I want
to thank Bishop Lipscomb and the Rev. Victoria Kempf for opportunities
such as this one to focus as leaders of the church on building patterns
of health for our bodies, minds, spirits, and relationships and being willing
to revise those patterns as situations call for new responses.
This morning
the primary lens for viewing questions of personal change and growth as
clergy was through the discipline of psychology. This afternoon the
invitation is to look at issues that face us through the lens of our spiritual
tradition as Christians and particularly as Anglicans.
Stories
as Holy Ground
Typical
of spiritual directors and trainers of spiritual directors, I have a deep
appreciation for the ground of experience as the starting-point for doing
primary theology. Listening to peoples’ stories becomes for me the
holy ground for reflection on how God encounters us, loves us, and challenges
us, as our baptismal liturgy puts it, “to grow into the full stature of
Christ” Book of Common Prayer, p. 302). In preparation for
this time with you I have drawn from the stories and comments of a number
of people, and have been in touch with my own story.
Nearly twenty years ago, as the custodial parent of a seven-year-old daughter
following divorce, I entered seminary in preparation for priesthood.
It was indeed formative–and began raising important questions of how I
was going to be shaped as a priest, and what in my vocation to Christian
leadership in the church I was going to model for others. How was
I to respect my need for both a personal and community prayer life, amidst
the academic demands of seminary life, and the need to engage in a work-study
program, and be an attentive single parent to a young child, and have some
time for cultivating friendships, as well as honor my need for quiet time
for myself? I wanted it all–and I wanted to do it all perfectly.
It is
probably no surprise to you that it didn’t take too long into my first
year at seminary before I got so sick with a “fever of undetermined origin”
that I had to be hospitalized for several days and a seminary friend of
mine had to stay with my daughter. I had hit up hard against my limits.
I couldn’t do it all, at least not with the level of expectation I had
place on myself. I had to take a hard look at what I needed to do
about all those good things that claimed my attention. And
I began to realize that I needed help in assessing those demands and my
limitations.
I found
help in that first year in three ways. One resource was my academic
advisor. He was someone who knew the seminary’s system and could
help me sort out some of the issues related to life there–especially the
academic demands. This was a person within the seminary system that
I could talk to about the practical expectations of life there.
Another
resource that I sought out was spiritual direction. The broader availability
of individual spiritual direction was very new in the early 1980's, and
very few people had been specifically trained in that art. However,
writers in the Episcopal-Anglican tradition–Morton Kelsey, Tilden Edwards,
Alan Jones, and Kenneth Leech–were informing the church about the re-appropriation
of this ancient practice.
I was
interested in exploring a spiritual direction relationship as a way of
reflecting in an ongoing manner on my developing relationship with God
and how that impacted on my relationships with others in life. I
also sought to understand what might be appropriate spiritual practices
for my continuing growth in my love for God and God’s love for me and hoped
that a spiritual director might help me discover those practices.
And I wanted a confidential and sacred environment where a guide would
listen with me as I reflected on my deepest yearnings and concerns.
A third
resource that developed in my entering year was participation in a peer
support group. Several of us had found that a small group process
for support and growth had been important to our life in the past.
So about ten of us negotiated with the seminary to provide a peer group
facilitator, and we set up a regular meeting time for exploring situations
emerging in our lives related to personal, professional, and spiritual
growth.
The tug
of various dimensions of life on me did not change when I graduated from
seminary, and the challenge to model something other than the general cultural
drivenness–the challenge to live in a way that respects the loves entrusted
to me by God–continues to be a major life theme for me and I think that
it is a basic spiritual challenge to many clergy. Receiving personal
spiritual companionship and participating in a colleague group have been
major structures for regular reflection and support over the years.
The
Three Loves
So I propose
that we frame our inquiry around spiritual wholeness, especially in times
of change and transition. Many of you just did your exegetical work
around the “summary of the law” passage from Matthew for this past Sunday’s
sermon. You know that it is a conflation of a portion of the
Shema
of Deuteronomy 6.5 and one of the “holiness codes” of Lev. 19.18b.
There
are three loves referred to in this and the parallel texts in the other
synoptic gospels: we are to love God with the totality of ourselves, we
are to love our neighbor, and we are to love ourselves. I interpret
this passage to mean, among other things, that respect for each of these
three loves in their dynamic interrelationship is the basis for true life.
