I could feel my ontological status changing...

... as my wife was ordained. I hadn't expected that. I don't know what I did expect, but that certainly cought me by surprise. There we were, sitting in Durham cathedral with hundreds of co-worshippers while eight people were ordained deacons by Bishop Tom Wright. My wife was about fifth or sixth in line. It was a hot day outside but tolerable in the midst of the thick stones that have made up Durham cathedral for about a thousand years. And have 'seen' such things taking place most of those years.

People have kept asking me how I felt about my wife being ordained. And I don't really know what they expect in reply, -do they? Is it some sage suggestion about the role of clergy spouses and being a male one at that? Or are they wondering how it feels to be ordained and to have your wife 'follow' you into ordained status?

Whatever it is, I don't think I can answer until I've lived with it for a while. There's too many other more pressing issues for me. We have to move house and establish our family life afresh and we still don't have a date to move, in fact the house the diocese are buying still hasn't been acquired [despite them having 8 months to sort it out, it was still left till after Easter, what's that about?]. More pressing existentially, I'm still retuning my self-image and self-understanding to not being in stipendiary ministry and wondering how my calling to resource other Chrisians in word and sacrament works with being in secular employment and to the loss of the status of 'being known' that went with having served in a particular area of a particular diocese for so long. Now I'm unknown and keep bumping into the feeling that goes with the observation "I'd have been asked to do that in ..."

It feels like I'm being called to a lot of self-restraint: so that I can allow her to establish herself in her own right in her own ministry. That calling is the one I am most clear about and conscious of at the moment. However, I still don't feel called to be a 'housespouse'... and actually Tracy doesn't really like seeing me when my horizens got foreshortened to the best bargains in Waitrose!

It's great to see Tracy finding her place in God's purposes, and it has been a real privilege to see her growing in understanding and confidence as a minister of God's grace. And, I reflect, it is important to enable the ministry of others especially when married to them! So it has been good to make room for her to grow in grace in ways that might otherwise not have happened as quickly or effectively.

Tracy isn't 'following' me into ordained status. This is her call, which she now recognises the precursors of in her childhood and on through. It's a matter of the right time, and I wonder whether being married to someone in presbyteral orders has had its part to play also. No doubt, in time, that may become clearer.

But back to feeling status changing. I think it was that I was responding to the recognition that Tracy's was changing. Apart from any theological consideration, what was happening was that she was acquiring the 'right' to wear a dog-collar, be addressed with 'Revd' and all those other social and cultural odds and ends that go with being a CofE clergybeing. And with that, my own social construction shifts in wider society and also within a 'world' that previously I have been most closely related to of the two of us: the 'full-time Church of England'.

Our identities as human beings are partly/mainly given to us by our relationships and history of relationships. Even when we seek to forge our own identities we cannot escape the givens: we operate within our linguistic communities, we cannot unpick certain responses laid down before we were conscious, and even our rebelling is against a given. Ordination restructures our social identity, for good -and ill.

Is that ontological or functional? How about we don't ask the question like that, let's suppose it doesn't make sense to put it like that. It's both and it's neither. It's functional because we act differently and we are expected and called upon to act differently than we would otherwise. It's ontological because it is about our response to God's call within God's people and God works within us to will and to act according to his good purposes and we are new creations. It is both because both doing and being feed into one another. But to say there is an ontological dimension is surely not to deny the ontological dimensions of the callings of those who are not called to 'ministerial priesthood'. In fact I would say that all callings are individual, it's just that some have callings that make sense, given current Church structures are as they are, within the structures of ordained ministry. This is something I am having to explore in earnest right now because, as I re-read the undertakings that those to be ordained made [the same as I made 20 years ago], I knew that they were still 'mine' also. And yet, I can't exercise them through the inherited structures at the moment. I'm actually quite excited to find out how that will work out, but at the moment I have only a foggy idea of how.

Time to pull the plug on this ramble. Thanks for reading this far, if you did!