Photo courtesy of The Frederick Buechner Center
Frederick Buechner at 90: The Road Goes On
Alban Weekly from Duke Divinity School in Durham, North Carolina, United States - PRACTICAL WISDOM FOR LEADING CONGREGATIONS: Frederick Buechner at 90: The Road Goes On for Monday, 25 July 2016
Frederick Buechner is a theologian, ordained Presbyterian minister and writer. He's also an unlikely social media sensation, with more than 1.5 million followers.
On July 11, 2016, he turned 90, an occasion marked by the publication of Buechner 101: Essays and Sermons by Frederick Buechner.
Edited by writer Anne Lamott, the volume features a selection of Buechner's essays and sermons, as well as excerpts from his memoirs and novels. It also offers tributes by others, including Barbara Brown Taylor and Brian McLaren.
In the introduction, Lamott says that Buechner "writes of the truth, both of the Gospel, and of his own damaged family, and of our truth, sight unseen, ... in a way that is so precise, revelatory and profound, that it makes me experience an awakening to spiritual reality all over again, each time."
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Faith & Leadership
VOCATION
Frederick Buechner at 90: The road goes onMinistry is “a business that breaks the heart for the sake of the heart,” the theologian said in a commencement address. The address is reprinted in a new book marking Buechner’s 90th birthday.
Frederick Buechner is a theologian, ordained Presbyterian minister and writer. He’s also an unlikely social media sensation, with more than 1.5 million followers.
On July 11, 2016, he turned 90, an occasion marked by the publication of “Buechner 101: Essays and Sermons by Frederick Buechner.”(link is external)
Edited by writer Anne Lamott, the volume features a selection of Buechner’s essays and sermons, as well as excerpts from his memoirs and novels. It also offers tributes by others, including Barbara Brown Taylor and Brian McLaren.
In the introduction, Lamott says that Buechner “writes of the truth, both of the Gospel, and of his own damaged family, and of our truth, sight unseen, … in a way that is so precise, revelatory and profound, that it makes me experience an awakening to spiritual reality all over again, each time.”
The following excerpt is Buechner’s commencement address at the Union Theological Seminary in Richmond, Virginia, originally published in “A Room Called Remember.”
JOHN 14:6Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.”Here I am, and there you are. That is the crux of it. Here I am, the stranger in your midst. There you are, who are the midst, who are the graduating class, who are friends and classmates and sweethearts of each other, who have brought your friends and families with you and yet who are -- all of you, even those of you who have known each other for years and whose hearts are sweetest -- as much strangers to each other in many ways as I am a stranger to you all. Because how can we be other than strangers when at those rare moments of our lives when we stop hiding from each other and try instead passionately and profoundly to make ourselves known to each other, we find this is precisely what we cannot do?
As ministers, preachers, prophets, pastors, teachers, administrators and who knows what-all else of churches, you will be leaving this lovely place for places as lovely or lovelier yet or not lovely at all where you will take your turn at doing essentially what I am here to do now, which is one way or another to be, however inadequately, a servant of Christ.
And yet in another sense we are none of us strangers. Not even I. Not even you. Because how can we be strangers when, for all these years, we have ridden on the back of this same rogue planet, when we have awakened to the same sun and dreamed the same dreams under the same moon? How can we be strangers when we are all of us in the same interior war and do battle with the same interior enemy, which is most of the time ourselves? How can we be strangers when we laugh and cry at the same things and have the same bad habits and occasionally astonish ourselves and everybody else by performing the same uncharacteristic deeds of disinterested kindness and love?
We are strangers and we are not strangers. The question is: Can anything that really matters humanly pass between us? The question is: Can God in his grace and power speak anything that matters ultimately through the likes of me to the likes of you? And I am saying all these things not just to point up the difficulties of delivering a commencement address like this. Who cares about that? I am saying them because in the place where I am standing now, or places just as improbable, you will be standing soon enough as your turn comes. And much of what this day means is that your turn has come at last.
As ministers, preachers, prophets, pastors, teachers, administrators and who knows what-all else of churches, you will be leaving this lovely place for places as lovely or lovelier yet or not lovely at all where you will take your turn at doing essentially what I am here to do now, which is one way or another to be, however inadequately, a servant of Christ. I wouldn’t have dreamed of packing my bag and driving a thousand miles except for Christ. I wouldn’t have the brass to stand here before you now if the only words I had to speak were the ones I had cooked up for the occasion. I am here, Heaven help me, because I believe that from time to time we are given something of Christ’s word to speak if we can only get it out through the clutter and cleverness of our own speaking. And I believe that in the last analysis, whatever other reasons you have for being here yourselves, Christ is at the bottom of why you are here too. We are all here because of him. This is his day as much as, if not more than, it is ours. If it weren’t for him, we would be somewhere else.
Our business is to be the hands and feet and mouths of one who has no other hands or feet or mouth except our own. It gives you pause. Our business is to work for Christ as surely as men and women in other trades work for presidents of banks or managers of stores or principals of high schools. Whatever salaries you draw, whatever fringe benefits you receive, your recompense will be ultimately from Christ, and a strange and unforeseeable and wondrous recompense I suspect it will be, and with many a string attached to it too. Whatever real success you have will be measured finally in terms of how well you please not anyone else in all this world -- including your presbyteries, your bishops, your congregations -- but only Christ, and I suspect that the successes that please him best are very often the ones that we don’t even notice. Christ is the one who will be hurt, finally, by your failures. If you are to be healed, comforted, sustained during the dark times that will come to you as surely as they have come to everyone else who has ever gone into this strange trade, Christ will be the one to sustain you because there is no one else in all this world with love enough and power enough to do so. It is worth thinking about.