Love of God with the whole of our self is foundational for spiritual vitality
but such love also entails love for others and ourselves. This sense
of the dynamic interrelationship of the loves as an understanding of what
life in its fullness is about is mirrored in other ways in scripture.
Shalom
and Eirene
For example,
the Hebrew understanding of shalom is a very richly textured expression
of peace. Shalom means completeness, peace, totality, well-being,
harmony in community, free growth of the soul. It is extended by covenant,
and its source is the God who overcomes the forces of disharmony and evil.
It’s adjectival form, shalem, is translated as “whole.” Shalom is
used in Hebrew scriptures too numerous to detail here, and is particularly
abundant in the psalms and in the various Isaiah passages.
The Christian
scriptures follow this richly textured understanding of peace, appearing
in the Greek as eirene. Eirene as peace, unity, and concord and evoking
the richness of the Jewish understanding of shalom appears in all the gospels,
the Acts of the Apostles, and the Pauline epistles. Ultimately for
Christians, Jesus Christ is the supreme embodiment of the gift of
shalom by God to the world through the totality of his life, ministry,
passion and crucifixion, and resurrection. He is the one who shows
the marks of his crucifixion, the signs of his unconquerable love, and
proclaims peace. He is the one, in John’s gospel, who calls his followers
to love one another as he has loved us.
Respecting
the Loves
So our
consideration of the movement into deepening spiritual health and well-being
(shalom) can be theologically grounded on a respect for the loves that
are ours to integrate in the concrete situations of our lives. To
“respect the loves” means living in the creative tension of a receptivity
and response to God’s ongoing call in all dimensions of our lives while
honoring the community of relationships that God has entrusted to us, and
while attending to our personal needs and seeing that they are addressed
in healthy ways. We are made of whole fabric–that is part of the
shalom or eirene or peace that is the gift of God–and so we are not wise
to put the loves in opposition to each other. Yet, it can be helpful
to reflect on how we find we are balancing the loves.
Liminality
I told
you of an incident early in my seminary life that was the result of the
stress of trying to manage those loves without accessing spiritual resources
that would help focus me on God’s call to wholeness. In this new
stage in my life I tried to meet everyone else’s agendas but neglected
to respect my own needs. I got sick with a medically unknown illness–a
sickness of the soul.
The beginning
of my soul-healing had to do with getting in conscious touch with my own
vulnerable state in a time of major life transition. It required
a lot of “letting go” of things that had been important, including my sense
of competency and social power. I found myself in what anthropologist
Victor Turner, and theologian Terry Holmes, called a “liminal state.”
The root for liminal means “threshold” or “boundary limit” and it might
be visualized as the threshold of a doorway when one enters into some new
place.
The structures
that supported my sense of identity and worth had been undone and my life
felt ambiguous, unsure, powerless. My ability to pray as I had in
the past had been disrupted. The scriptural image that comes to my
mind about that time is of “wandering in the wilderness.” It was
an in-between time of the painful dying of an old self identity, but without
the comfort of any clarity about the new self. I began again the
difficult, sometimes painful, sometimes joyful journey into shalom that
is my–our– spiritual birthright, process, and destination with the help
of individual and communal guides and companions.
These
liminal times in our lives, times of major passage, are both distressing
and potent occasions of grace. One young priest had been an
associate rector for about five years when a restlessness started emerging
within him. In paying attention to the restlessness, two images surfaced
for him. One was coming up against a wall that was now too limited
a boundary in his current parish ministry. He had an urge to get
on the other side of the wall, even though it was safest being inside the
confines of the wall. The other was seeing himself as a baby eagle
craning his neck to peek outside a high nest. There was a big world
out there, but it was also very safe being in the nest. He was beginning
to feel the urge to try his wings, but he might fall if he wasn’t ready.
As we sat with the inner wisdom of those images he slowly moved to a recognition
of his readiness to go through the hard work of actively seeking a call
to a new parish.
A priest
who had moved following her final parish position spent her first year
of retirement in the discomfort of a liminal state. Was she going
to be financially stable enough in retirement? What was her ministry
going to look like now that she was not a full-time parish priest?
How was she to invest her time? What gifts did she have to give now
that she was retired? The image that first emerged for her
as we sat together with her questions was one of a field that seemed barren.
Gradually she became aware that the field was fallow ground, it was the
good earth, and that nestled in the fallow ground underneath the surface
were seeds. She came to a recognition that she was being called into
an extended Advent season, a season of trusting in the emergence of a future
that couldn’t been seen with clarity–the seeds were growing beneath the
surface, deep in her soul, and would emerge as new plants in the fulness
of time. She was able to live faithfully through a major life transition.
