Lent Unplugged

I’m forty so I’m old enough to say things like, ‘When I was a boy, [insert simplistic critical anachronism here].’ And I’ve been a Christian for almost three decades, so let me tell you, when I was a spiritual boy, things were simpler. Back then, I meant it when I said, ‘Jesus is my best friend.’

But now it seems more like Jesus lived and died a long time ago, like I can no longer say, as I once did, that he and I ‘hang out.’ I do still believe that he kicked death’s ass; that he is somehow, somewhere alive and well. But – maybe I’m just getting old – Jesus doesn’t seem quite as chummy as he once did.

I saw a cougar last night. My eyes hadn’t quite adjusted, but I saw it, dimly, and I heard it move over the crusted snow, and I felt its presence with the hair on the back of my neck. Maybe Jesus is more like that? Like a mountain lion, out there in the dark, a predator, watching, more aware of me than I am of him, and very unlikely to follow me back inside for a BFF chat. True, there’s always the Holy Spirit, present and faithful, but I’ll curb my urge to be theologically correct for the sake of this point: God often seems just beyond my range of vision, like a suspicious silhouette in the shadows, ready to consume my selfish flesh in a thrashing if only I would yield to the pain and overcome my basic instinct to make a run for it.

It’s Lent. And I should probably know more about what that means, but here’s what little I do: it’s about the prep. Lent is a season of preparation for Good Friday and Easter. That's doubtless a simplistic explanation, but it makes sense to me. Because, really, if the incarnate Son of God willingly died by public execution, then properly acknowledging that event wouldn’t be something I could just stumble into. And same for Easter: if a man has been lynched and killed and was consequently dead but nonetheless is alive again, that too would be something I’d need a little lead-time to celebrate properly.

There’s one more thing I know about Lent: it seems usually to involve some kind of self-imposed dietary restrictions or otherwise uncomfortable penitential asceticism. Normally, I’m happy to dismiss such extremes as vain attempts to impress God. And isn’t that convenient? me-so-friendly with Jesus that I needn’t bother with legalistic rituals? and what’s on the tube tonight? and please pass the chips?

The thought started as a side effect from a recent Twitter hangover: maybe I’d be closer to Jesus if I tweeted less? (God help me, that sounds trite. But look: the Pope got a Twitter account, and now – only a few months later – he’s decided to abdicate. Just a coincidence?)

Now I’m thinking maybe I should take it up a notch. What about skipping the whole internet? Giving-up Facebook would be too easy, like a neighbour who quit broccoli a few years ago. And my erratic blog behavior wouldn’t suffer for the interruption. Dropping Instagram might make some of my more distant followers wonder what's become of me, but I doubt I’ll tumble into the abyss if I don’t stay LinkedIn for a few weeks. I’m pretty sure I can still write a sermon without the googles, and my phone, apparently, works as a telephone and not just a mini-computer so hearing it ring with a call instead of just ding with push notifications is a real possibility. I could set an automatic reply on my email with something hip and not-too-holier-than-thou like, ‘Hey, it’s Lent. And this is crazy. But here’s my number. So call me, maybe?’

What would happen to my spiritual night-vision if I stared at screens a bit less? I might be getting too old for the Buddy Christ but maybe my eyes could still adjust to the Lion of Judah. Granted, a few weeks offline is not likely to be the existential flaying I might need, but it couldn’t hurt.

Or, at least, I don’t think it could hurt. 

It probably won’t hurt. I’m pretty sure it won’t. 

No, of course it won’t. 

This won’t hurt, will it?

Weird

One of the weird things about being a pastor is the way this job requires me to love.

Love is always a strange experience, but that’s not my point. What’s weird is making a living by it. If I want to pay my mortgage and feed my kinds, I have to love people.

Also beside the point is how lovable these people may or may not be. The humans in my life are probably much like the ones in yours; they invite a whole range of interest and affection. But most occupations leave their practitioners to navigate that range at their own pace and inclination. Not so for clergy. Sure, every line of work includes people seemingly designed to expand their co-workers’ capacity for grace, but even the most mood savvy employer stops short of making unconditional love an element of workplace policy. Unless you’re a pastor.