Christ is our employer as surely as the general contractor is the carpenter’s employer, only the chances are that this side of Paradise we will never see his face except mirrored darkly in dreams and shadows, if we’re lucky, and in each other’s faces. He is our general, but the chances are that this side of Paradise we will never hear his voice except in the depth of our own inner silence and in each other’s voices. He is our shepherd, but the chances are we will never feel his touch except as we are touched by the joy and pain and holiness of our own life and each other’s lives. He is our pilot, our guide, our true, fast, final friend and judge, but often when we need him most, he seems farthest away because he will always have gone on ahead, leaving only the faint print of his feet on the path to follow. And the world blows leaves across the path. And branches fall. And darkness falls. We are, all of us, Mary Magdalene, who reached out to him at the end only to embrace the empty air. We are the ones who stopped for a bite to eat that evening at Emmaus and, as soon as they saw who it was that was sitting there at the table with them, found him vanished from their sight. Abraham, Moses, Gideon, Rahab, Sarah are our brothers and sisters because, like them, we all must live in faith, as the great chapter puts it with a staggering honesty that should be a lesson to us all, “not having received what was promised, but having seen it and greeted it from afar,” and only from afar. And yet the country we seek and do not truly find, at least not here, not now, the heavenly country and homeland, is there somewhere as surely as our yearning for it is there; and I think that our yearning for it is itself as much a part of the truth of it as our yearning for love or beauty or peace is a part of those truths. And Christ is there with us on our way as surely as the way itself is there that has brought us to this place. It has brought us. We are here. He is with us -- that is our faith -- but only in unseen ways, as subtle and pervasive as air. As for what it remains for you and me to do, maybe T. S. Eliot says it as poignantly as anybody.
... wait without hope
For hope would be hope of the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be light, and the stillness the dancing.
It’s a queer business that you have chosen or that has chosen you. It’s a business that breaks the heart for the sake of the heart. It’s a hard and chancy business whose risks are as great even as its rewards. Above all else, perhaps, it is a crazy business. It is a foolish business. It is a crazy and foolish business to work for Christ in a world where most people most of the time don’t give a hoot in hell whether you work for him or not. It is crazy and foolish to offer a service that most people most of the time think they need like a hole in the head. As long as there are bones to set and drains to unclog and children to tame and boredom to survive, we need doctors and plumbers and teachers and people who play the musical saw; but when it comes to the business of Christ and his church, how unreal and irrelevant a service that seems even, and at times especially, to the ones who are called to work at it.
“We are fools for Christ’s sake,” Paul says. You can’t put it much more plainly than that. God is foolish too, he says -- “the foolishness of God” -- just as plainly. God is foolish to choose for his holy work in the world the kind of lamebrains and misfits and nitpickers and holier-than-thous and stuffed shirts and odd ducks and egomaniacs and milquetoasts and closet sensualists as are vividly represented here by you and me this spring evening. God is foolish to send us out to speak hope to a world that slogs along heart-deep in the conviction that from here on out things can only get worse. To speak of realities we cannot see when the realities we see all too well are already more than we can handle. To speak of loving our enemies when we have a hard enough time of it just loving our friends.
To be all things to all people when it’s usually all we can do to be anything that matters much to anybody. To proclaim eternal life in a world that is as obsessed with death as a quick browse through TV Guide or the newspapers or the drugstore paperbacks make plain enough. God is foolish to send us out on a journey for which there are no sure maps. Such is the foolishness of God.
And yet. The “and yet” of it is our faith, of course. And yet, Paul says, “the foolishness of God is wiser than men,” which is to say that in some unsearchable way he may even know what he is doing. Praise him.
If I were braver than I am, I would sing you a song at this point. If you were braver than you are, you might even encourage me to. But let me at least say you a song. It is fromThe Lord of the Rings, and Bilbo Baggins sings it. It goes like this.
The road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the road has gone,
And I must follow if I can,
Pursuing it with weary feet,
Until it joins some larger way,
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then?
I cannot say.
“I am the way,” Jesus said. I am the road. And in some foolish fashion, we are all on the road that is his, that is he, or such at least is our hope and prayer. That is why we are here at this turning of the road. There is not a single shoe in this place that does not contain a foot of clay, a foot that drags, a foot that stumbles; but on just such feet we all seek to follow that road through a world where there are many other roads to follow, and hardly a one of them that is not more clearly marked and easier to tramp and toward an end more known, more assured, more realizable. But we have picked this road, or been picked by it. “I am the way,” he said, “the truth and the life.” We have come this far along the way. From time to time, when we have our wits about us, when our hearts are in the right place, when nothing more enticing or immediate shows up to distract us, we have glimpsed that truth. From time to time when the complex and wearisome and seductive business of living doesn’t get in our way, our pulses have quickened and gladdened to the pulse of that life. Who knows what the mysteries of our faith mean? Who knows what the Holy Spirit means? Who knows what the Resurrection means? Who knows what he means when he tells us that whenever two or three are gathered together in his name, he will be with them? But what at the very least they seem to mean is that there winds through all we think of as real life a way of life, a way to life, that is so vastly realer still that we cannot think of him, whose way it is, as anything less than vastly alive.
It’s a business that breaks the heart for the sake of the heart. It’s a hard and chancy business whose risks are as great even as its rewards. Above all else, perhaps, it is a crazy business. It is a foolish business. It is a crazy and foolish business to work for Christ in a world where most people most of the time don’t give a hoot in hell whether you work for him or not.
By grace we are on that way. By grace there come unbidden moments when we feel in our bones what it is like to be on that way. Our clay feet drag us to the bedroom of the garrulous old woman, to the alcoholic who for the tenth time has phoned to threaten suicide just as we are sitting down to supper, to the laying of the cornerstone of the new gym to deliver ourselves of a prayer that nobody much listens to, to the Bible study group where nobody has done any studying, to the Xerox machine. We don’t want to go. We go in fear of the terrible needs of the ones we go to. We go in fear of our own emptiness from which it is hard to believe that any word or deed of help or hope or healing can come. But we go because it is where his way leads us; and again and again we are blessed by our going in ways we can never anticipate, and our going becomes a blessing to the ones we go to because when we follow his way, we never go entirely alone, and it is always something more than just ourselves and our own emptiness that we bring. Is that true? Is it true in the sense that it is true that there are seven days in a week and that light travels faster than sound? Maybe the final answer that faith can give to that awesome and final question occurs in a letter that Dostoevski wrote to a friend in 1854. “If anyone proved to me that Christ was outside the truth,” he wrote, “and it really was so that the truth was outside Christ, then I would prefer to remain with Christ than with the truth.”