Regula
and Covenant
A superior
of an Episcopal religious community that I talked with was concerned that
clergy are able to develop a meaningful personal spiritual rule of life
that honors the real context of their life. My sense is that such
a practice as developing a spiritual rule should encompass reflection on
how God is calling the person to faithfulness in respecting the loves–and
that means going beyond just the structuring of personal patterns of prayer
and study of scripture to looking at what are the various foundational
ways the particular person is kept “spiritually sane and whole.”
When I work with clergy on developing a personal regula I ask them to reflect
on what they have discovered is important to do on a regular basis to keep
themselves as healthy as possible in body, mind, spirit, and in their relationships.
In my own family network of living with my spouse and 14-year-old son,
we developed a “family covenant” that articulates our commitment to honoring
our needs for physical care and safety, intellectual growth, emotional
health, and spiritual well-being–and states our agreement on certain practices
and ways of being together, including our decision-making processes, that
sustains those areas of care.
So, for
example, one of the ways that my wife and I can respect our love amidst
the many pulls of other good things and vocational responsibilities is
to commit to a morning off together once a week as time for us, and a Monday-Saturday
routine of simple prayer together in the morning. Those simple commitments
are concrete ways we respect our love and ground our lives in regular times
for intimacy. So, too, we negotiate a “family night” weekly where
we commit to playing together as son and parents. These structures
help provide a framework for building stability and honoring our love for
each other. In fact, these are contemporary applications of the ancient
Christian and Jewish spiritual practices of living under a spiritual rule
of life and being a people in covenant with each other and God.
Inherent
Tensions
A pastor
and spiritual director whose direction work is exclusively with clergy
wrote about exploring three basic polarities inherent in the spiritual
challenge of clergy life. He wrote,
“Framed
as polarities, these three realities require an ever deepening appreciation
for the paradoxical character of life [and] ministry.
Indwelling/Outgoing–the tension
between the maintenance of an inner life in the midst of highly extroverted
demands.
Fear/Trust–the tension between
the two fundamental human emotions from which all perception, judgement
and behavior emerge.
Law/Grace–the tension between
our need for structure and the fluid experience of the Spirit.
The following questions are formative
in an exploration of these polarities:
In what or whom do I place
trust?
In what or whom do I make
covenant?
To what or whom do I surrender?”
Other
tensions inherent in the life of many clergy were named by other priests
who wrote to me. I would like you to hear their voices as well.
A diocesan
officer wrote:
“I can
think of two personal issues. One has to do with the tension between
helping to create trust relationships and a community of trust when one
must practice defensive ministry. The ‘boundary maintenance’ guidelines
of diocesan sexual misconduct policies require caution and a kind of defensiveness.
And they presuppose structures of mistrust. And the Clergy Killer
phenomenon which has been described by Lloyd Rediger, means that one has
to watch one's back. I think the challenge is to find some way to
live with these tensions while finding some kind of detachment.
A second
issue has to do with the dynamics of pastoral-sized congregations.
Their size is determined by how many folk the pastor can stay connected
with personally. So to grow one has to stay connected with more,
and for many congregations that only works when the pastor over-functions.
Working a mere 50 hour week comes to be resented. It represents inaccessibility
or indifference. To find the spiritual detachment to let go of those
expectations from the pastor's side and the skills to help other structural
dynamics develop is the challenge. Not being able to do that is to
sacrifice personal health.”
A priest
who is a pastoral psychotherapist wrote:
“I see
too many (parish) clergy forced to play manager/CEO. By that I mean,
over the years it is harder
to be a mission. . . . Our parishes must be self-supporting and thereby
larger. So making sure that the bottom-line is black becomes a major
goal, said or unsaid. That leads to a economically driven, manage by objectives,
ministry. Clergy are then forced to play to the broadest denominator, being
bland is therefore a virtue, and they cease to lead. In the worst of cases,
fail to lead.”
A rector
in a very wealthy parish setting was candid about the tension he feels
between the cultural values that are a dominant force in the life of his
people and his own sense of spiritual authenticity to the gospel of Christ.
