Ordination Anniversary
The young bull said to the old bull, "the situation is serious but not desperate." The old bull said to the young bull, "actually, the situation is desperate but not serious."
Five years after Bishop Wayne Miller and a modest assembly of clergy laid their hands on me and proclaimed to me have Christ’s authority to proclaim the Gospel and forgive sins, I wrote a brief reflection on what ministry looked like from where I sat at that particular moment:
Since arriving in the office at 9 a.m., I have: prayed the office of readings from the iBreviary app on my phone, revised the prayers of the people for this weekend’s services, tried to help arrange for a car payment for a member, picked Scripture readings for a Saturday funeral, had a phone conversation about the ELCA’s new fundraising campaign and another about our town’s Memorial Day parade, sent a few emails, left a couple of voicemails, set up a visit to a homebound member, discussed this Sunday’s first communion class with our Christian education director, and met with my senior pastor to discuss the pastoral care concerns of the parish. A little later I’ll be proofreading the bulletin and meeting with a family whose mother and daughter are new to church and preparing for baptism. Midweek worship will follow.
I have also spent some time chatting on Gmail with a colleague. I’ve eaten three Reese’s peanut butter cups and drunk two cups of tea (maintenance doses following my morning cups of coffee). I found a really exciting article via Twitter about Gerard Manley Hopkins, the Jesuit priest and poet, that I haven’t had the chance to read yet. But that’s ok, because three of the biggest items on my to-do list still stare accusingly, uncrossed, from the page.
It’s 3 p.m. on a Tuesday as I write this, and while every particular has changed, today’s list would be a similar grab-bag. In those days, pastors were more likely than not to rejoice in the meandering diversity of our roles—at least when we were talking or writing in public. Today, after nine years of widening polarization, church schisms, a pandemic, the society-wide loss of “third places,” and a relentless acceleration of the long-running trend of de-churching, we seem more likely to complain about or lament this self-scattering. Even at the time, I saw it as a vulnerability and proposed an out-of-the-box remedy:
I don’t have any good ideas on how to cultivate this expansiveness in our leaders. Perhaps we should all be apprenticed to sea captains for a year in the hope of spurring a little Odysseus-like crazed ingenuity, not to mention picking up some bankable skills.
I wonder if the difference, for most of us, is that we stretch ourselves over the same area, as it were, but that area contains fewer points of contact or opportunities for success. The same expectations—whether they come from ourselves or others—can feel less and less reasonable. But this is itself not an uncommon experience of work in the 21st century. It might also be the negativity bias of social media, in which clout and attention tend to flow to expressions of discontent, anger, exhaustion, or injustice of various kinds rather than to the more ambivalent narration of ups and downs in the context of generally unfavorable trends.
The bad stories are real and heartbreaking, to be sure. I’ve watched people get a raw deal from this work, often aggravated by factors that I don’t have to deal with. I can acknowledge that while I have been (once upon a time) too young, too verbose and intellectual, or too cold and analytical for some people, I’ve always fit the straight-married-white-male model of Lutheran church ministry that is buried too deep for speech in many of our congregational cultures. It’s only fair to acknowledge that advantage when I look back at my less than desolating experience.
Still, I’ve had to learn and change. I was, for a time, obsessed with a severely existential idea of vocation. At the end of Gilead, John Ames gives a blessing to his wayward namesake and godson, having to ad lib a bit beyond the traditional benediction from numbers, calling him “beloved son and brother and husband and father.”
“Thank you, Reverend,” he said, and his tone made me think that to him it might have seemed I had named everything I thought he no longer was, when that was absolutely the furthest thing from my meaning, the exact opposite of my meaning. Well, anyway, I told him it was an honor to bless him. And that was also absolutely true. In fact I’d have gone through seminary and ordination and all the years intervening for that one moment.”
I used to read that last line and think “hell yeah, brother.” Same deal with that mother-daughter pair I was getting ready to baptize in 2014. Somehow I missed that Jack, the one blessed, did not receive it as intended, or I noticed it and didn’t really absorb it.1 The idea of the moment that justifies the whole thing—the full offering of the best and most vigorous years of our lives without heed for the outcome—animated my early career, and I built a significant architecture around that vacuum of disdain for consequence.2
I don’t feel that way any more. Or at least, as those moments when everything might have been at stake proliferate and spread out over the receding horizon of the years, I accept that the smaller stakes add up, too. We might not be interested in the consequences, but the consequences are interested in us. Even if it was not a mistake to begin with, the conviction that it all might be justified by a single act has served its purpose in my life. I need to think about it in other ways.
I’ve taught myself to react more slowly to criticism, whether I perceive it as fair or not, and I have gotten better at being less anxious than people around me. I resent the days full of random tasks a little more, even as I’ve gotten at least a little better at pushing bigger processes ahead. I’m not as passionate about justice and service as I was, and in most ways my life is actually easier than I ever dared to picture it. But what you lose in intensity you can hopefully gain in endurance.
I used to think—or at least say—that I couldn’t imagine myself doing anything else, or that I wasn’t fit for anything else. But that was probably more existential bluffing. To the extent that we get better at this over time, we probably become more able to do other jobs, too. John Ames could have left Gilead, could have left ministry entirely, and in the end it’s not obvious to him or anyone else that he even did a good job by staying. We may imagine ourselves taking these roles under some kind of compulsion and abandoning them only under extreme duress, but for me, at least, that was a story I told myself to avoid the reality of freedom.
And that’s ok, too. God allows these tricks because we don’t necessarily react well when God plays fair. Freedom in the theological sense isn’t given or asserted but grown into. We find a way to bring our will into alignment with our responsibilities. Or we fall apart. Whether we collapse into the vacuum of consequence or explode with its excess hardly matters.
I still think the sea captain apprenticeship is not a bad idea. When I wrote that, I’m sure I was thinking of a specific friend who did something like that and had a hair-raisingly horrible experience. I periodically think of it to give my work troubles some perspective. I used to spin castles in the air when I imagined a sabbatical, but now as one becomes a real possibility, I think it would be good to learn something totally different. What can I learn about plumbing in twelve weeks? Not to be more employable, but just to experience a different way of relating to the world. We accept a calling, an appointment from God and the community, but it becomes our life through the accumulation of our own choices interacting with unstable circumstances. But that’s true of everyone else’s life, too. Mary, with her relics of a long life lived around the world. Sue, who always wished to bless and pray for me, too. Jill, who decided in fifth grade that it was time to get baptized. It was never their job to justify anyone else’s choices. But I’m grateful for all of it. I ask their prayers, living or dead, and I ask for yours.
Gilead is a novel about the idea of blessing, I think, and what it means apart from any conscious acceptance of the blessing. It’s also about dads. It’s about a lot of things. I re-read this passage tonight and it brought me near to tears for the the sixth or eighth or whatever time. Still the best.
Not for nothing, but the mother and daughter I baptized that year slipped away pretty quickly and never came back.
This one hurt: "Not for nothing, but the mother and daughter I baptized that year slipped away pretty quickly and never came back."