“The road goes ever on and on,” the song says, “down from the door where it began,” and for each of us there was a different door, and we all have different tales to tell of where and when and how our journeys began. Perhaps there was no single moment but rather a series of moments that together started us off. For me, there was hearing a drunken blasphemy in a bar. There was a dream where I found myself writing down a name which, though I couldn’t remember it when I woke up, I knew was the true and secret name of everything that matters or could ever matter. As I lay on the grass one afternoon thinking that if ever I was going to know the truth in all its fullness, it was going to be then, there was a stirring in the air that made two apple branches strike against each other with a wooden clack, and I suspect that any more of the truth than that would have been the end of me instead of, as it turned out, part of the beginning.
Such moments as those, and others no less foolish, were, together, the door from which the road began for me, and who knows where it began for each of you. But this much at least, I think, would be true for us all: that one way or another the road starts off from passion -- a passion for what is holy and hidden, a passion for Christ. It is a little like falling in love, or, to put it more accurately, I suppose, falling in love is a little like it. The breath quickens. Scales fall from the eyes. A world within the world flames up. If you are Simeon Stylites, you spend the rest of your days perched on a flagpole. If you are Saint Francis, you go out and preach to the red-winged blackbirds. If you are Albert Schweitzer, you give up theology and Bach and go to medical school. And if that sort of thing is too rich for your blood, you go to a seminary. You did. I did. And for some of us, it’s not all that crazy a thing to do.
It’s not such a crazy thing to do because if seminaries don’t as a rule turn out saints and heroes, they at least teach you a thing or two. “God has made foolish the wisdom of the world,” Paul says, but not until wisdom has served its purpose. Passion is all very well. It is all very well to fall in love. But passion must be grounded, or like lightning without a lightning rod it can blow fuses and burn the house down. Passion must be related not just to the world inside your skin where it is born but to the world outside your skin where it has to learn to walk and talk and act in terms of social justice and human need and politics and nuclear power and God knows what-all else or otherwise become as shadowy and irrelevant as all the other good intentions that the way to hell is paved with. Passion must be harnessed and put to work, and the power that first stirs the heart must become the power that also stirs the hands and feet because it is the places your feet take you to and the work you find for your hands that finally proclaim who you are and who Christ is. Passion without wisdom to give it shape and direction is as empty as wisdom without passion to give it power and purpose. So you sit at the feet of the wise and learn what they have to teach, and our debts to them are so great that, if your experience is like mine, even twenty-five years later you will draw on the depth and breadth of their insights, and their voices will speak in you still, and again and again you will find yourself speaking in their voices. You learn as much as you can from the wise until finally, if you do it right and things break your way, you are wise enough to be yourself, and brave enough to speak with your own voice, and foolish enough, for Christ’s sake, to live and serve out of the uniqueness of your own vision of him and out of your own passion.
“And whither then?” the song asks. The world of The Lord of the Rings is an enchanted world. It is a shadowy world where life and death are at stake and where things are seldom what they seem. It is a dangerous and beautiful world in which great evil and great good are engaged in a battle where more often than not the odds are heavily in favor of great evil. It is a world where enormous burdens are loaded on small shoulders and where the most fateful issues hang on what are apparently the most homely and insignificant decisions. And thus it is through a world in many ways much like our own that the road winds.
Strange things happen. Again and again Christ is present not where, as priests, you would be apt to look for him but precisely where you wouldn’t have thought to look for him in a thousand years.
You will be ordained, many of you, or have been already, and if again your experience is anything like mine, you will find, or have found, that something more even than an outlandish new title and an outlandish new set of responsibilities is conferred in that outlandish ceremony. Without wanting to sound unduly fanciful, I think it is fair to say that an extraordinary new adventure begins with ordination, a new stretch of the road, that is unlike any other that you have either experienced or imagined. Your life is no longer your own in the same sense. You are not any more virtuous than you ever were -- certainly no new sanctity or wisdom or power suddenly descends -- but you are nonetheless “on call” in a new way. You start moving through the world as the declared representative of what people variously see as either the world’s oldest and most persistent and superannuated superstition, or the world’s wildest and most improbable dream, or the holy, living truth itself. In unexpected ways and at unexpected times people of all sorts, believers and unbelievers alike, make their way to you looking for something that often they themselves can’t name any more than you can well name it to them. Often their lives touch yours at the moments when they are most vulnerable, when some great grief or gladness or perplexity has swept away all the usual barriers we erect between each other so that you see them for a little as who they really are, and you yourself are stripped naked by their nakedness.
Strange things happen. Again and again Christ is present not where, as priests, you would be apt to look for him but precisely where you wouldn’t have thought to look for him in a thousand years. The great preacher, the sunset, the Mozart Requiem can leave you cold, but the child in the doorway, the rain on the roof, the half-remembered dream, can speak of him and for him with an eloquence that turns your knees to water. The decisions you think are most important turn out not to matter so much after all, but whether or not you mail the letter, the way you say goodbye or decide not to say it, the afternoon you cancel everything and drive out to the beach to watch the tide come in -- these are apt to be the moments when souls are won or lost, including quite possibly your own.
You come to places where many paths and errands meet, as the song says, as all our paths meet for a moment here, we friends who are strangers, we strangers who are friends. Great possibilities for good or for ill may come of the meeting, and often it is the leaden casket rather than the golden casket that contains the treasure, and the one who seems to have least to offer turns out to be the one who has most.
“And whither then?” Whither now? “I cannot say,” the singer says, nor yet can I. But far ahead the road goes on anyway, and we must follow if we can because it is our road, it is his road, it is the only road that matters when you come right down to it. Let me finally say only this one thing more.
I was sitting by the side of the road one day last fall. It was a dark time in my life. I was full of anxiety, full of fear and uncertainty. The world within seemed as shadowy as the world without. And then, as I sat there, I spotted a car coming down the road toward me with one of those license plates that you can get by paying a little extra with a word on it instead of just numbers and a letter or two. And of all the words the license plate might have had on it, the word that it did have was the word T-R-U-S-T: TRUST. And as it came close enough for me to read, it became suddenly for me a word from on high, and I give it to you here as a word from on high also for you, a kind of graduation present.
