In Massachusetts, there’s a great story that shows both the diversity and uniqueness of the diaconate vocation. The new member of the clergy is an innkeeper in New England (why do I keep picturing Bob Newhart?), and a convert, who brings his own talents to his ministry:

For newly ordained Deacon Gregory Burch, the journey to the deaconate was decades in the making, and one he would make with his wife, Marilyn Murdy, supporting him completely.

Though they didn’t know it at the time, the husband-and-wife owners and innkeepers of the award-winning Hawthorne Inn bed-and-breakfast, which has hosted more than 100,000 people, would later realize what started the journey was a letter in the mail they received more than 20 years ago from a little old lady: It said that she just wanted them to know that she was going to pray that all their dreams would come true because she read about them in a magazine and they seemed like such nice people.

“We didn’t understand the importance of this — we’re kids. We just didn’t know,” said Burch. “But it came back to Marilyn at the ordination that this woman was praying for us when she didn’t even know us. You know, that is what service is. That is what love is — just helping strangers, really and from your heart for no other reason.”

A gold cross hangs prominently on Burch’s chest, suspended millimeters above the first latched button of his open-collard dress shirt as he sits in a comfortable green chair in the Hawthorne Inn, revisiting his conversion to Catholicism about a decade ago during an interview earlier this week.

“The mysticism of Catholicism is really what opened up to me first,” Burch said. “The idea of community and the idea of service were revealed through the mysticism.”

Brought up Unitarian Universalist, the 55-year-old innkeeper found himself at a point where he felt compelled to reexamine his beliefs to discern which were his own. Witnessing “miracles” at his father-in-law’s deathbed would forever alter the course of his life and send him down the road to the deaconate.

To enter the five-year deaconate ordination process, one must be a Catholic for at least five years. Burch waited no more than the minimum, but felt he was called by the Holy Spirit, and encouraged by others well before that. Actually entering the deaconate, they soon realized, is a huge commitment for the one who will be ordained and the rest of the family.

“You really need to be on that path together to understand,” Murdy said, “Because it is not only about the learning aspect, it’s about the spiritual. You have to understand what your partner is about spiritually and you have to go there together.”

Read much more at the link, and please keep this new “Deacon Greg”, and all deacons, in your prayers.

And let’s pray, too, for copy editors and reporters (and even some deacons) who insist on calling this the “deaconate.”