A sacristy, also known as a vestry, is the room where vestments, paraments, and other items used for worship are kept. Oftentimes, the sacristy is right off the sanctuary or it can be in another part of the church. At times, the sacristy is where pastors will keep their albs and chasubles and prepare for worship. A small sink, called a piscina, is sometimes located in the sacristy. The piscina has a drain called a sacrarium which empties directly into the ground. This sink is a place to wash sacred vessels and to pour out baptismal waters and leftover communion wine so they go back into the earth and not into the sewer system. A sacristan is someone who has been given the duties of watching over and caring for items in the sacristy.
The sacristy is the room where I’ve disappeared to have a panic attack between services, the place where congregants have tracked me down to commend or scold me for sermons, and where I’ve stood to look in the mirror before church during a difficult season of ministry and thought, “is this it? Is this my life?” It’s where I’ve felt the hum of excitement as we prepared for a particularly big service, waited for the strains of the processional music to begin, and at times, wished I could be anywhere else. The sacristy is where we keep the stuff of worship – and at times it has felt like it is where I am kept, too. It’s where people can make sense of me – there with my alb and my proper stole for the church season. People know me there. They may not recognize me immediately at the grocery store or the movie theater or the swimming pool – but at the sacristy, robed and microphoned, I am in my place and easily classified.
Lately I have been thinking about the “stuff” of church and how it can both bring us closer to God and farther away – sometimes at the same time. For some people, being in the presence of a sanctuary with the stained glass, the pulpit, the altar, and paraments can be comforting and help one focus on celestial matters. For another, that atmosphere can feel rigid and oppressive.
As a pastor, I have sometimes felt that same push and pull in people’s interactions with me. I recall a particular wedding I was invited to preside at for parishioners with whom I had become close. The wedding was in the yard of a home in the country and I was at the house with the families and friends a bit before the wedding began. The place was buzzing with activity and nerves were frayed. Every few minutes it seemed someone would zip past me with a broken shoelace or looking for a lost bouquet or coming from a interaction with someone else and cussing up a storm. Then, they would see me, pause, and say, “Sorry, pastor.” Then they’d move along.
We were friends but we weren’t. Their interactions with me were just like with anyone else – and yet not. I was there to celebrate the joy of that wedding like everyone else, and yet I was also set apart somehow. And while part of me wanted everyone to just be themselves around me, a smallest fragment of my mind liked that I was somehow noticed because of my role. I liked that I had a particular role to play there.
I’ve always loved being a pastor – but the perceptions put upon me by others because of that role are not always predictable. Just like being around a church building can bring out the best or the worst in people, so can being around a pastor. However, I imagine it’s true that many people experience being treated in particular ways personally because of who they are professionally – the doctor who gets asked medical advice when she’s out trying to have supper with her family; the attorney who gets asked legal advice on the golf course; the baker whom everyone expects will contribute the cake to the family get-together. None of us can extract our professional lives from our personal lives entirely – not that we would want to. And as I’ve grown older, I’ve grown more comfortable knowing that to the vast majority of people in my life, I am their pastor first. Perhaps that is why it has made my closest friendships, my husband, my children, even more precious to me – because to them, I’m just Ruth. Just mom.
Thank God for the work we all are called to do in this life. Thank God that we are all more than the work we do in this life.