Unexpected Allies

I get my best help from writers who did not set out to help me.

Pastoral work is demanding, and I need lots of help. Fortunately, a lot is offered, much of it in the form of books. Theologians and counselors, scholars and consultants write for me. I am informed by their knowledge, guided by their counsel.

But I get my best help from writers who did not set out to help me. My most valued allies in ministry are those who write novels and poems. I think I know why. The act of creation is at the heart of life, whether in biology or in faith.

Pastors wake up in the middle of this creative work every morning. We also wake up amid many uncreative, behind-the-scenes responsibilities. These routines are the most visible parts of my life. I prepare sermons, visit people, administer programs.

Most books directed my way try to help me in these visible areas. But I also need help in the invisible parts—the creative center. Creation and re-creation—making lives to the glory of God—is the core of the gospel, of the Spirit’s work, of pastoral work.

Often, however, this center is moved to the periphery, and “creative” means nothing more than “interesting” or “innovative.” Who is there to keep me aware of the very nature of creation, the work that goes into it, the way it feels?

My allies are the novelists and poets, writers who are not telling me something, but making something.

Novelists take the raw data of existence and make a world of meaning. I am in the story-making business, too. God is drawing the people around me into the plot of salvation; every word, gesture, and action has a significant place in the story. Being involved in the creation of reality like this takes endless patience and attentiveness, and I am forever taking shortcuts. Instead of assisting in the development of a character, I hurriedly categorize: active or inactive, saved or unsaved, disciple or backslider, key leader or dependable follower, leadership material or pew fodder. Instead of seeing each person in my life as unique, a splendid never-to-be-duplicated story of grace, unprecedented in the particular ways grace and sin are in dramatic tension, I slap on a label so I can efficiently get through my routines. Once the label is in place I don’t have to look at him and her any more; I know how to use them.

Then I read Fyodor Dostoevsky, William Faulkner, Ann Tyler, or Walker Percy and see how an artist committed to creative work approaches the most ordinary and least promising human: the unexpected depths in the ordinary, the capacities for good and evil in the apparently conventional!

Rebuked in my shallow efficiency, I return to the person that I in disgust or boredom had dismissed from my prayers and preaching, ready again to be witness and servant in the messy, unmanageable world of the Spirit’s creation.

Poets are caretakers of language, the shepherds of words, keeping them from harm, exploitation, misuse. Words not only mean something; they are something, each with a sound and rhythm all its own.

Poets are not primarily trying to tell us, or get us, to do something. By attending to words with playful discipline (or disciplined playfulness), they draw us into deeper respect both for words and the reality they set before us.

I also am in the word business. I preach, I teach, I counsel using words. People often pay particular attention on the chance that God may be using my words to speak to them. I have a responsibility to use words accurately and well. But it isn’t easy. I live in a world where words are used carelessly by some, cunningly by others.

It is easy to say whatever comes to mind, my role as pastor compensating for my inane speech. It is easy to say what either flatters or manipulates and so acquire power over others. In subtle ways, being a pastor subjects my words to corruption. That is why I frequently spend a few hours with a poet friend—Gerard Manley Hopkins or George Herbert, Emily Dickenson or Luci Shaw—people who care about words, are honest with them, respect and honor their sheer overwhelming power. I leave such meetings less careless, my reverence for words and the Word restored.

How significant that the biblical prophets and psalmists were poets. It is a continuing curiosity that so many pastors, whose work integrates the prophetic and psalmic (preaching and praying), are indifferent to poets.

I don’t read novels to get sermon illustrations. I don’t read poems for quotable lines. I read them to feel the act of creation, to associate with those doing with words what the Spirit is doing with lives.

This world of making is the pastor’s essential home. But it is a difficult and sometimes lonely habitation. There is so much more backslapping camaraderie among the explainers and exhorters.

I am saddened when friends tell me, “I’m swamped with must reading; I don’t have time for novels or poetry.” What they are saying is that they choose to attend to the routines and not to the creative center.

There is no “must” reading; we choose what we read. What is not fed does not grow; what is not supported does not stand; what is not nurtured does not develop. Artists are not the only people who keep us open and involved in this essential but easily slighted center of creation, but they are too valuable to be slighted.