He wrote:
“In order
to be true to your question, it is necessary to focus on ‘THE’ major personal
spiritual issue, so I am going to risk and say that it is, for me, the
realization that I take the Gospel too seriously for my people. While
I like to think of myself as one who embraces the Incarnation, and understands
the Gospel imperative to be something which occurs in the midst of life,
not apart from it, I also know that we cannot substitute another ‘gospel’
for the Good News we have in Jesus Christ. . . .But inside I churn with
spiritual anxiety as I see myself drawn to put aside Christian principles
in order to accommodate another form of principle.
The crisis
of this is that I believe the people among whom I minister actually expect
me to do that. They are embarrassed by being reminded of what I believe
to be a moral, ethical, or ‘Christian’ principle which might cause us to
do things in another way. They are not bad people, and they don't
want me to be ‘bad’ either. They just don't want me to mess around
with the actions, words, or activities which might assist them in getting
ahead (whatever that means for each of them.) As I approach
the last few years of my professional ordained ministry, I am more and
more conflicted over this tension. I don't want to retire (in a few years)
having "sold out" on principles which I believe to be central to the Christian
faith, such as honesty, openness to diversity of thought and practice,
and justice for all the people of God.. I want the sacraments to
reflect an opportunity for unity with our creator God, not just a pretty,
well-performed piece of drama.
To turn
this issue into a time of growth would take more than my own concern for
this issue. I would love ‘the Church’ (by which I mean the Episcopal
Church, my Bishop, my Diocese, my colleagues in ministry) to give credibility
to this issue, without it being another chance to ‘beat up’ the people
in the pew. I would love for my Bishop to say to me, ‘Go for it.
If there is resistence, I will be there for you.’ My experience tells
me that our Bishops (at least the ones I know) are far more willing to
go to the mat over social issues than this one. As I said earlier,
there would have been many times when I thought that was the right way.
I don't now.”
Intimacy
with God
One of
the challenges that was named earlier is to honor the tension between an
inner life (love of self and intimacy with God) and highly extroverted
demands (love of neighbor writ large). Donald Hands and Wayne Fehr,
both Episcopal priests, in Spiritual Wholeness for Clergy (1993)
point out the spiritual danger for clergy of lack of intimacy with God.
They write,
“Ordained
ministers can live for years on the level of the ‘objective,’ church-mediated
faith (what ‘we’ believe), without reflecting much on their personal history
with God, without any heartfelt personal love-involvement with God. . .
. Also typical for this pattern of life and ministry is a notable split
between head and heart. A person in this condition may be well educated
in theology and quite eloquent in teaching correct doctrine. His or her
preaching and counseling, however, is likely to be without much power to
touch the hearts of others. What is missing in such a life is a deeply
lived love relationship to the One about whom this person speaks. ” (Hands
& Fehr, 54-55)
As clergy
we get lots of strokes for being public pray-ers. We don’t get the
same level of external reward for nurturing the private dimension of our
spiritual life. Managing our time in a way that assures regular personal
nurture of our relationship with the Holy One, the very source of our life
and ministry, often means taking ongoing initiatives in negotiating agreements
with the community of faith that we work for and also with our intimate
circle of relationships so we can get the practices and resources that
we need: such as regular daily time for private prayer and meditation,
monthly meetings with a spiritual companion or group, and periodic personal
retreats and sabbath days. Having a spiritual companion relationship
that focuses on valuing the quality of your personal spiritual life
will obviously give you more support as you negotiate time off from others
in support of your intimacy with God. Also, If you are hitting
a spiritual impasse in your life, or a liminal time, you will want to know
how that can affect the way you pray and a good guide can help you discover
what prayer is now yours.
Who
Pastors the Pastor?
Another
important spiritual issue for clergy, which rises to the forefront in times
of major life transition or situational crisis, is the question of who
is your pastor? (An allied question is who is the pastor for your
immediate family and loved ones?) Often clergy get isolated off from
appropriate and effective pastoral care unless they have a spiritual director
or some other person that they have no other responsibility to other than
receiving spiritual and pastoral care and guidance. Typically bishops
and others in the church hierarchy, although they may wish to provide a
pastoral presence, can not be primary pastoral care-givers to clergy because
of the tensions inherent in dual relationships. Sometimes clergy
in multiple staff relationships hope to receive primary pastoral care and
spiritual guidance from the rector. Again, this is tricky due to
the multiple roles and supervisory responsibility that is inherent in the
relationship. Another source of ongoing pastoral care might be a
peer clergy support group–if the clergy in the group can establish enough
trust for each other to “take off their collars” and the group is willing
to challenge a member’s destructive behavior when that is needed.
