CONFIRMATION
On the morning of Sunday, June 11, 1972, the members of our high-school-age Confirmation class stood before the congregation of Fort Garry United Church. We’d prepared for this day, meeting weekly for study, discussion and reflection with our Minister Don Frame. Sometimes we met on week nights around a table in the choir room, other times on Sundays after worship over brown bag lunches in the church basement. Our final assignment was to write a one-page essay on why we were choosing to be confirmed. My essay, as I recall, began with the confession that it had been my parents’ idea. I hope, too, that I wrote about some reasons of my own and some words of personal commitment.
On Confirmation Sunday, we confessed our faith and that of the Church as we understood it and hoped to grow into it. We promised to live-out this faith both in the Church and the world, “…God being our helper.” Then we knelt, in turn, on the sanctuary floor. (This was before the soft red carpet, so that floor was hard!) Don Frame laid his hand on each of our heads, in my case saying: “Confirm, O God, this your servant Ron, that he may be true to you all the days of his life.” We then stood, and Don took our right hand in his to spoke words of commissioning, in my case saying: “Ron, go into the world in the power of the Holy Spirit, to fulfill your calling as a disciple of Jesus Christ.”
I was confirmed at the age of sixteen. Forty-nine years have passed since then. Still, the one moment from that day which remains most vivid and powerful to me is when Don laid his hand on my head. It startled me, you see, because his was not a hand laid lightly. It was a heavy hand laid firmly; pressing down, intentionally, on my head. It seemed to me then as it does now, that something of great importance was meant to be conveyed by the weight of Don’s hand. I took him to be impressing upon us the weightiness of this step along our faith journey; the weightiness of the vows we had just made; and the weightiness, especially, of God’s promise to us to be our helper always. Indeed, the presence and power of the Holy Spirit is a weighty and wonder-full gift.
I am so grateful to Fort Garry United Church for the huge role this congregation, and some very dear people in particular, played in guiding me in life and shaping my faith; especially, when I was a child, a youth and young adult. This June, 2021, I retired after thirty-six years of ordained ministry in the United Church of Canada. This was a life first made possible at that Confirmation; and when, in the early 1980’s, the Session of Fort Garry United Church interviewed and recommended me as a candidate for ministry.
-Ron McConnell