The world is full of dark shadows to be sure, both the world without and the world within, and the road we’ve all set off on is long and hard and often hard to find, but the word is trust. Trust the deepest intuitions of your own heart. Trust the source of your own truest gladness. Trust the road. Above all else, trust him. Trust him. Amen.
“The Road Goes On” from “A Room Called Remember: Uncollected Pieces” by Frederick Buechner, copyright © 1984 by Frederick Buechner. Courtesy of HarperOne, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
Featured in Buechner 101: Essays and Sermons by Frederick Buechner(link is external) (Frederick Buechner Center, 2016), available in paperback or Kindle edition from Amazon.com(link is external).
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IDEAS THAT IMPACT: MEMOIRS OF MINISTRYBorrowing Inspiration: Pastoral Memoirs and the Narrative Imagination
The pastoral memoir allows us to overhear the sounds of the gospel reverberating through the life of another minister. It clarifies or challenges our own reckonings of ministry and provides clues as to where in our lives God may be found, or better yet, where God may find us. This is what makes the pastoral memoir so engaging.
But, at the level of Christian practice, what do pastoral memoirs offer to the busy pastor and layperson active in Christian ministry? How can this particular expression inform the life and work of those who minister in the name of Jesus Christ? How does the pastoral memoir help shape the way a pastor sees the world and everything he or she does?
Read more from Lee Ramsey »
Borrowing Inspiration: Pastoral Memoirs and the Narrative Imagination
The pastoral memoir allows us to overhear the sounds of the gospel reverberating through the life of another minister. It clarifies or challenges our own reckonings of ministry and provides clues to where in our lives God may be found, or better yet, where God may find us. This is what makes the pastoral memoir so engaging.
But, at the level of Christian practice, what do pastoral memoirs offer to the busy pastor and active layperson in Christian ministry? How can this particular expression inform the life and work of those who minister in the name of Jesus Christ? How does the pastoral memoir help shape the way a pastor sees the world and everything he or she does?
While very few of us can tell our stories as deftly as Nora Gallagher (Things Seen and Unseen; Practicing Resurrection) or Barbara Brown Taylor (Leaving Church), or as insightfully as Richard Lischer (Open Secrets), their gifts can enrich our own. Their stories can amplify the ways that we imagine ministry. Sifted through theology, scripture, and church tradition, their memories of ministry can help us to more fully understand our own. By lending us their vision, perhaps we can more fully see below the tedious surface of ministry into the depths where shining insights flash and dart away into the future. Maybe we can come closer to saying what is true about our own callings by listening to their voices.
So how can the working pastor cultivate an imagination that helps him or her see ministry with greater creativity? If it is true, as Garrett Greene says, that “to save sinners, God seizes them by the imagination,” how does the pastor remain open to such “God-seizures.”1 Here are several ways that the pastoral memoir can stir the narrative imagination of the pastor.
Listen to Your Life
Toward the end of his memoir Now and Then, Presbyterian minister and writer Frederick Buechner says, “Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.”2 It is an invitation and reminder to “see grace” in the comings and goings of our lives as pastors. Something about ministry obscures vision, occludes hearing. We slowly lose the ability to see the subtle signs of God’s presence in our own lives and in the lives of those around us. Perhaps it is the relentless routine of a regular weekly cycle that dims the senses. Too many sermons, too little time. Maybe it is the disheartening discovery that every congregation has its “nay-sayers,” those who wouldn’t believe God is moving if the ark washed up on their doorsteps. Whatever the cause, pastors can grow deaf to the sounds of grace—so deaf we stop listening altogether. Here is where the memoir provides aid.
The memoir enchants theologically; it helps us to “name grace.”3 The pastoral memoir points us to where and how grace appears in the life of the pastor. Like Barbara Brown Taylor, who thinks, upon hearing the honking sounds of wild geese flying overhead, “I could not have asked for more blessed assurance that my life had really changed.”4 Or, as Heidi Neumark says, when seeing how the love between a severely burned father and his children gives the father hope to endure, “Connection is everything. Relationship to God and each other is life itself.”5 The grace that sustains ministry happens right where pastors and laity live. The pastoral memoir points us to the sacraments, to the rowdiest of church meetings, to the hospital room and the parking lot. All are sites of God’s presence if we have eyes to see and ears to hear. Imagine that.
The Thread of Revelation
The pastoral memoir looks back at a season or lifetime of ministry and watches how the story unfolds. With a long backward look, the pastor takes her bearings for the present and future. This careful look at one’s own story deepens the imagination of the pastor, especially the pastor who has been floating listlessly upon the surface of a ministry that was once flowing with life. The memoir can spark the imagination of the pastor by helping her discover what Eudora Welty called the “continuous thread of revelation”6 that courses through the forgotten and neglected channels of one’s life. As Taylor recalls, after being pushed into a swimming pool full of other lost and found human beings, “Bobbing in that healing pool with all those other flawed beings of light, I looked around and saw them as I had never seen them before, while some of them looked at me the same way. The long wait had come to an end. I was in the water at last.”7 Through the imagination, the pastor sees her calling not so much as a lonely, sluggish drift through time but as a continuous, life-giving thread of meaning that joins her together with all the rest of humanity.
As the pastor scans whole chapters of ministry and life, redemptive themes emerge for both the minister and the congregation. As Garrett Keizer says, “I have tried to listen, as I believe Jesus did, for the stories that can become parables.”8 Pastoral memoirs help us imagine or re-imagine our own ministry as story-shaped, parable-like, and pregnant with meaning. Christian ministry is not a random series of events that we tack upon the pegboard of life or work. Ministry occurs within a story about God and us. If we listen well to that story, we will hear the sounds of a continuous thread of revelation, like familiar voices drifting from a darkened porch at nightfall.
Narrated by Scripture
The turn to narrative has been one of the most fruitful avenues in biblical study over the past 40 years. Without completely rejecting historical-critical approaches to scripture, many have begun to understand the biblical text as a living story with God as the central character. As believers who live (and die) by this story, the aim is to allow scripture to “read us,” to find where and how the Bible draws us into its story and inscribes our lives with gospel sense, usually understood in some way as an alternative story to the dominate stories—economic, social, political—of contemporary culture. The approach is appealing.