In a clergy
group I was in for eleven years I saw two men approach retirement.
One used the group effectively in processing his experiences of letting
go of his authority as rector, celebrating the development of his parish
over the years, and redirecting his energy into future vocational interests
in retirement. Another rector for at least five or six years
prior to his retirement showed a strong resistance to change, challenges,
and the opportunity for growth. He would use the group to complain
about how dead the parish was, but was unable to accept any responsibility
for its deadness. He would consider that maybe he had been mismatched
with that parish, but would not do anything about getting out prior to
retirement. He was in the parish sixteen years and both he and the
parish were decimated by the time he retired. As I look back on our
group interactions I wonder how firm we were in challenging him. There
was a tension within the group as to how much we were to offer comfort
and to what degree are we willing to accept confrontation. We also
had several facilitators over the time that I was a member of the group
that reflected some of our ambivalence. I name this with you to give
you a “heads up” on a dynamic within a system aiming to give effective
pastoral care to clergy.
I received
some correspondence from lay members of churches wanting to explore the
question of what is an appropriate level of self-disclosure of spiritual
struggles by clergy to their parishioners. This also surfaced as
an issue in a conversation I had with a priest. The concern is whether
the clergy person is seeking primary pastoral care from the congregation,
which is reversing a role expectation, or whether the priest or deacon
is using the story of their spiritual struggle or crisis as an example
of trying to live a faithful Christian life and seeking resources for growth
in the midst of a difficult time, which supports members of the congregation
in their own times of pain. Lay people wrote that they would welcome
the kind of self-disclosure that would help members of the parish face
their own spiritual problems, but they are not inviting becoming the primary
pastors for their pastors.
“Managing
the Reverence”
Warner
White, a retired priest who has done consulting work with congregations,
has given focus to what he has called “managing the reverence.” As
clergy we are all symbol-people of the sacred and are often the unconscious
focus of the longings and fears that the people we serve have for God.
We are addressed as “the reverend.” Sometimes we are called “Father”
or “Mother.” Particularly priests and bishops are given the responsibility
and power of presiding over the sacred rituals of the community–rituals
that determine what is made holy and what is forgiven. We are
entrusted with the authority to speak on behalf of the Church and to give
voice and direction to the deep spiritual longings of the community.
White suggests that in a healthy relationship with a faith community the
bonding process goes through three stages–adoration, disappointment, and
respect (Action Information, Vol. XII, No. I). The time
of adoration is a time when the clergy person is viewed in divine terms–larger
than life. White writes, “I heard a priest once describe how he was
greeted in his new parish as ‘the messiah,’ ‘the one who was going to set
all things right.’ ‘And the trouble was,’ the priest added, ‘I believed
it! I thought I really was going to do all those things.’ [The priest]
went on to describe his own disillusionment with himself, as well as the
disillusionment of his parish when they discovered the he couldn’t do everything
they had hoped for.” In this time of disappointment, White continues, “We
and our parishioners become painfully aware of our mere humanity. We and
they are faced with the necessity of accepting a merely human rector, instead
of a messiah. If that task is successfully completed, and both priest
and parish move on to the stage of respect, in which the priest respects
himself or herself, and in which the parish respects the priest in that
priest’s humanity, a healthy bond of regard is established. However
. . . [we] still are walking symbols of God’s care and love for his people.”
I think
that there are some vital practices that can be helpful in this issue of
“managing the reverence.” Reflecting periodically with another
person or group can help identify and understand the projections of the
holy that are made onto us, and that we might make onto ourselves, and
ground us in our humanity and real limitations and gifts. Such reflection
can also help us appreciate that God’s grace is at work in our being symbol-people,
recognized bearers of the sign of God’s presence and action in and through
the Church, and particularly in the sacramental work and preaching that
we are called to provide. Periodically exploring how we mirror back to
others the gift of God’s grace that makes the whole people of God holy,
the whole people of God the incarnation of the sacred presence–Christ’s
body–rather than mistaking the projection of the holy onto us as something
that is especially ours, or how we tend to keep that power to ourselves
can be fruitful, although perhaps painful at times.
Other
very practical considerations might include being attentive to regularizing
parish feedback systems, establishing letters of agreement that outline
parish leadership responsibilities with annual reviews and re-negotiations,
and especially holding a mutual review of the pastoral-parish relationship
and the stewardship of the parish’s ministries in light of its mission
every few years with an outside consultant helping you and the parish through
that process.
