The End and the Beginning

There is a wonderful prayer attributed to King Alfred (d.899) that runs as follows:

To see Thee is the end and the beginning.
Thou carriedst me and Thou goest before.
Thou art the journey and the journey’s end.
Amen.

Trinity is at an end and a beginning.  Yet Trinity is also on a steady course, a journey in our Lord, our Lord who does not change, whose purposes are constant, whose call to us and to our School has not changed.

That I write this piece for Seed &Harvest is a sign of the bittersweet truth of this moment.  To be given this editorial opportunity is also a privilege of the first order for me personally as a devoted Trustee and as Bishop of the Diocese of Pittsburgh.

The Rev. Dr. Paul F.M. Zahl surprised the Board at our May meeting with his decision to resign as Trinity’s Dean President.  Paul has served the school with extraordinary energy, wit, and passion.  Yet Paul has found that his primary call as teacher and apologist of God’s limitless grace in Christ Jesus has been unacceptably restricted by the demands, the constraints, and the dynamics of serving as Trinity’s Dean President.  None will miss Paul more than I, for we have battled together as “Christ’s faithful soldiers and servants” since our earliest years of ministry together in New York City.  Few are truer friends.  Parallel truths could be spoken of Trinity’s First Lady, Mary Zahl, who sacrificed so much for the cause of Trinity and the gospel.  They will be sorely missed.

Yet a mark of Trinity’s greatness and of God’s favor on our enterprise is that she goes from strength to strength.  That the Rt. Rev. Dr. John H. Rodgers, with the consent of his beloved Blanche and the unanimous support of the Trustess and the Faculty, would yet again give up his retirement for the good of Trinity and the cause of Christ, is stunning testimony to the stability of our School and to God’s blessings continually showered on the vision He has given us from the beginning. 

There is still much to do, much to improve about our life, our witness and our effectiveness.  The Lord is far from finished with us.  The challenges of being Trinity (Episcopal) School for Ministry in the context of a once strong denomination that has disintegrated into unsettled fragments and an Anglican world that is realigning as its historic structures fail, have arguably never been greater.  But we are rather used to challenges – indeed impossible challenges – and we remain convicted about a God with whom all things are possible and whose nature is His faithfulness, the gospel of whose Son is to be carried by us as a saving message for all the world.  Besides this, our experience in endings and beginnings and in the whole of our institutional journey has been, in the words of our first Dean President, that “God’s work, done in God’s way, will have God’s resources.”   Deo gratias!

The Rt. Rev. Robert Duncan
Trustee of Trinity School
Bishop of Pittsburgh

13th June, A.D. 2007