Although I would normally resist the designation ‘professional’ for the ministry, l’ll use it here for the sake of putting this bluntly: To be a pastor is to be a professional lover.

That sounds weird because it is.

A profession with similar terms comes to mind, the parallels with which I’ll not explore too deeply, but suffice it to say that a prostitute is unlikely to be deemed less professional if she doesn’t love her clients. I’d guess the opposite is the case. She, or he, is paid to pretend, and the pretense is, no pun intended, explicit.

For the pastor, by contrast, play-acting is anathema. And rightly so. We’re supposed to be genuine. But there’s the rub. How can a person freely be something if they’re already supposed to be it? It’s the existential dilemma in vocational form.

I’m sure I’m not the first pastor to wrestle with this. All my ilk probably wonder at times if  the people we attend are sometimes suspicious: Is my pastor here because he cares, or because he is just doing his job? Good question. Sometimes I don’t even know. But I do know it’s hard to work with all that second-guessing and angst in the air. Therapists have it easy in this respect. Their wares are the one great modern alternative to pastoral attention yet they avoid our awkward bind because the terms on their couch are clear: they care when they’re paid to. Sure, the clarity of the arrangement might make it a tad chilly at first, but at least it would mitigate weirdness in the long run.

I am now approaching what on statistical analysis would be a long run in my current church. The average tenure of a pastor is apparently somewhere in the range of four years, and I’m at nearly double that. It seems odd to me that a type of work supposedly based on relationships could finish its course so quickly, but maybe that’s a symptom of exactly the malaise in question.

An awareness of the typical brevity of a pastor’s term was likely in play during a recent conversation I had with a financial advisor. The punch-line in his advice included the unsurprising suggestion that maybe I should consider a job somewhere else for the sake of a lower cost of living and a higher income. Listening to my own response to his idea was a case of hearing aloud a belief I wasn’t formerly conscious of holding: if my church didn’t pay me I’d drive a school bus or deliver firewood to stay in this town. The fact that my hypothetical solution wouldn’t be one at all is maybe a nod at why I found myself talking to a financial advisor in the first place, but that now obvious connection was lost on me at the time because I was stunned by a flash of catharsis: Of course I could go somewhere else, but I don’t want to.

On some days I’m not entirely sure I want to be a pastor. But on no days do I want to be one somewhere else. Why is that? Okay, true, the fishing is good here. And yes, I like the scenery. But a recent vacation supplied ample evidence there is a shortage of neither anglable water nor spectacular landscape elsewhere in this country. On the contrary, beyond this valley are fish and mountains as near the Platonic Forms of each as I could possibly imagine. I’d be happy to elaborate. But not now, this anecdote has a point.

My impromptu burst of pioneering resilience led me to a shocking realization: It seems my roots here are deeper than a thinly baptized hedonism. Strange, but I want to stay for reasons other than Blackcomb powder or Birkenhead trout.

And what might those reasons be?

Before I get to those, there’s another peculiar thing about the pastorate: its frequent and insidious deterioration into sentimentalism. I resist this to a fault – often cringing when a group-hug or a round of Kum-Bah-Yah might actually be appropriate – so rest assured, I don’t say this lightly: Could it be that I want to stay here because I love this place, and maybe even the people in it?

With no slight against the people in question, that would be weird. And it would only compound the original weirdness of getting paid for it.

It seems to me there is no way around it: love, to be genuine, must be free, and ‘free’ in both senses of the word. If I am only interested in someone’s problems because a perceived lack of concern on my part would mean a real lack of food on my table, then I am bound in the pretense by the price of food and my ersatz concern is the consequence of that bind. On the other hand, if I am free to earn my keep elsewise, and indeed elsewhere, but I choose instead to be a pastor, and to be one here, then maybe I am making those choices not because I am supposed to, but simply because I actually like, and maybe even love, the people here.

Alas, much hangs on those ‘maybes.’ But remove them – over-tighten the terms or reduce them to a professionally explicit arrangement – and the whole thing slips backward into a cave where whatever might have been love ends up a shadowy version of its absent ideal. Squeeze the mystery too tightly and I might finally get a grip on it, but it’ll be a lifeless lump, unrecognizable as the may-be miracle it could have been.

So yah, this is weird. But maybe that’s just the way love is. And, if I am going to be any good at this gig, maybe that’s just the way this pastor will have to be too. 

Muster

It’s a tricky thing, trusting other people. Movies sometimes say hardened cowboys can make it well enough without it. But those cowboys don’t really exist. Or if they do, they don’t in a way that seems much good after the credits roll. Regular cowboys and the rest of us have to figure it out somehow. If we want to get anywhere in this world then trusting people is part of the deal. It’s the sinews and tendons of moving ourselves around. That guy who broke his leg in Peru, he got himself down the mountain with some very damaged sinews and tendons, although I understand it was painful for him and unpleasant. But what’s a little pain and unpleasantness to a cowboy? Aren’t we all buckaroos in freefall some of the time? Seems so. But of course it’s not the falling we mind. It’s the thud at the bottom and hauling our busted bones back to camp to stare into the fire. The smoke stings the eyes and a little voice inside says maybe just skip it next time. Ride into the sunset and sleep under the stars and eat roasted antelope and only go to town for salt and bags of flour and otherwise don’t bother. It’s a snake’s whisper, that. Calm and smooth and true enough. But it’ll spook a horse and bite from a bedroll sooner than do much good. Travel far enough with that voice and soon we have one ear to it so much of the time that our look at the world goes squinty from straining for it. Then everyone starts to look suspect. Are these the kind of folk who set me on this trail in the first place? Hard to tell, the voice would say. Best not to ride along too quickly. Let’s just wait and see. But waiting and seeing can drag on a long time. And time doesn’t care much about the bruises we get from all that dragging. Pretty soon we aren’t just being cautious, we’ve plain forgotten how to trust in the first place. Sure, forgetting like that would take some effort. My guess is there’d be calluses instead of bruises by the time we really finished the job. And by then we’d likely figure there wasn’t much of life left anyway. Those sinews and tendons would be shrunk and stiff so why bother trying to muster up trust again? Damn snake says maybe the hardness would be a relief. It’s a tricky thing.

Sabbatawhat?

Recently I’ve been reading Eugene Peterson’s memoir, The Pastor, and have been down-right shocked by how encouraging it is. There are so many alternative voices and pressures out there; so many odd and competing ideas about what a pastor should be. But here is a guy who gets it. So I was especially glad to find and finally steal a brief article by him on the mysterious little thing we call ‘sabbatical.’ Once again, he gets it.

SABBATICAL IS NOT STUDY LEAVE

Eugene H. Peterson

The sabbatical is an entrenched tradition in academia. University professors, committed to the life of the mind, get them regularly every seventh year. And well they should. This life of the mind, teaching and thinking, is strenuous. The mind tires, grows stagnant, begins to repeat itself. The annual invasion of students, their curious and questioning minds strangely mingled with ignorance and sloth, constitutes a formidable challenge to a professor.

Academia exists to protect and develop knowledge, but knowledge is not a dead thing in a book. It's a living dialectic; it requires fully alive professors to maintain it. If knowledge disintegrates into cliché‚ or soddens into data, intelligence is betrayed and the mind dulled. And so the schools provide for regular renewal of the professorial brain cells by providing sabbaticals.

But pastors, committed to the life of the spirit, a life at least as strenuous, if not more so, than the life of the mind, rarely get sabbaticals. I wonder why, for the spirit also tires, grows stagnant, begins to repeat itself. The weekly assembly of Christians, their hungry-and-thirsty-after-righteousness lives strangely mingled with sin and sloth, constitutes a formidable challenge to the pastor. The sanctuary exists to protect and develop holiness, but holiness is not a packaged attitude that can be sold to Sunday god-shoppers. It is life at risk before God, dangerously and awesomely at risk, and it needs fully alive pastors to represent it. If the life of faith is reduced to a church program or into jargon, the gospel is betrayed and the spirit dulled. Yet churches make little provision for renewal of spirit in those they set as overseers for the renewal of their spirits.