Communal
Nature of Discernment
In the
interaction between clergy and parish lay leadership another issue that
is present to some extent in many churches is that of how we identify the
particular gifts, ministries, mission, and vision that is emerging in that
congregation. The developing sense of a baptismal ecclesiology that envisions
all members of the church as called to be ministers of Christ through their
baptism has moved many congregations and their lay and ordained leadership
into a period of liminality. While the implications of this emerging
way of seeing the church stimulates the minds and hearts of many, it is
nevertheless set against an older and very well established form of understanding
that “the ministers” are the ordained and they are the ones who do the
sacred work and are solely responsible for the spiritual matters of the
church. Consequently, there are tensions in many congregations around
governance and spiritual authority. A gift in this is that
some places are ready to do more focused reflection on what might constitute
a spirituality of parish leadership that recognizes the authority of the
ordained ministers while also welcoming a wider circle of lay members into
the process of engaging in the ongoing discernment of the call of God in
the mission, ongoing life, and ministries of the church.
Reverencing
the Loves–Living into Shalom
I want
to leave you with two final images that speak to me of the movement into
God’s vision of relationships. One comes from the Eastern church’s
language of the relationship between the divine persons of the Holy Trinity
as pericoresis, which I understand to mean a dance-like movement.
There is such loving regard and unity between the divine community of persons
that it is like a never-ending joyous dance that spills out and invites
in all of creation. Could it be that respecting–no let’s now use
the stronger sacred word, reverencing–the loves that God gives us, of self,
of others, and of God’s own self, is to join in and take our rightful place
in the eternal dance of God?
The second
image is of a hope for shalom that Isaiah 60 poetically paints of the ingathering
of the dispersed people of Israel and the unity of the nations through
the God who is at the center of the city of Zion. We know selections
from it as Canticle 11, Surge Illuminare, The Third Song of Isaiah
in the Book of Common Prayer. It begins, “Arise, shine, for
your light has come, and the glory of the Lord has dawned upon you.”
The vision is one of a well fortified city that is completely secure in
the presence of the Holy One who lives in its center and so it can leave
its gates always open to receive the gifts of the nations led by their
kings. People can freely come and go in peace. It continues,
“I will appoint Peace (Shalom) as your overseer and Righteousness as your
taskmaster. Violence will no more be heard in your land, ruin or destruction
within your borders. You will call your walls, Salvation, and all
your portals, Praise.” May we continue discovering our holy
dance partners, and live in well-boundaried security with God as our center
and our true shalom.
Addenda: Additional Clergy Spiritual Issues
Besides
the issues mentioned in the presentation to the clergy of the Diocese of
Southwest Florida, I would like to make note of some other comments I have
received.
Language
for the Holy One
A Quaker
of the un-programmed tradition wrote,
“I think what would be useful
is to be flexible in the use of other words for
‘God’ and to encourage self-exploration
of what these traditional terms mean today.” She was not arguing
for discarding traditional religious language, but that the meaning of
such terms needs to be placed in a current context along with other possibilities,
which might also strengthen or reaffirm traditional metaphorical expressions.
Be
a Scholar-Preacher
The Episcopal
priest-pastoral psychotherapist quoted earlier in the presentation also
had some challenging observations about preaching disciplines for clergy:
“[Too]
few clergy continue to really study. By the time they get around to write
sermons, they substitute a ‘psychologically oriented’ message for a
‘theologically oriented’ message.
You see, psychology is nearer, it's everywhere. A theologically oriented
message requires time in the study, exegesis, biblical study, etc. A ‘pop-psy’
sermon just takes one good idea and lots of personal examples. But the
‘gospel’ gets short-shrift. I can't tell you how many sermons I hear that
I wish I never heard. I can do the ‘psy’ better. Give me the gospel, thoughtfully,
not doctrine, but careful exposition of the text. . .Study and preaching.
I think better time management and personal discipline would help. A clearer
identity would be good too. Stop being the pop-psychologist, and
be the scholar-preacher!”
He echoes
the rector who was worried about preaching “another gospel” to his well-to-do
congregation in that both the culture of privilege and the cultural milieu
of pop-psychology are in tension with a sharp, challenging application
of the Christian gospel.
