will I give my Yes? Though disciplined noes kept premature sowing at bay, I caught myself in the early months trying to zero in on specifics. Should I write a book about x, y, or z? Should I volunteer at x for y days a week, z hours a day? Should my wife and I compile a bucket list and calendar when we're going to check each item off? Such specificity was too hasty. I was guilting myself into doing rather than receiving the Sabbath gift of being (Someone once said, "Don't should on yourself").

My spiritual director encouraged me to bracket all the disparate whats that could eventuate in my retirement and seek first a greater, unifying how? “Discern how you are going to live out your life,” she said. “Find your polar star and all the specifics will fall into place.” She unknowingly echoed Jesus' words my wife and I chose for our wedding nearly 40 years ago, "But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well" (Matthew 6:33). In time, the word stewardship began shimmering in my mind and morphed into the question, "How can I be a good steward of the gifts and graces, knowledge, experiences, and relationships with which I've been blessed?" A final honing of the question led to, "How can I be a good steward of the verbs of my life?"

The Verbs of Our Lives

Several years ago, I made a list of verbs, descriptors of what animates and gives purpose, meaning, and joy to my life. I distilled all the verbs into a Rule of Life: "If I'm run up, read up, friended up, and prayed up, I'm up for anything." My verbs include:

·      Running (not for trophies, but for fitness) and hiking

·      Reading (not to get through a book, but to get a deeper perspective; not to get a grade, but to get understanding), studying, learning

·      Contemplating, praying, worshipping

·      Writing (not for a grade or publication, but for meaning), journaling

·      Preaching, teaching

·      Pastoring, mentoring, connecting, befriending

·      Wed-ing (being a husband), parenting, grandparenting

·      Imagining, creating

·      Laughing, enjoying, savoring

·      Encouraging, thanking

·      Persevering

·      Giving

During my years of ministry, I had ready-made outlets for my verbs:

·      Writing was given an outlet each week in a Wednesday blog post, a Sunday sermon, letters to congregants who raised questions that merited a pastoral, theological, biblically-informed response, and journal entries.

·      Reading, studying, and learning came to fruition in teaching classes.

·      Imagining and creating were manifest in leading staff retreats that evoked a shared vision and coming up with new ways to do ongoing ministries.

·      Persevering and encouraging fueled figuring out how to do and be church in a pandemic.

The day I retired, the outlets for my verbs no longer existed, creating a disconnect, a void.

Parker Palmer defines vocation as "persisting in what you can't not do." He adds, "Naming the jobs by which I've made a living is not the same thing as naming the vocation by which I’ve made meaning." What I can't not do – my calling/vocation – is to be a good steward of the verbs God implanted deep within me. But suddenly, my verbs had no outlet. Their impetus still burned within me, but I was without the familiar places to apply them.

Novelist Jamie Anderson writes, "Grief, I've learned, is really just love. It's all the love you want to give, but cannot. All that unspent love gathers up in the corners of your eyes, the lump in your throat, and in that hollow part of your chest. Grief is just love with no place to go." My verbs had no place to go and I was aching to use them.

At the six-month mark, I am amid the crucial enterprise of discovering new outlets and find it enlivening. I bundled my passion for reading, studying, learning, and writing into taking an online class on writing. That opened doors to new relationships with editors, authors, and other pastors who love to write, nurturing my connecting and befriending verbs. One of the joys of retirement is worshipping next to my wife for the first time in our marriage. We've visited a different church every Sunday for six months. We’re savoring connecting with colleagues whose worship leadership and preaching enrich us. We’re giving 1/52nd of our gap year tithe as an offering. I write and mail a letter on Monday thanking them for what we experienced in their midst and encouraging their ministry. The conference on the shores of Lake Superior fed my desire to "Learn creation" and included hiking, reading, studying, learning, contemplating, praying, and journaling. My wife and I planned a leisurely route to get there that included stops with family and friends (connecting, befriending, parenting, grandparenting, laughing, enjoying, and savoring). My outlet for contemplating, imagining, and creating is coming up with new ways to use my verbs. How convenient! There is no end to the permutations that derive from linking verbs to outlets. Good thing, because I suspect stewarding my soul in this fashion will be a guiding spiritual discipline for the rest of my life.

A Laying On of Hands

At the end of the worship service that marked my last Sunday, my colleague Elizabeth invited me to come forward. She asked me to kneel on the chancel steps and then invited my wife, family and gathered friends to come up and lay hands on me. She said,  

"David, forty years and three weeks ago, you entered into congregational ministry. On May 12, 1985, you were ordained with the laying on of hands and with prayer for the Holy Spirit's inspiration. Trusting that the Spirit has continued to work in you throughout your life and ministry and the Spirit will continue to work in you and in us still, we lay hands on you and pray for you again now."

In these first months of retirement, I have returned to Elizabeth's prayer numerous times. For what ministry were hands laid on me this time? When a mentor died in his 92nd year, I remembered his words about the inviolable call to ministry. "You can't get out of ministry," he said, "It's like getting unbaptized. It doesn't work." We're called to be lifelong "stewards of God's mysteries" (1 Corinthians 4:1 NRSVue), ever discerning new outlets for the verbs God planted in our souls so we may partner with the risen Christ in what the rabbis call tikkun olam – the repair of the world.

Retirement calls us to ministry that transcends previous callings. Our church no longer has walls. Our congregation expands. We're called to serve all creation with intelligence, energy, imagination, and love. When we do that, the result is meaning, purpose, and joy. When we do it for the duration of our lives, we will finish well and pass the baton to succeeding generations with confidence and pleasure. We will be able to lay our retirements and lives on the altar with gratitude, at peace.