The omission impoverishes the church's spiritual vitality. Pastors enter their ordained work centered in prayer and alive to grace; after ten, twelve, thirteen years they find they simply don't have the energy for a life of prayer, of spirit. One after another and year after year, they abandon the terms of their ordination and settle for running churches.

A curious irony has occurred in the midst of this. Churches have, of late, been giving pastors study leave. In my denomination it is required-two weeks each year. But why "study"? That, surely, is not my central work. I stand before a congregation each week not as a lecturer in dogmatics but to lead them in prayer, bring them the sacraments, and guide them in listening to God. Intelligence, and the cultivation of intelligence by study, is not to be slighted in this work, but it is the life of spirit that is my forte. It is the prayer, contemplation, and proclamation to which I am guardian. The sanctuary, not the classroom, is my demesne. 

I think I know what happened. Several centuries ago, the university took the practice of the sabbatical from the church and then altered it to suit its purposes. Recently, the church glanced over at the university and noticed this wonderful practice and thought a sabbatical might be a good idea for pastors, too. And so we started taking it back. But instead of taking back what they took from us, a time for renewal of spirit, we are taking back what they turned it into – a renewal of mind. The all-but-universal practice is for pastors to go to universities and seminaries for these bastard sabbaticals and take academic courses. They return to their congregations with starched and in-fashion ideas, but their spirits as baggy as ever. 

If we are going to take sabbaticals, let them be real sabbaticals: a willed passivity in order to be restored to alert receptivity to spirit – prayer, silence, solitude, worship. It is outrageous that we acquiesce to the world's definition of our word and let our unique, biblical sabbatical be put to the use of career advancement, psychological adjustment, and intellectual polish – with all the prayer and contemplation laundered out. The original intent of sabbath is a time to be silent and listen to God, not attend lectures; a time to be in solitude and be with God, not "interact" with fatigued peers. If help is to be given to the pastor in midcourse, it is not going to come by infusion of intellect but by renewal of spirit.

Leadership Journal  Winter 1988 pp.74-5.

http://www.christianitytoday.com/le/1988/winter/88l1074.html?start=1

A voice of one calling

What preachers are supposed to do for their congregations, Wendell Berry does for me. His New Collected Poems arrived today and after my habitual scan of the covers, their insides and several back pages, I turned to the Table of Contents and then directly to page 173. I copy this from there to here as a testament of the reminder it is for me of the way certain forces aim to reduce life, and the way we might live instead.

MANIFESTO: THE MAD FARMER LIBERATION FRONT

by Wendell Berry

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,

vacation with pay. Want more

of everything ready-made. Be afraid

to know your neighbors and to die.

And you will have a window in your head.

Not even your future will be a mystery

any more. Your mind will be punched in a card

and shut away in a little drawer.

When they want you to buy something

they will call you. When they want you

to die for profit they will let you know.

So, friends, everyday do something

that won’t compute. Love the Lord.

Love the world. Work for nothing.

Take all that you have and be poor.

Love somebody who does not deserve it.

Denounce the government and embrace

the flag. Hope to live in that free

republic for which it stands.

Give your approval to all you cannot

understand. Praise ignorance, for what man

has not encountered he has not destroyed.

Ask the questions that have no answers.

Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.

Say that your main crop is the forest

that you did not plant,

that you will not live to harvest.

Say that the leaves are harvested

when they have rotted in the mold.

Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.

Put your faith in the two inches of humus

that will build under the trees

every thousand years.

Listen to carrion – put your ear

close, and hear the faint chattering

of the songs that are to come.

Expect the end of the world. Laugh.

Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful

though you have considered all the facts.

So long as women do not go cheap

for power, please women more than men.

Ask yourself: Will this satisfy

a woman satisfied to bear a child?

Will this disturb the sleep

of a woman near to giving birth?

Go with your love to the fields.

Lie easy in the shade. Rest your head

in her lap. Swear allegiance

to what is nighest your thoughts.

