Since that event, I haven’t spent a lot of time on the couch watching the clock's pendulum swing or in my rocking chair watching the grass grow! Activity doesn’t end at retirement. There are and have been so many opportunities for creative engagement and contributing.

So, I did go back into harness for one and a half year as part-time retired minister at Wesley Mimico UC in Etobicoke. As well, for the last three and a half years, Albright Gardens Retirement Community in Beamsville have taken some of my time as I functioned as the “Owner’s Agent”.  The task is to  keep lines of communication open with the 41 resident households and with the property manager, even as preliminary steps were taken to redevelop this affordable housing village for personnel retired from service in various UCC ministries.  Retirement did not mean hanging up my shingle and taking no paid work. 

Since July 2018, Glenys Huws, my spouse, and I have been living in an apartment in Ottawa. We had decided some time before that we wanted to sell our Toronto house and move into an apartment. But where? After much exploring, we chose Ottawa where one son and family are located, even as another son and family plus friends of many years remain in the GTA.   

The move from Toronto meant a real break in various volunteer activities for me. It marked the final end of the redevelopment project to renew the local Wesley Mimico church  of which we were part. For nine years I had the privilege of working with a substantial team of congregational and community volunteers aiming to re-purpose the Wesley building from a 500 seat sanctuary to a community hub with a hall for up to 150, community spaces to meet human needs, and 36 units of housing for seniors. Just before the building permit was to be issued, the team realized that the finances were not settled  and other hurdles prevented completion.  

 

Winding down the Wesley Mimico Place corporation was a disappointment to the leadership team, the whole congregation, and to the many community supporters who had been cheering on this repurposing of the iconic church marking the “village”. I believe this conclusion represented a failure  of nerve and planning by the larger church and the loss of a great opportunity for the United Church to serve as a lively presence in the Etobicoke Lakeshore area. Happily, the small congregation has persevered faithfully in gathering for worship and in sharing food with marginalized neighbours. The church building home was sold and refurbished for a Montessori school and the congregation has gathered in the local library, while maintaining an office in the neighbourhood.

I had also been very involved in the Mimico Lakeshore Community Network first as chair and latterly as secretary. The Steering Group was made up of reps from various community groups – faith-based and secular – with the aim to struggle for human scale development values for the ever-changing Lakeshore community. I sat at the table as a rep from Wesley congregation and as convenor of the Etobicoke Mississauga Inter Faith Forum – leaders from various Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Sikh, Zoroastrian, and other faith traditions working, planning, and organizing together – especially for Inter Faith fests held in 2017 through 2019, involving hundreds of faithful. 

The reality in urban Canada and growing in rural Canada is a highly diverse population coming together from a wide range of faith traditions and cultures. An urgent mission priority for all Canadians is to learn better how to live respectfully with the diversity and to discover the richness of gifts – spiritual and cultural – that is ours. The Forum sought to lead people of faith and no-faith to affirm the divine gifts inherent in human diversity, to seek unity through humbly learning and fostering just relations, so that peace – shalom – might abound.   A worthy and urgent mission!

Another area of involvement was to help establish a Francophone United Church congregation in the GTA. La Mission Protestante Francophone de Toronto was constituted in 2018 and continues to witness to the Gospel in both official languages and liturgical cultures of the UCC/L’Eglise unie du Canada in the GTA. To continue my commitment to the French reality of Canada – especially in Ottawa, I registered for the Frantastique on-line educational program operating under the umbrella of “Le Monde” newspaper.

Once settled in our apartment in Ottawa there were fewer commitments to continue. Of course, grandchildren (Harrison & Henry) and their parents welcomed our caring presence. With both parents working, Glenys and I frequently filled in the gaps picking up the boys from daycare and school, or hosting them in our apartment home, with access to the indoor pool for fun and exercise.  With Covid 19 that was modified, relaxed and, with the 2nd wave, re-instated.   We all pray for an end to this global  health threat.

But what drew my focussed attention was the Oussoren family history. On the one hand, I retrieved files, documents, and photos that had been stored for over 50 years. My father had died in 1968 and he bequeathed to me the genealogical work he had started in the 1920s and brought to completion – sort of – in the year or two before his death. In the intervening years, the material awaited my attention patiently, so that in this new context, the moment seemed right. As well, we were planning a family re-union for August 2019 and that might be a great time to share the updated material.

So countless hours were spent tracking data for the Oussoren family (back to about 1650), for my mother’s Meulenberg family back to the 18th century, and for my grandmothers back as far as we could, but with more challenge than the tracking needed for the paternal lines!! Hundreds of photos were scanned with the help of nephew Sean's scanner.  At the re-union, genealogies accompanied by a 30-page book of  family photos were distributed to each household in the extended family. 

The  event in Ottawa was a wonderful opportunity to reconnect with sibs and cousins and their families. Unfortunately none of the Dutch cousins were able to cross the Atlantic for the occasion.   One cousin lamented becoming too old to travel.  At the same time, my brother Bert and his spouse, Betty, could not attend and two days after the gathering he died after a long struggle with Parkinson’s Disease. Bert was the middle child of five in the Oussoren family with the eldest born in 1934 and the youngest – me – born in 1944. His death gave weight to the intimations of mortality of which we were  becoming all too aware!

Once the re-union was past and the genealogical task was put aside, what next?  We looked in suitcases and cartons still stored in the apartment and “found” much evidence of our past.   It included many letters received and sent (and given back to us by family members) at various stages of our younger years. Correspondence with parents, with friends, with lovers, with acquaintances met along travel routes, postcards from around the world, and retained notes and essays from various academic programs – a treasure trove and hodge-podge of storytelling, reports  of mundane happenings, tear-jerking distress sharing, and deeply felt loving - all was liberated from storage.  

What to do with it?  Reading all the correspondence took many hours and days – but re-acquainted each of us with experiences, friendships, situations, disappointments, achievements, and a surfeit of love we had experienced over the decades. So we date-sorted all the items in categories mainly defined by where we had lived at the time of the correspondence: Hamburg, Vancouver, Winnipeg, Toronto, round-the-world trip, Geneva, Mississauga, etc. A huge job! Our only regret: we wished we had kept more of a diary so that our memories could be jogged even more than the letters, etc. already did!

But maybe that’s a vain desire. We can’t go back to those times to relive the experiences. They are already woven into our psyches. It is a huge privilege to live in a peaceful society where we have at least been able to conserve that much of our personal and family past. It is a gift beyond measure to have experienced such a wonderfully rich and varied life with so many people along the way. It is a blessing to have overcome obstacles, health issues, dangers, and other challenges – and through them, to have learned more about persevering, about wisdom, about contributing and sharing, about discerning between evil and good, about resisting and about growing in wisdom and truth.

I hunch that there are other posts waiting to be shared.   But blogs aren't intended to be books.  Lifetimes can't be summarized in three pages.   And reflections are ongoing.   So I'll end here - for now!

I like what J. Philip Newell writes in his “One Foot in Eden – A Celtic View of the Stages of Life” [New York, Paulist Press. 1999. p. 79]

I wonder about my “wisdom” - I can leave it to others to deny or affirm or qualify. But I can claim the variety of experiences at the diverse stages of life that have graced my living.   Being a preacher required it and made it easy to do so.   It comes naturally now to continue expressing gratitude to God for the amazing gift of life and for all the people – close and distant – who along with our awesome Earth home and the incomprehensible Universe have blessed me beyond measure.

This sounds a bit too much like an end-of-life witness. It’s not meant to be, but wisdom takes  some time to recognize grace when it abounds, and, as a 76-year old, the time is ripe for me to be reflecting more publicly  about this retirement stage of living .