The Henson Journals

[87]

4th Sunday in Advent, December 18th, 1921.

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A very beautiful sunrising mitigated the melancholy which shadowed my spirit this morning. There is always a great sadness about Ordination. It recalls so sharply the past with its enormous disillusions and, alas! Woeful personal failures. It forces on the mind and on the conscience all the paradoxes of the Christian minister's role, and all the insoluble difficulties which now confuse his message. The assumptions of traditional faith are most boldly made just when the heart sinks under a weight of irrepressible misgiving. On the other hand, there is the consciousness of being nothing more than a straw on the flux of a mighty tide of spiritual energy flowing out of an infinite past towards an illimitable future, no not merely a "straw", for that is wholly without active & willing association with the stream which carries it, but a contributory factor, though unimaginably petty in scale, yet none the less indispensable in one's measure to the progress of the great Flood. That, being what one knows one's self to be, one yet should have to come to be part, a necessary part, of this mighty & continuing movement of Witness and Blessing, is an uplifting thought. This is itself a crowning mercy, for which one may thank God with a full heart. Then there is the spectacle of youthful purpose, and self–dedication to the least earthly of human vocations. Mingled strangely all human motives are, and never so strangely as when they determine the highest human decisions. Here, where young men do publicly acknowledge for themselves a Divine Vocation, all the paradox and puzzle of the inextricable confusion are apparent. Yet where else is there a directer or more persuasive attestation of God's Presence with men, and Activity in their concerns? Allow for all the presumption, spiritual blindness, even self–deluding pride, & still there remains enough to rebuke one's scepticism, & to give a mean look to one's cynical reflections. "The Lord hath visited His People" That must be the final conclusion to which the experience of an Ordination leads the mind which has not parted company with the ultimate Faith. With this more congruous reflection in my mind I started in the motor for Durham at 9.15 a.m., and arrived at the cathedral in good time for the service. I ordained 4 deacons and 3 priests. Later I attended Evensong.

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