Christ Among the Seculars: Vocation as Witness

By Sue Careless

CATHERINE Sider Hamilton is a parish priest who serves in the Danforth, a downtown Toronto neighbourhood where she finds the residents not particularly hostile to God or to church. “It’s just not a part of their lives.”

Her son calls his generation “the seculars.”

But this very neighbourhood was badly shaken this year when on a lovely summer afternoon a gunman randomly shot 15 people, killing a young woman and a little girl.

The next day the sidewalks were covered with chalk messages proclaiming the power of love over hate.

The Danforth priest told the conference in Dallas, “This is a time that cries ‘Love!’, but does not remember love’s story, a time that chooses its own story instead….We stand among the seculars as witnesses to a different story. The love you seek has a name, we are called to say, and its name is Jesus Christ.”

All Christians are to be witnesses to Christ in the world but Sider Hamilton believes that it is the special task of the priest “to be a kind of living, walking billboard of Christ. You get to spend your waking hours explicitly working for Christ.” But she admits that it takes more than a dog collar: “It takes a life that looks like Christ.”

Yet it can be very tempting, even for a priest, not to speak of Christ and his cross. “To speak instead a more comfortable word, a word at home in the world.”

She opened her talk by saying, “This is a challenging time to talk about [priestly] vocation, because it is a challenging time to be the Church. It is not just the steady loss of people…. It is also that we are plagued by division, theological and ecclesial; we do not agree on central aspects of our faith.”

This presents a real dilemma for young people who sense a call to the priesthood.

“What if the teaching and actions of the bishop are at odds with the teaching of Christ as our church has received it, how does a new priest negotiate that? How to serve faithfully and also graciously, with love? How even to take the ordination vows?”

Sider Hamilton took her own ordination vows when the Anglican Church of Canada was not quite so divided as it is today. Yet she has faithfully stood for what she considers orthodox teaching even when seismic shifts have occurred within both her denomination and her diocese. She did not tell her audience any of this, but concluded:

“If you would be a priest in the secular city, in the divided church, it is necessary to have courage. Courage to tell Christ’s story and not another. Because it is Christ’s story that this world needs.”

She also reassured them that it is not a grim task. Rather, “to be a priest is to be given a great gift…to know a great joy.”

Dr. Sider Hamilton is not only Priest-in-Charge at St. Matthew’s Church in Riverdale but also Assistant Professor of New Testament and Greek at Wycliffe College in Toronto. She spoke at the RADVO conference in Dallas, Texas on Sept. 21st.   TAP