Who Was Matthew Without the Tax Booth?
Why Matthew may have left more than a tax booth behind
Welcome to today’s reflection.
Every Tuesday we take a look at one of the lectionary readings for Sunday. Whether you go to a church that follows that or not, today’s focus is relevant for us all.
It focuses on the call of the disciple Matthew and asks: What labels do you have?
As always, if you are not yet a paid subscriber, please do consider upgrading to read these daily reflections.
One of the strangest things about early retirement is discovering how much of your identity was tied to your work.
When people ask what I do now, I still hesitate before answering. It feels like a loaded question.
For more than a decade, I was a parish priest. It was not simply a job. It shaped my routines, my relationships, my sense of purpose, and my understanding of myself. If somebody asked who I was, being a priest would almost certainly have featured somewhere near the beginning of the answer.
Then chronic illness brought that chapter to an unexpected end.
My retirement arrived much earlier than I had ever imagined. Suddenly, a role that had occupied a huge part of my life was gone.
The practical challenges were significant enough, but what surprised me most was the deeper question that emerged underneath them all.
Who am I now?
I suspect most people encounter that question at some point.
Sometimes it arrives through retirement. Sometimes through redundancy, bereavement, illness, divorce, parenthood, or simply the passing of time. Sooner or later, many of us discover that the story we tell ourselves about who we are no longer fits quite as comfortably as it once did.
