Federal & Postal Disability Retirement Systems: The sacristan

Last Updated on April 17, 2017 by FERS Disability Attorney

There was once such a job.  Now, of course, the closest we can come to it is forever hidden in the secrecy of our own private lives.  For, there is nothing sacred, anymore, and everything private has been allowed to be revealed in the public domain of electronic declaratives.  Whether of protecting holy oils, ensuring that decretals are unblemished in their interpretation; of maintaining the decorum, orderliness and cleanliness of the altar and the implements of worship; and initiating the timeliness of church bells to call upon the loyal throng to approach with the sacraments of piety.

When did such an important position become extinguished?  How did it become an anachronism and extinction of necessity, and who made such a determination?  Was it with the conflagration of the public domain upon the private – when formerly private deeds, of the sanctity of intimacy behind closed doors reserved by those who commit themselves into a tripartite unity of matrimony?  Was it when youth allowed for the destruction of dignity and defiance of decorum and all manner of discretion, of sending through electronic means photographs of acts beyond bestiality merely for prurient interests and chitter of laughter and good times?

The sacristan is unemployed; he or she is now merely a vestige of an arcane past where holiness, purity and the sacred have been sacrificed upon the altar of inconvenience and guilty consciences replaced by the King of Human Folly:  Psychology.  What do we hold sacred, anymore, and behind what closed door can we find the remains of a past forever absolved?

For Federal employees and U.S. Postal workers who suffer from a medical condition, such that the medical conditions prevent the Federal or Postal worker from performing one or more of the essential elements of one’s positional duties, the question related to one’s own circumstances with the obsolescence of the sacristan, comes down to this:  In the course of dealing with my medical conditions, what altars of holiness have I compromised just to continue my career with the Federal agency or the U.S. Postal Service?  For, as the desecration of the public domain has increasingly harbored the sacred into the domains of private thought, so those reserved altars of inner sanctuaries concern the essence of one’s soul and the inner-held beliefs that remained forever the last vestiges of a sacred self.

Preparing, formulating and filing a Federal Disability Retirement, to be filed with the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, whether the Federal or Postal employee is under FERS, CSRS or CSRS Offset, is always just a means to an end.  The means is comprised of extrication from an untenable situation; the end is to reach a plateau of life where the sacristan may be reemployed, if only within the inner sanctum of one’s own conscience.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire