S CHAPTER XXIII DAYS OF A “JUBILEE YEAR” 1873-1923 ABBATICAL YEARS" are happily fitted into the Faculty provisions in modern universities for the wellbeing of all concerned, blocking out reinvigoration periods by units of sevens. It is somewhat rare, if not unique, for a Diocese in course to grant a "Jubilee Year" for a unit-hardly units after the ministry of seven times seven, or fifty years. Through our Standing Committee such was the cordial permission given me for a leave of absence in the year rounding out the halfcentury from my ordination to the Diaconate in 1873. The Bishop-Coadjutor and others kindly undertook to supply any lack of service it might cause in my routine duties and left me free for the yearning of the advancing years "to lift the gaze Above the world's uncertain haze." and take clearer bearings of things spiritual as well as to have the real exhilaration of a Jubilee of visiting children and grandchildren and relatives and old parishioners and friends and scenes new and old. This was all accomplished even more fully than I could have anticipated. During the year we had most filial and thoughtful welcome in their own homes from the families of our children in Helena, in Boston, in Palo Alto, and in San Mateo, and had planned for a visit to Shanghai, but the long range to reach my son's family there presented questions as to the proposed Suez Canal and Red Sea route which became formidable and led to our relinquishment of that trip. Out of the profounder reflections and musings of the stillnesses for self-communings, some of those not belonging to the essential spiritual reticences were from time to time noted in articles, sent to the Pacific Church man under the heading of "Jubilee Year Fallow Furrows" and republished here by the courtesy of that paper. JUBILEE YEAR FALLOW FURROWS I. "Sower Divine, Sow the good seed in me, 'Tis a rough, barren soil, Happy indeed is he who can find anything like a fallowing of furrows in the fiftieth year of a ministry. There is truly a jubilee note of blessing and thanksgiving in such a providence. And when a diocese so graciously allows it, there is added a new and profound attachment to a Bishop's field. This is signally so when there has been a deepening of that attachment for more than a generation, when the ties have so cherishingly bound a Bishop to his people and fellow workers over the active sowing and harvesting of the furrows of the field. And what could be more suggestive for such a jubilee year than the gradual passing of his generation and the sending of a new generation of laborers into the harvest? That, by their consideration and supply of his lack of service, makes it possible for him to be fallow while the field furrows are finding fresh tilling. Nothing could atmosphere such a fallow year more congenially nor more profitably than has fallen to the lot of the writer. Preparatory to it came a motor journey to the General Convention arranged by Mr. and Mrs. Monteagle, ever thoughtful and bountiful in their personal friendship as they are to the fore in their enterprise and services for the Diocese. The visit to Mr. and Mrs. Charles S. Wheeler at "The Bend," with its baronial hospitality and luring acreage of stream and wood; the choice inter-lockings of companionship with Bishop Manning and his family party en route; the salutary pre-Convention rehearsals of perspective between things big and little amid the awesome glories of Crater Lake and Mount Ranier-all this was something like a rare and levitical causing a "trumpet of the jubilee" on a minor motor horn scale, to sound. Upon the notable weeks of the General Convention I will not dwell, as their story will be so oft and fully told by tongue and pen and print. Portland certainly wideopened its welcome portals. Legislation and the allied interests certainly had their healthy exhilaration and progress. But it would be difficult to tell how much we "builded better than we knew" in planning for the first actual weeks of the Jubilee year. Going from Portland to my son William and his wife Dean, with their happy family in Helena, Montana, we found that they had arranged for us a sojourn on the great ranch, where I am writing this letter, owned by my son's father-in-law, Mr. H. W. Child, and his partner, Mr. Anceney, the "Flying D Ranch," some twenty-odd miles from Bozeman, Montana, in the famous Gallatin Valley. It would take a poet and an artist to give any idea of the natural charm of environment of the commodious and creaturecomforting ranch house where we are staying. The great skyline of the peaks and ranges of the amphitheatre around us, the purling "Spanish Creek" that sparkles and ripples with its hurrying of motion and life in contrast with the vast stillness and immobility of the "everlasting hills"; the sprightliness of the flooding sunshine with which we have been singularly blessed— who can do more than experience it? Who can resist the spell of size and grandeur in it all that comes with a consciousness of being on a domain of a hundred thousand acres of "benches" and beauties. It is all a nature's staging for reverie, and if one yields to the dreaminess he may easily see fantastic shaping and similitudes like those which the changing cloud forms of fleeciness seem to outline against the turquoise sky. One such fantasy is that the evergreen foresting of the mountain sides, is a great parable and oracle of the old phrase "a green old age" as applied to Mother Earth. Her geologies of periods written in her rocks tell their stories of passing through the fire and water, the heat and cold, the "faults" and upheavals as in St. Paul's figure, "the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together." Scars and jagged outcroppings and bare and dizzy scarps tell the practiced eye what a range of time the range of area has been through. Old age is there surely enough. But kindly nature has softened sharp outline into billowy contours with their verdure for the cattle upon a thousand foothills. She has not left her cataclysmic masses "unclothed but clothed upon" with the new life of the evergreen springing from craig and crevice. So the old age of the rock is featured green with the flora rather than grim from the burnt-out fires of youth. There are a good many such seeds for thought that drop into fallow furrows for "volunteer crops" as old men drop out of things and are left to themselves to "dream dreams" and “think things over." They germinate realization and repentance for past failures in the furrows while they fructify in the hope of the beneficial grace of God that flowers the furrows with forgiveness and with vision for years that are left, of a new meaning in the prophecy and parable that "the mountains shall bring peace." II. "And ye who fill the places we once filled And follow in the furrows that we tilled, Young men whose generous hearts are beating high, We who are old and are about to die, Salute you; hail you; take your hands in ours, And crown you with our welcome as with flowers." Longfellow in these lines from his "Morituri Salutamus" divines a true cheery instinct for age abdicating its activities. He might easily have dwelt upon other instincts that come into the consciousness at such a time; self-pity at being obliged to face facts of lessening energy and growing demands; natural clinging to places of power and honor; “holding on" to plans unfulfilled; human enjoyment of the stir and importance and intimacies and confidences of responsible office; zest of life-long calls and habits of a position of leadership, all this and more of the minor key of advancing years like the poet's own later sorrows-of a busy life might have found plaintive phrases in the poem. But no, the sentiment quoted strikes the real major key of the genius of happy old-age adjustments. It jubilates for jubilee years. It tends to silence laments. It checks musings over "losing the grip” upon the coming generation and forgets them in "giving the grip" of welcome"take your hands in ours" to those who are doing even more than to "Fill the places we once filled And follow in the furrows that we tilled." It has helped one to deepen in that sentiment to be an observer of two notable Church events of recent date. They have fitted most suggestively into these early months of my "fallow year" both to its refreshment and its reflections. The one was the celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the consecration of my old Divinity School friend and brother in the ministry, the Bishop of Connecticut, Dr. Chauncey Bunce Brewster. Much might be said of the large and spontaneous accrediting of his quarter-century in the Connecticut Episcopate. And it is good to be able to take Church bearings of a generation outside of one's own immediate sphere. It is a safeguard against too introspective or self-opinionated following as in that frank avowal of one who said he liked soliloquy for two reasons, first, "because he liked to talk to a sensible person, and next, because he liked to hear a sensible person talk." A good summary of Bishop Brewster's Episcopate is that he took what is known as Connecticut churchmanship—and with Bishop John |