The problem is that many pastors and preachers don’t quite know what to do with narrative, whether in preaching, spiritual direction, pastoral care, or administration. Some of us have been preaching “about” scripture for so long and so unimaginatively that we no longer hear scripture preaching about us. We approach the scriptural text as if it is an object to be dissected and explained rather than as a Spirit-moving story that invites us to walk around among its characters and scenes and find our surprising place.
Here the pastoral memoirs provide direction. Neumark and Lischer’s stories are especially helpful. Their memoirs show us pastors and congregations who allow themselves to be read by scripture. For example, Neumark relates how the story of the widow of Zarephath (I Kings 17) gave shape to the stories of single mothers within her own congregation—mothers struggling to find enough food to feed their children while remaining faithful. From Zarephath to the South Bronx, scripture weaves its world of meaning. The pastor, as Neumark says, is sometimes carried along reluctantly in the belly of a whale. But if she is willing to trust scripture and the Spirit who breathes life upon it, she may find herself beached upon new, imaginative shores of pastoral and biblical understanding that will enrich her entire ministry.
Seasons of the Gospel
Many of the writers of contemporary pastoral memoirs delight in the seasons of the Christian year. Nora Gallagher, an Episcopal lay m
inister and writer, structures her memoir, Things Seen and Unseen, around the entire Christian calendar, beginning with Advent and ending with Ordinary Time.9 Similarly, Diana Butler Bass’s Strength for the Journey gives sustained attention to the Christian seasons, especially worship services during the holy days of Lent and Easter. At one Easter vigil service at Christ Church in South Hamilton, Massachusetts, she sensed a “moment when the boundaries between heaven and earth thinned,” where the congregation that gathered on Easter eve knew themselves to “be God’s pilgrim people, wanderers following God’s way justice.”10 Worship can do that. Following the liturgical calendar through the seasons of the gospel, worship draws us into the entire drama of salvation where we move with Christ and the historic church through birth, life, death, and resurrection.
Such liturgical immersion, so finely described in many of the pastoral memoirs, can deepen the narrative imagination of the pastor. This may be especially true for the Protestant pastors who come from less liturgically oriented traditions, but it can also renew the imagination of all those pastors for whom the liturgical seasons have become repetitive and dull. The seasons of the Christian year and the particular biblical stories that are associated with them can soak our imaginations with symbols and images that flow refreshingly through our preaching, worship leadership, and Christian education. The challenge is to imaginatively locate ourselves and the congregation within the larger story of God, and to allow the seasons within that story to carry us along into the fullness of time.
To Do Justice, Love Kindness
Imagination thieves stalk the halls of many churches. One of the most lethal of these bandits demands institutional maintenance so persistently that it leeches away the minister’s passion for biblical justice. For many clergy, especially in mainline Protestant traditions, where middle- and upper-middle-class economic concerns predominate, God’s desire for humanity voiced by the biblical prophet, Amos—to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with God—becomes almost inaudible amid the cacophonous (and frequently desperate) shouts to “raise the budget” and “build more parking spaces.” Whether you pastor a small church trying to stay alive or a large church trying to grow bigger, a lot of time and money is spent on physical plants and bottom lines, while the imagination for ministry is held hostage. Meanwhile, the poor continue to work for less than living wage, if they work at all, and those without any health care multiply daily. All this happens in a country that spends billions of dollars a year to fund an ill-advised war in a country torn apart by civil strife. Yet the church’s call for biblical justice is muted throughout the land. It’s almost enough to make the downhearted pastor agree with the iconoclastic Will Campbell when he says, especially with the church in mind, “All institutions, and I mean all of ’em, are fundamentally inimical to what Christ was about on this earth.”11
Yet allowing oneself to be robbed of hope, conceding to despair, has always been one of the greatest temptations of the faithful. What is needed is a new imagination, a renewal of the mind (Romans 12: 2) that helps the pastor and congregation to see their mission in a new light. Here, surprisingly, the pastoral memoir can help.
There is no telling how many times Dorothy Day’s plainly written memoir The Long Loneliness has strengthened hope and passion for biblical justice. Henri Nouwen’s confession-like journals of his sojourns in Latin America, Gracias, and his reflections upon servant leadership among the L’Arche community in Toronto, In the Name of Jesus, have helped ground many Christians in practices that wed justice with mercy.12
We discover similar sources for renewal in the pastoral memoirs of Neumark and Keizer. These memoirs are not so much exercises in personal introspection as they are reflections upon the challenges of living out a faithful ministry amid the complexities and injustices of the late 20th and 21st centuries, whether in rural Vermont or the bustling Bronx. They do not offer a prescription for how pastors and congregations can remain focused upon mission and worship, but they do provide moving accounts of how their particular congregations have attempted to do so. When hearing one of Neumark’s many stories about how she and her congregation began to take the ministry of Transfiguration into the rough-and-tumble streets of the South Bronx, if we listen carefully we can hear a gentle summons saying, “So what would that look like around our church? Who needs Holy Communion outside the walls of this building, and how do we come along beside them?” That’s how imagination works. That’s how the streams of new life start flowing.
Imaginative Companions
Dorothy Day concludes The Long Loneliness by saying, “We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community. It all happened while we sat there talking, and it is still going on.” It is a lovely image of community. Christ breaks and redeems the long loneliness of ministry by the gift of human community in which “We know Him in the breaking of the bread, and we know each other . . . and we are not alone any more.”13
The last and best gift of the pastoral memoir may be companions in ministry who stir our own imaginations. Reading the memoir, we see the kind of human community that nurtures and challenges the writer. These pastoral memoirs are not about isolated clergy but about pastors who are called and shaped by particular communities—like the congregation of Grace-Calvary Church welcoming their new rector, Barbara Brown Taylor, by giving her and her husband two rocking chairs. “I was being invited to sit down and stay a while, which I fully intended to do,” says Taylor.14 Or like Richard Lischer being told by one of the Lutheran elders during his first meeting with the New Cana, Illinois congregation, “I didn’t vote for you, but I know we will have a very good church with you as our pastor.”15 Now that either pushes the pastor toward genuine community or sends him running in the other direction.
