The Subway Train Nightmare

This morning I woke up having a nightmare. Although the details of the dream are now hazy to me, here is the gist of it: In my dream I was going to celebrate Mass. I looked around for my vestments, chalice, and paten, and I realized I had everything with me. I went to look for the chasuble and discovered that my vestments were just tossed in a pile on the floor. Who could have done this? When I came back to where I was to set up the altar, I found that someone else had set up a table in front of the place, all set up for an Anglican Communion service with a purple veil covering the chalice. "What the heck?" I thought, and I remembered then that I wasn't supposed to be celebrating Mass anyway because I am a Catholic and I have not been ordained in the Catholic Church. Then I began to realize the the place where I was was filled with other priests who were also bringing with them all their church paraphernalia: Vestments, chalices, monstrances, thuribles, etc. All was a hopeless jumble of stuff and everyone was looking for something as I was. Then I realized that we were on a subway train hurtling through the subway at enormous speed. "What happens when we get there," I thought. "How will we be able to get all this stuff off the train?" The hopelessness of the situation began to dawn on me and I began to wake up.

As I reflect on this nightmare, I realize that it is the nightmare that I and many Anglican priests are living. They are refugees with a lot of ecclesiastical baggage. The thing we all have in common is that we answered the call to be priests. Over the years we have either settled for some continuing church situation, or we have come into the Catholic Church or the Orthodox Church. In the case of the Catholic Church only some of us, have been invited to move forward to the priesthood in the Pastoral Provision or the Ordinariate, and the effect on those of us who have not received the Nulla osta, is that we are now definitively laicized.

Thus the nightmare: How does one remain faithful to ordination vows when you have become laicized by circumstances like this? I don't want to leave my ecclesiastical baggage on the subway train, and I don't really know where this train is going, so I guess I must just continue to live this nightmare. Perhaps there is a way for laicized Anglican priests in the Catholic Church to have some solidarity with each other.