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)