Real communities are populated by real characters who accompany the pastor in ministry—characters like the elderly Jeffrey in Keizer’s Dresser of Sycamore Trees, who has cerebral palsy. He says to the unsuspecting Keizer, “If I were cured tomorrow at seven-fifteen, it would be the greatest tragedy of my life. Because knowing my weakness, I know I would forget about God by four.”16 Or characters like Dodie Little in Trinity Church in Santa Barbara, California, who says to Diana Butler Bass in Strength for the Journey that the reason Trinity was transformed was that “we were forced to look at each other, and we really saw each other for the first time.”17
These are the types of characters who walk beside pastors in congregations. They can be found in every sanctuary and fellowship hall where Christians gather. Ministry does not occur in solitude, though solitude can certainly nourish the spiritual and emotional life of the pastor. Ministry occurs among the characters whom we know as the people of God, the communion of saints. The way the pastoral memoir presents them helps us imagine the “characters” of our own congregations as part of the cast of a much larger, divine drama, with each character playing his or her part. The imaginative companions of the memoir give way to the true companions who surround us in ministry. With them we can converse, argue, disagree, pray, and forgive. With them, in true community, we seek to love and serve the risen Lord.
Conclusion
Who can say, in the end, what will seize the narrative imagination of the pastor, the student of ministry, or the Christian layperson? But for all types of leaders in all situations, the pastoral memoir can offer direction. If the narrative imagination is sluggish, the pastoral memoir pumps new zest into ministry. It can help clergy and laity see and hear fresh stories of other congregations that are realistically imaginable. The characters of Lischer’s or Neumark’s memoirs, for example, can “in-spire” (breathe spirit into) the minister and the congregation. On the other hand, if the narrative imagination is already revved up, the memoir can provide additional spark for the race of faith. It offers energized companions and parable-like stories to accompany us along the way.
Either way, the pastoral memoirs available today show and tell how the stories, characters, and settings of ministry all work together—if we watch them closely—to reveal the continuous thread of revelation. In a day where it sometimes seems that the louder we shout the less God is heard, if the pastoral memoir stirs our imagination enough to steadily perceive the tracings of God within ministry, that would be gift enough.
________________
NOTES
1. Garrett Green, Imagining God: Theology and the Religious Imagination (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1989), 149.
2. Frederick Buechner, Now and Then (New York: Harper & Row, 1983), 87.
3. See Mary Catherine Hilkert’s Naming Grace: Preaching and the Sacramental Imagination (New York: Continuum, 1997) for an excellent exploration of the sacramental imagination and ministry.
4. Barbara Brown Taylor, Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2006), 63.
5. Heidi B. Neumark, Breathing Space: A Spiritual Journey in the South Bronx (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003)), xvii.
6. Eudora Welty, One Writer’s Beginnings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), 68–69.
7. Taylor, Leaving Church,120.
8. Garrett Keizer, A Dresser of Sycamore Trees: The Finding of a Ministry (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991), 50.
9. Nora Gallagher, Things Seen and Unseen: A Year Lived in Faith (New York: Vintage Books, 1998).
10. Diana Butler Bass, Strength for the Journey: A Pilgrimage of Faith in Community (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2002), 79.
11. Will Campbell in Marshall Frady’s Southerners: A Journalist’s Odyssey (New York: New American Library, 1980), 373.
12. Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness: An Autobiography (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1952); Henri J. M. Nouwen, In the Name of Jesus: Reflections on Christian Leadership (New York: Crossroad, 1997); and Nouwen, Gracias! A Latin American Journal (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1983).
13. Day, The Long Loneliness, 285–286.
14. Taylor, Leaving Church, 90.
15. Richard Lischer, Open Secrets: A Memoir of Faith and Discovery (New York: Broadway Books, 2001), 20.
16. Keizer, A Dresser of Sycamore Trees, 10.
17. Bass, Strength for the Journey, 202. -------
For the Love of God, Write
In the past several months, I have had close to a dozen current or recent seminarians reach out to me asking for counsel on what to do with their desire to write.
Engaging in the craft of creative writing is where they feel most alive and the means by which they feel most passionate about witnessing to "the things about which [they] have been instructed" (Luke 1:4 NRSV).
Read more from Enuma Okoro »
Faith & Leadership
VOCATION, LAITY, WORK LIVES
Enuma Okoro: For the love of God, write
Making a living as a writer is choosing to struggle with the tension of being called, having that call affirmed as ministry and discerning the particulars of that ministry, says the author of the memoir “Reluctant Pilgrim.”
In the past several months, I have had close to a dozen current or recent seminarians reach out to me asking for counsel on what to do with their desire to write.
Engaging in the craft of creative writing is where they feel most alive and the means by which they feel most passionate about witnessing to “the things about which [they] have been instructed” (Luke 1:4 NRSV).
But these men and women seek counsel on discerning how writing can be ministry and where they might turn for support and encouragement in understanding how faith and writing intersect. They share earnestly their hunger for Christian mentors who can affirm their felt callings and help them cultivate what such a ministry could look like.
I know of such hunger.
I have been writing since I could pick up a crayon. My love of words began with poetry -- Mother Goose nursery rhymes and a million different versions of “Roses are red, violets are blue.” Eventually, I tried my own hand at it and fell in love with the ability to play with words.
Naturally, as I’ve grown older, I have come to appreciate that writing is not just about wordplay. It is also about power and beauty, truth telling and possibility, and hope and activism.
Questions to consider:
Such discerning is a work in progress. But an important part of vocational discernment is listening to how the community of faith responds to your perceived gifts, and a key moment for me occurred when people began to respond to my writing in ways that affirmed a sense of call.
Because I understand writing as a significant part of my call to Christian discipleship, I have also come to understand that other necessary habits must coexist with the discipline of writing to help me best live out this call.
So to the seminarians who email me with their concerns about how to cultivate a faithful writing practice, I share only what I have learned through my own experience.
