I would respond to this post at Street Prophets in their comments section, except that, as a new person there, I'd have to wait 24 hours, and I'm not a member of that "club" anyway, and what I have to say is very personal, which I never do at this blog.
Well, hardly ever. Largely because I don't know who I'm talking to, and aside from a handful of people, I have no idea who is reading this, or why.
And all of that already raises so many issues of ecclesiology and "just what is church?" and "just what is church for?", that it's already distracting me down rabbit trails promising shiny objects for my jackdaw mind, that again I'm finding it hard to focus on what I came here to say.
Still, my response is personal, and I only want to say, initially at least, that change a few root causes that Pastor Dan elucidates in his post (my depression is more of the "Celtic twilight/existential despair" variety, or at least I have diagnosed it so), and what he says, I could as well say; to a frighteningly consistent degree. It must be something about the ministry; a peculiar field that draws introverts much given to study and private thought, and expects them to be extroverts, much given to public speaking and being a best friend to every stranger they meet and every person whose name they know.
A queer beast indeed, in the old and lovely meaning of that word.
I want to say it comes with the territory, somehow, to be a "miserable failure." Perhaps because doubt is not the opposite of faith, certainty is. Perhaps because pastors of congregations, much like Presidents in so many ways (though only another pastor can appreciate that; the laity think it merely vainglorious to make the comparison) are given great responsibility, but even less authority, and yet expected to be men and women of great certainty, to carry away the doubts of all the congregation, and in that way most especially to be their servant.
I sometimes think this is why people like Bush so much, until his certainty shows itself for the limitation it is, until the brittleness of absolute confidence is broken by circumstances that are always beyond our control, and finally prove themselves to be.
What Pastor Dan really portrays for us, however, is the importance, and the painful vulnerability, of humility. I have done what he does; I do what he does now. I had my own plans to set the world on fire, even though I have always assiduously avoided the world's notice, and always been uncomfortable with the world's recognition. I tried and failed at plans A through D, in almost the same ways. And while I told myself even as a pastor that numbers were the last thing that truly mattered to Sunday worship, I follow the numbers of who visits my website as obsessively as I tracked attendance at the services I conducted. I even hoped that, despite my reluctance to even by noticed, I'd win a Koufax award last year, be recognized by my virtual peers even as I retain my lifelong reluctance to join any club which would have me as a member.
And the painfulness of being faithful to God. When he says: "It is as my father says: you give the sermon, and it drifts off into the ether. Did it reach people? Did it affect them? There's no way to know, not for a long time," I remember the strangeness of first preaching, because unlike conversation you are expected to talk, and "they" are not expected to respond. That's the first experience of the "ether." And then, when you do get a response, a positive one, as I did while still in seminary, you start to aim for it, to try to push those buttons again. And when you realize the foolishness of that, and try to return to being faithful to the word again, and the word alone, you feel the awful loneliness of silence and even of abjuration. Tom Rush has a great line for it: "Adam's prize was open eyes/His sentence was to see/Day by day he's worn away/against reality."
The word of God is the harshest kind of reality; and day by day, if we are faithful, we are all worn away against it.
Worn away to be remade, but it is, in Theodore Sturgeon's lovely phrase, "slow sculpture." He was speaking of bonsai trees, slowly twisted into beautiful forms, twisted in ways that would be painful if the trees had any nerves to them. It is painful to be slowly sculpted by God, painful to wonder if, to anyone else, you look at all beautiful, and if you do, is it at all worth it?
Pastor Dan calls this, and says it saves his post from narcissism, "a general condition of progressive faith." Only on this would I correct him, or perhaps just disagree with him: I think it is a general condition of true faith. He says it may be better to fail, than to try to match the power of Falwell and Dobson.
I say it is better to follow the powerlessness of God, the powerlessness which is true power. The humility of the follower of Christ is not the slavish submission criticized by Nietzsche, nor a blind relinguishment of will or intellect, or an impassive state of not-doing. It is precisely the paradox of the Cross; it is exactly the wisdom of God.
It is the coming of the king of heaven, when all's set at six and seven. It is the Creator of the Universe, born unexpectedly as a baby to a poor couple, and laid to sleep his first night among the humblest and gentlest and meekest of animals.
That we might all know what the wielding of power really is.
Go in peace, Pastor Dan. Go with God; for God is surely with you.
P.S. On what Pastor Dan has to say about reclaiming "sanity and decency in America," I have, almost coincidentally (or is this why the Celtic symbol of the Holy Spirit is the wild goose?) some words of Thoms Merton's I plan to offer, on December 10th, the anniversary of Merton's death.
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