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By Root 462 0

afternoon after the parish secretary had gone home, I was sitting in my new office admiring the view out my four windows when I heard the sound of distant car horns honking. As the horns drew nearer, I realized that I was hearing not cars in town but Canada geese overhead, flying directly over the roof of the parish house. Their wild calls had so much life in them, so much hollering breath and direction, that my own breath came more quickly just hearing them. I could not have asked for more blessed assurance that my life had really changed. The sounds outside my windows were no longer car horns and traffic helicopters but migrating geese. Like them, I had left my old home when all the food was gone, following my instinct to a new, green place where I hoped to regain my strength for ministry. Also like them, I did not know where my flight plan had come from, but I trusted that the Divine Presence was mixed up in it somehow.

Clarkesville was so compact that I began walking to the post office to pick up the mail every day. One day I would take the route that led past the old town cemetery and the next day the one that went by the public library. On my second trip past the library, I turned around, went inside, and walked out five minutes later with a laminated library card in my pocket. When the Northeast Georgian published my picture over a brief article about Grace-Calvary’s new minister, my privileges around town increased. The owner of Dixie Gallery offered me a 10 percent clergy discount on antiques. The manager of Woods Furniture Store invited me to give the weekly devotional for her sales staff. Back at the post office, the clerk told me not to worry when I came up a quarter short on a book of stamps. “Just bring it back before we close at five,” she said, sliding my stamps across the counter to me with a smile.

Of course people also knew where I got my hair cut, what I served my dinner guests on Friday night, and how fast I drove on the four-lane highway. The anonymity of my life in the city was over, along with many of the professional boundaries that had gone with it. One church member said he could help me find some better-tailored clothes while another offered to wash the red Georgia dirt off my truly filthy car. When I tried to enlist the parish secretary’s help in teaching people to make appointments if they wanted to see me, she gently explained that most of them did not keep day planners like I did. “If they want to see you then they’ll stop by,” Marty said, “and if you’re busy then they’ll come back later.” Meanwhile, she added, there were some people I might want to visit at home. Would I like her to make up a list for me?

In this way I began to learn what it meant to be a parson—a representative person—whose every move reflected upon her parishioners. By the time my first Sunday arrived, I was so anxious that I vibrated from head to foot. I had produced a painfully overworked sermon with three points in it that all started with a p. I had washed and ironed my vestments. At ten minutes before the hour, the tiny sacristy was full of people—acolytes, lay readers, altar guild members, and Skip, the semiretired physician from Florida who served as deacon at Grace-Calvary. It was almost time for us to head to the front porch of the church for the processional when everyone got quiet and looked at me. I wondered if I had something on my face and they were all waiting to see who would tell me. Then I remembered that I was the rector and they were all waiting for me to pray.

I prayed. We headed to the porch, where we stood with the ushers while the last few worshipers climbed the steps and went inside. When the head usher looked at me for the signal to ring the bell, I nodded, and the sky above all our heads erupted with sound. The first chord of the first hymn burst out the doors of the church as the procession entered them. Since I was rector, my place was not at the front of the line but at the end. This prevented me from remembering what a small place Grace-Calvary was until I stepped inside. The walk from