I have learned how essential it is to welcome, appreciate and make space for silence and solitude. The first task is listening -- cultivating attentiveness to life in general, both locally and beyond. Every single thing around you and in the midst of your days can help you be a better writer. It is as poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning penned: “Earth’s crammed with heaven,/ And every common bush afire with God,/ But only he who sees, takes off his shoes; / The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.”
I have also learned the importance of prayer. Wordsmithing is in itself a form of centering of breath, mind and prayer. Yet I speak particularly of the asking, seeking, knocking kind of prayer that beseeches God to reveal God’s self and God’s purposes for you as God’s child and for you as a writer and as one more fellow pilgrim in a broken community that groans for redemption.
I suspect it would be difficult for me to take writing as ministry seriously if I were not also an avid reader. The two tasks go hand in hand.
Beyond intellectual growth, reading teaches me that any physical space has the potential to become holy, a sanctuary where my thoughts and emotions can alight one by one like candles of blessings commemorating the dead. Reading draws me uniquely into the community of saints both present and passed on. It helps form me in faithful ways of engaging space and being in relationship.
Chinua Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart,” for example, affirmed anew the spiritual and communal truth that I am part of a bigger narrative than what I see. Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s “Gift from the Sea” taught me something significant and long-lasting about being female, creative and made in God’s image in these very ways. And John Leax’s vocational memoir “Grace Is Where I Live” helped me ease into the reality that it was OK to love both God and writing, and to feel called to writing as vocation. The book brought me into community with other Christians who had similar struggles.
Making a living as a writer is choosing to struggle with the tension of being called, having that call affirmed as ministry and discerning the particulars of that ministry. I have found it an ongoing challenge to live into a vocation as a writer, someone who culls words for the sake of faithful witness and imagined creativity and not for research or academic pursuits.
But I rely on narrative for spiritual nourishment. Returning words to God has always been my primary impulse of navigating my way through the world. Writing is the discerning shawl with which I wrap things whenever I sense the soft or strong winds of the Holy Spirit. It is one of my daily attempts to live and work faithfully with the gifts God has given me for the sake of the kingdom. I write because I believe writing is essential to my unique proclamation of God’s goodness.
Integrating my love of God and of words has been a somewhat solitary endeavor, a spiritual, intellectual and creative journey where I have found myself elated at the occasional fellow pilgrims I encounter with similar longings and hungers. I understand the space from which these seminarians who seek my counsel speak.
During my own theological training, I too wish I had been encouraged more to think of the disciplines of reading and writing as a response to God’s call and as a sort of spiritual practice inviting me to delve further and struggle creatively in God’s presence.
I wish I had encountered more mentors who had the time and space and concern to say to me, as someone who imagined writing as Christian vocation, “Take the leap of faith and trust in your gift to proclaim God’s word in new ways.” I hope I can grow into the sort of mentor who recognizes the writing gift and call in others and boldly and daringly says to them, “Write for the love and power of words. Write for the love of God.”
FROM THE ALBAN LIBRARY
Becoming the Pastor You Hope to Be unapologetically urges clergy readers to develop practices that will help them become more excellent ministers.
A long-time field educator, now serving as a denominational staff person responsible for ministerial formation, Barbara Blodgett believes excellence is a matter of doing simple things with care and consistency. Ministers who commit themselves to excellence will grow and flourish, and even become happier in ministry. Blodgett urges ministers to resist praise and instead to ask for feedback, to seek the company of mentors who are better than the reader is at what he or she does, to be vulnerable before their peers in order to learn from them, and to define themselves as a leader who does not merely take activist stances but risks entering into deep, transformative relationships. Improvement in ministry, Blodgett argues, comes about not through extraordinary leaps and bounds but rather through adopting simple habits and carrying through on small but thoughtfully made choices.
Addressed to ministers, Becoming the Pastor You Hope to Be is also a valuable resource for discernment committees, Christian educators, leaders of continuing education and lay education programs, and all those who partner with theological schools to help form ministers, both lay and ordained.
Learn more and order the book »
Follow us on social media:
VISIT OUR WEBSITE
Alban at Duke Divinity School
2. Frederick Buechner, Now and Then (New York: Harper & Row, 1983), 87.
3. See Mary Catherine Hilkert’s Naming Grace: Preaching and the Sacramental Imagination (New York: Continuum, 1997) for an excellent exploration of the sacramental imagination and ministry.
4. Barbara Brown Taylor, Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2006), 63.
5. Heidi B. Neumark, Breathing Space: A Spiritual Journey in the South Bronx (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003)), xvii.
6. Eudora Welty, One Writer’s Beginnings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), 68–69.
7. Taylor, Leaving Church,120.
8. Garrett Keizer, A Dresser of Sycamore Trees: The Finding of a Ministry (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991), 50.
9. Nora Gallagher, Things Seen and Unseen: A Year Lived in Faith (New York: Vintage Books, 1998).
10. Diana Butler Bass, Strength for the Journey: A Pilgrimage of Faith in Community (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2002), 79.
11. Will Campbell in Marshall Frady’s Southerners: A Journalist’s Odyssey (New York: New American Library, 1980), 373.
12. Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness: An Autobiography (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1952); Henri J. M. Nouwen, In the Name of Jesus: Reflections on Christian Leadership (New York: Crossroad, 1997); and Nouwen, Gracias! A Latin American Journal (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1983).
13. Day, The Long Loneliness, 285–286.
14. Taylor, Leaving Church, 90.
15. Richard Lischer, Open Secrets: A Memoir of Faith and Discovery (New York: Broadway Books, 2001), 20.
16. Keizer, A Dresser of Sycamore Trees, 10.
17. Bass, Strength for the Journey, 202. -------
For the Love of God, Write
In the past several months, I have had close to a dozen current or recent seminarians reach out to me asking for counsel on what to do with their desire to write.
Engaging in the craft of creative writing is where they feel most alive and the means by which they feel most passionate about witnessing to "the things about which [they] have been instructed" (Luke 1:4 NRSV).
Read more from Enuma Okoro »
Faith & Leadership
VOCATION, LAITY, WORK LIVES
Enuma Okoro: For the love of God, write
Making a living as a writer is choosing to struggle with the tension of being called, having that call affirmed as ministry and discerning the particulars of that ministry, says the author of the memoir “Reluctant Pilgrim.”