As soon as the generals and the politicos

can predict the motions of you mind,

lose it. Leave it as a sign

to mark the false trail. Be like a fox

who makes more tracks than necessary,

some in the wrong direction.

Practice resurrection.

Unsolicited advice from somewhere in the middle

Last week I read about Jesus and the woman caught in adultery (John 8.1-11). And as the Bible often does, it surprised me again with something new.

Jesus knew his Hebrew Bible, he knew it said the situation warranted a death penalty. He also knew his religious opponents wanted to catch him fudging it so they could prosecute him accordingly.

The irony is scalding. Here’s a bunch of zealous Bible-readers in a white-knuckle frenzy against the very one their Bibles are about. How does this happen? How does something meant to lead people to Jesus become the very thing used to thwart him?

“Okay, stone her,” Jesus said. “But let the ones who’ve never sinned throw first.”

Sheer brilliance. On my good days I can honestly say I love Jesus but even on the less than good ones I can always say I admire him. That was a tight spot. And I imagine it might’ve felt like a bit of a gamble, given the company he was in. Who could be sure there wasn’t at least one within that self-righteous group who imagined himself sinless?

The phrase that caught me last week was this: the older ones first. The gamble worked, thank God, the mob dispersed. And it was the older ones who left first.

I’m not old yet. The stats tell me I’m likely somewhere in the middle. It’s a strange place to be, this midway. It means I can easily remember what it was like to be young, and I can almost hear what it will be like to be old. From this place I know that unsolicited advice is very unlikely to find its mark. But I’m not crusty yet. There’s still enough youth in my veins to give this a shot.

So here goes: Allow yourself space to be uncomfortable because there is more freedom in questions than answers. Truth is slippery when we try to grip it, like water through the fingers, but it comes free and undeserved when we’re tired and thirsty, like beer from a friend. In the church we call this ‘grace,’ but it’s true everywhere: Life gets smaller when we hold on tight and bigger when we lift our heads and listen.

As far as I can tell, faith is like that. It’s more like listening than gripping, more like accepting a gift than crunching data.

The temptation for you and I at this point is to think we already know this. We nod at quaint thoughts about a relationship with God as if we’ve already checked that item on our list. “Next, please.” But the checklist is fooling us. The most important truths neither fit in boxes nor line up beside them waiting for checkmarks. The big truths take a whole life to learn, over and over again.

The one on my mind at the moment is this: We don’t have faith in Jesus because the Bible has informed us about the mysteries of God, of which he is one. We have faith in Jesus because God enables us to trust him like a man trusts his wife or a close friend.

That sounds a bit weird. Or it should anyway. After all, we’ve never met Jesus in the flesh. But this is where the Bible comes in. With God’s help we can know Jesus through this book and through others who’ve believed it. And that’s the spot we’re in. Like a mob of religious Bible-believers surrounding the one it’s all about.

I used to think that faith in God meant knowing a lot of things about him, that my faith would grow by keeping hold of what I already knew and carefully adding more and more knowledge until one day I had all the answers. As a young man I would’ve been one of the last to finally drop his stone.

So here’s a request from a guy somewhere in the middle: Please don’t make the same mistake. It’s better to be dirt-level and sobbing at the feet of Jesus than disappointed by his grace and walking away.

Top Ten signs you should give up social networking for Lent. (Revised re-post)

1. You think news feed is a legitimate source of news and you spend more time reading it than actually feeding yourself.

2. You used to workout, now you just de-tag unflattering pictures of yourself.

   

3. You think send friend request is a great way to meet new people.

4. You update your status more often than you empty your bowel and you think your cell-phone is ‘smart’ because it allows you to do both at once. 

[Number five has been removed at the request of readers to allow a moment to check facebook. This list will resume at number six momentarily]

6. You think following Jesus by faith means following him on an unverified Twitter account.

7. You have a Google+ account.

8. Your attention span is exactly 140 characters long.

9. This list has made you decide to unfriend me.

10. You think it’s rude when someone calls you on your cell phone.