The Contemplative Pastor (1)

In my job description as pastor, I’m expected to solve problems. Wherever two or three are gathered together, problems develop. Egos are bruised, procedures get snarled, arrangements become confused, plans go awry. Temperaments dash. 

There are logistic problems, marriage problems, work problems, child problems, committee problems, financial problems, emotional problems. Someone has to interpret, explain, read the lines, read between the lines, read the small prints. That someone is the pastor, of course because he knows that people are emotional beings. He also suppose to work out plans, develop better procedures, organize, and administer. Most pastors like to do this. It is satisfying to help make the rough places smooth.

The difficulty is that problems arrive in such a constant flow that problem solving becomes full-time work. Because it is useful and the pastor ordinarily does it well, we fail to see that the pastoral vocation has been subverted. Gabriel Marcel wrote that life is not so much a problem to be solved as a mystery to be explored. That is certainly the biblical stance: life is not something we manage to hammer together and keep in repair by our pastoral wits; it is an unfathomable gift. We are immersed in mysteries: incredible love, confounding evil, the creation, the cross, grace, God.

The secularized mind is terrorized by mysteries. Thus it makes lists, labels people, assigns roles, and solves problems. But a solved life is a reduced life. These tightly buttoned-up people never take great faith risks or make convincing love talk. They deny or ignore the mysteries and diminish human existence to what can be managed, controlled, and fixed.

We live in a cult of experts who explain and solve. The vast technological apparatus around us gives the impression that there is a tool for everything if we can only afford it. Pastors cast in the role of spiritual technologists are hard put to keep that role from absorbing everything else since they are so many things that need to be and can be fixed.

But there are things, wrote Marianne Moore, that are important beyond all this fiddle. The old-time guide of souls asserts the priority of the "beyond" over "this fiddle." Who is available for this work other than pastors? They supposed to be super-qualified and under-paid, ready to embrace this infinite task of maxi/mini/stry.

If pastors become accomplices in treating every child as a problem to be figured out, every spouse as a problem to be dealt with, every clash of wills in Bible Class or committee as a problem to be adjudicated, we abdicate our most important work, which is directing worship in the traffic, discovering the presence of the cross in the paradoxes and chaos between Sabbaths, calling attention to the "splendor in the ordinary". 

And, most of all, teaching a life of prayer to our friends and companions in the pilgrimage.

(thank you Mr. Peterson)

The Blind Elephant of Relativism

Social media addicts are more apt to believe that no religion is the truth. This feeling is often illustrated by the favorite parable of college professors: the parable of the six blind men and the elephant.

This is where each blind man feels a different part of the elephant and therefore reaches a different conclusion about the object in front of him.

·       One grabs the tusk and says, “This is a spear.”

·       Another feels the trunk and says, “This is a snake.”

·       The one hugging the leg claims, “This is a tree.”

·       The blind man holding the tail thinks, “I have a rope.”

·       The one feeling the ear believes, “This is a fan.”

·       And the one leaning on the elephant’s side is certain, “This is a wall.”

These blind men are said to represent world religions because they each come to a different conclusion about what they are sensing. Like each blind man, we are told, no one religion has the truth. No one religion has the complete box top. Religions are simply different paths up the same mountain.

This, of course, greatly appeals to the minds used to cute but shallow Instagram slogan. In post-Pandemic America, truth in religion is considered an oxymoron. There is no truth in religion, we are told. It’s all a matter of taste or opinion. You like chocolate, I like vanilla. You like Christianity, I like Islam. If Buddhism works for you, then it’s true for you. Besides, you ought not judge me for my beliefs. Just wear your face mask - a psychological symbol of egalitarianism beyond the necessary physical protection.

The other problem with truth in religion is that some pieces of life seem to defy explanation - they don’t appear to fit any religious box top. These include the existence of evil and the silence of God in the face of that evil. These are especially powerful objections to anyone claiming that an all-powerful (theistic) God exists.

Many skeptics and atheists argue that if one true, powerful God actually exists, then he would intervene to clear up all the confusion. After all, if God is really out there, then why does he seem to hide himself? Why doesn’t he just show up to debunk the false religions and end all the controversy? Why doesn’t he intervene to stop all the evil in the world, including all the religious wars that are such a black mark on his name? And why does he allow bad things to happen to good people? 

These are difficult questions for anyone claiming that their theistic religion is true. (Hart, David Bentley, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashinable Enemies . Yale University Press. p.67) Nevertheless, Christianity is the only major faith built entirely around a single historical claim. It is, however, a claim quite unlike any other ever made, as any perceptive and scrupulous historian must recognize. Certainly it bears no resemblance to the vague fantasies of witless enthusiasts or to the cunning machinations of opportunistic charlatans. 

It is the report of men and women who had suffered the devastating defeat of their beloved master’s death, but who in a very short time were proclaiming an immediate experience of his living presence beyond the tomb, and who were, it seems, willing to suffer privation, imprisonment, torture, and death rather than deny that experience. 

And it is the report of a man, Saul of Tarsus, who had never known Jesus before the crucifixion, and who had once persecuted Jesus’s followers, but who also believed that he had experienced the risen Christ, with such shattering power that he too preferred death to apostasy. 

And it is the report of countless others who have believed that they also—in a quite irreducibly personal way—have known the risen Christ. Add me too here...