In the past several months, I have had close to a dozen current or recent seminarians reach out to me asking for counsel on what to do with their desire to write.
Engaging in the craft of creative writing is where they feel most alive and the means by which they feel most passionate about witnessing to “the things about which [they] have been instructed” (Luke 1:4 NRSV).
But these men and women seek counsel on discerning how writing can be ministry and where they might turn for support and encouragement in understanding how faith and writing intersect. They share earnestly their hunger for Christian mentors who can affirm their felt callings and help them cultivate what such a ministry could look like.
I know of such hunger.
I have been writing since I could pick up a crayon. My love of words began with poetry -- Mother Goose nursery rhymes and a million different versions of “Roses are red, violets are blue.” Eventually, I tried my own hand at it and fell in love with the ability to play with words.
Naturally, as I’ve grown older, I have come to appreciate that writing is not just about wordplay. It is also about power and beauty, truth telling and possibility, and hope and activism.
Questions to consider:
- Enuma Okoro describes writing as her “discerning shawl,” the way she comes to understand the work of the Spirit. Who or what functions in that way for you?
- Okoro identifies several practices -- silence, solitude, prayer and reading -- that are essential to her vocation of writing. What practices do you engage in that are vital to the living out of your sense of calling?
- What books have you read, what songs have you heard and what experiences have you shared that have given you permission to live into your calling? How have they shaped your imagination and challenged your assumptions?
- In the spirit of creative writing, write a letter to an imagined mentee about what you have learned from your vocational journey. What would you tell a person 15 years younger who has expressed a calling similar to yours?
Such discerning is a work in progress. But an important part of vocational discernment is listening to how the community of faith responds to your perceived gifts, and a key moment for me occurred when people began to respond to my writing in ways that affirmed a sense of call.
Because I understand writing as a significant part of my call to Christian discipleship, I have also come to understand that other necessary habits must coexist with the discipline of writing to help me best live out this call.
So to the seminarians who email me with their concerns about how to cultivate a faithful writing practice, I share only what I have learned through my own experience.
I have learned how essential it is to welcome, appreciate and make space for silence and solitude. The first task is listening -- cultivating attentiveness to life in general, both locally and beyond. Every single thing around you and in the midst of your days can help you be a better writer. It is as poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning penned: “Earth’s crammed with heaven,/ And every common bush afire with God,/ But only he who sees, takes off his shoes; / The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.”
I have also learned the importance of prayer. Wordsmithing is in itself a form of centering of breath, mind and prayer. Yet I speak particularly of the asking, seeking, knocking kind of prayer that beseeches God to reveal God’s self and God’s purposes for you as God’s child and for you as a writer and as one more fellow pilgrim in a broken community that groans for redemption.
I suspect it would be difficult for me to take writing as ministry seriously if I were not also an avid reader. The two tasks go hand in hand.
Beyond intellectual growth, reading teaches me that any physical space has the potential to become holy, a sanctuary where my thoughts and emotions can alight one by one like candles of blessings commemorating the dead. Reading draws me uniquely into the community of saints both present and passed on. It helps form me in faithful ways of engaging space and being in relationship.
Chinua Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart,” for example, affirmed anew the spiritual and communal truth that I am part of a bigger narrative than what I see. Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s “Gift from the Sea” taught me something significant and long-lasting about being female, creative and made in God’s image in these very ways. And John Leax’s vocational memoir “Grace Is Where I Live” helped me ease into the reality that it was OK to love both God and writing, and to feel called to writing as vocation. The book brought me into community with other Christians who had similar struggles.
Making a living as a writer is choosing to struggle with the tension of being called, having that call affirmed as ministry and discerning the particulars of that ministry. I have found it an ongoing challenge to live into a vocation as a writer, someone who culls words for the sake of faithful witness and imagined creativity and not for research or academic pursuits.
But I rely on narrative for spiritual nourishment. Returning words to God has always been my primary impulse of navigating my way through the world. Writing is the discerning shawl with which I wrap things whenever I sense the soft or strong winds of the Holy Spirit. It is one of my daily attempts to live and work faithfully with the gifts God has given me for the sake of the kingdom. I write because I believe writing is essential to my unique proclamation of God’s goodness.
Integrating my love of God and of words has been a somewhat solitary endeavor, a spiritual, intellectual and creative journey where I have found myself elated at the occasional fellow pilgrims I encounter with similar longings and hungers. I understand the space from which these seminarians who seek my counsel speak.
During my own theological training, I too wish I had been encouraged more to think of the disciplines of reading and writing as a response to God’s call and as a sort of spiritual practice inviting me to delve further and struggle creatively in God’s presence.
I wish I had encountered more mentors who had the time and space and concern to say to me, as someone who imagined writing as Christian vocation, “Take the leap of faith and trust in your gift to proclaim God’s word in new ways.” I hope I can grow into the sort of mentor who recognizes the writing gift and call in others and boldly and daringly says to them, “Write for the love and power of words. Write for the love of God.”
FROM THE ALBAN LIBRARY
A long-time field educator, now serving as a denominational staff person responsible for ministerial formation, Barbara Blodgett believes excellence is a matter of doing simple things with care and consistency. Ministers who commit themselves to excellence will grow and flourish, and even become happier in ministry. Blodgett urges ministers to resist praise and instead to ask for feedback, to seek the company of mentors who are better than the reader is at what he or she does, to be vulnerable before their peers in order to learn from them, and to define themselves as a leader who does not merely take activist stances but risks entering into deep, transformative relationships. Improvement in ministry, Blodgett argues, comes about not through extraordinary leaps and bounds but rather through adopting simple habits and carrying through on small but thoughtfully made choices.
Addressed to ministers, Becoming the Pastor You Hope to Be is also a valuable resource for discernment committees, Christian educators, leaders of continuing education and lay education programs, and all those who partner with theological schools to help form ministers, both lay and ordained.
Learn more and order the book »
Follow us on social media:
VISIT OUR WEBSITE
Alban at Duke Divinity School
1121 West Chapel Hill Street, Suite 101
Durham, North Carolina 27701, United States
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