Openness
to Compassion and Authentic Inspiration
A Jewish
woman had attended a seminary commencement service where Episcopal Bishop
Chilton Knudsen was the speaker. She wrote,
“All I
remember is that she talked about the simplicity of tissues and a cup of
coffee being the best tools sometimes in offering support and comfort while
listening. And I think she said something about she didn't always
know what to say but that somehow from the deepest part of her the right
words came about, G-d inspired words at the appropriate moment, sharing
herself, being authentic in the moment as opposed to ‘knowing all the answers’.”
More
on Self-Care
A married
Roman Catholic woman who serves as a Pastoral Associate for a parish expressed
further concern for clergy:
“Having
worked pretty closely with a couple of clergy, I see a couple of issues.
In my opinion, it is easier for them to take care of others than to take
care of themselves. Obviously, I know emergencies occur, but, for
the most part, I find they tend to not take appropriate care of themselves
in areas of: nutrition, time for themselves, decent exercise, time
for friends.
Another
issue is for them to fit in prayer. It's tough. If I don't
get up to pray at 5:30 AM, prayer is a moot point for me as well with family,
kids, the parish, professional commitments. But, I have seen a couple
of pastors give up their prayer time...weeks on end....to 'do' something
they perceive as important. I have seen them blow off retreats years
in a row since their calendars are too busy. Are they doing 'good
things, necessary things,' YES!!! But....”
Tension of the Good Responsibilities
This tough issue of being stretched on multiple fronts by responsibilities
to others is named by two other respondents. A clergy woman wrote:
“Right now the top of my list of ‘spiritual issues’ is keeping centered
and focused on the mission of the church and my ministry in that mission.
The things that pull me away are not BAD things -- they are needed and
valuable alternatives -- but they do pull me away.
Some are
part of the job of pastor: administrative tasks (I have felt like
the building superintendent this week), "housekeeping" tasks, keeping the
"social infrastructure" in-good-working-order tasks. YOU know that
list.
Some are
part of my personal life: the struggles and strains of family
relations, the social infrastructure
of my own life, the physical infrastructure of my home, the need for play
and restoration.
And some
are part of community life.
Anyhow
-- I think I have gained some experience and insight that help me turn
away things that are not important, but choosing among those that are all
important (sermon or pastoral visit??) is wearing.
I do feel
I am doing better at this balancing act than I was a few years ago, and
I'd be glad to share what the components of that improvement are. But it
remains the central issue for me, spiritually. How to keep responding
faithfully to my call to ministry in the face of more legitimate demands
and needs that I can ever meet ....”
A man
responded to the previous note:
“I too
have felt all those "tugs" that [she] named. Issues centered around
all those promises made in God's presence, relying upon the Grace of God
to fulfill. Vows to Spouse, Children, Local Church, Denominations,
and to God's self. It seems that our spiritual task is to handle
all those vows in the context of our "Ultimate Vow" to what I think Tillich
named our "Ultimate Concern" - God. That for me is THE spiritual
issue. The way we respond changes as our relationship with God matures.
I recently
read a survey on the amount of time Pastors spent each day in
prayer. Categories were;
more than 1 hour, 1 hour, 30 minutes, 15 minutes, less than 15 minutes.
I don't remember the actual breakdown but I do remember recoiling at the
thought of judging our prayer life (and by extension) our spiritual life,
by the amount of time spent on the activity. The jest of the article was
that Pastor's should spend more time praying. But I have felt the uneasiness
of handling prayer time as just another item to be checked off your daily
to-do list.
The issue
is much more complex than time. It has to do with being. And
that is my struggle.”
Playing
God
In the
presentation we looked at the issue of being symbol-people. A woman
Episcopal priest gave this stark narrative of her own struggle:
“I think the major spiritual
issue for clergy is 'playing God', or actually believing it. No one would,
of course admit that but..... that is how it works out. In
my own life that shows up in getting upset, angry, discouraged when things
don't work the way I thought or planned. I could talk about
the entire experience of the dissolution of the pastoral relationship [that
she experienced many years ago] under that heading. It also involves accepting
the culture's values of success and basing ones worth on them.
One bit
of council given during the sacrament of reconciliation. . .early in my
ordained ministry has continually called me back to reality.
It was something like this, ‘[When] we are ordained priests, we often think
of the great things we are going to accomplish for others and how they
will be changed. Remember, always that this is your vocation,
which means that you are going to be the one changed and drawn into deeper
relationship with the crucified God through the persons God gives you to
serve.’ That has stood me in good stead, and the journey continues.”