Years ago the longings caught up to me. The landscape of my soul shifted, a new direction emerged. My approach to ministry was never to be the same.
I was restless. I had been in ministry for several years, the work was going well enough: our church was growing, our people were happy. I was doing what I was supposed to do. But I was haunted: Is this all there is? Is this the ministry? Is this what I dreamed of doing for God?
Thomas Kelly wrote, “I am persuaded that this fevered life of church workers is not wholesome. … Over the margins of life comes a whisper, a faint call, a premonition of richer living which we know we are passing by. Strained by the very mad pace of our daily outer burdens, we are further strained by an inward uneasiness, because we have hints that there is a way of life vastly richer than all this hurried existence.”
Whispers kept coming over my margins: a feeling of running on empty, a remembered vision of why I entered the ministry, frustrations with piles of administrative work.
I was searching for something more than a new seminar, something deeper than technique. The realities of my career were going to include crowded calendars and boring meetings and dealing with people. Now I needed a new raison d’etre, a vision for ministry that adjusted itself to the mundane details of parish life-and that did so with real respect, patience, and love.
Along with the restlessness came rejection. I was finding no easy way around those great and mundane realities. Although our little church was thriving, the larger churches weren’t “noticing” me.
My personal dream had always been to teach preaching, so I pursued that goal. I made extensive plans to attend an Ivy League divinity school. I got to know a few faculty, corresponded profusely, visited campuses, and studied preliminarily at a nearby graduate school. My heart was already there when I received a form letter: “Your application has been rejected.”
In my imagination, and frankly, in my prayers I had departed months earlier. Now all I had left was what T had planned to leave behind. I was restless, rejected, and in search of a reason to go on in ministry. I knew some techniques and was working with them fairly well. But I needed a philosophy of ministry, a purpose beneath the goal statements. Before improving on the “how” questions, I needed to answer the “why” of ministry.
As I look back on my response to those inner promptings, I see three significant changes I made in my work schedule that became changes in my life and ministry. I made deliberate decisions to invest my time in spiritual reading, a soul friend, and a journal.
Spiritual Reading
The classical tradition calls it lectio divina: divine reading. It is the art of reading carefully selected books, in a slow and thoughtful manner. The goal of this reading is not to garner information. It is soulwork. Spiritual reading allows me to share a journey with those who have ventured far and deep into the life of the spirit.
I find saints and mystics coming from many different times, traditions, and cultures. They employ all sorts of language in describing their experience of God. It stretches me to move beyond my familiar cliches into new territories of expression.
Five books that I read during that crucial period stand out. One was Ordering Your Private World by Gordon MacDonald. A sample insight:
“Unfortunately, our society abounds with . . . men and women caught in golden cages, driven to accumulate, to be recognized, or to achieve. Our churches . . . abound with these driven people as well. Many churches are fountains gone dry. Rather than being springs of life-giving energy that cause people to grow and to delight in God’s way, they become sources of stress.”
Another was A Testament of Devotion by Thomas Kelly, who writes:
“I have in mind something deeper than the simplification of our external programs, our absurdly crowded calendars of appointments through which so many pantingly and frantically gasp. … The poise and peace we have been missing can really be found. But there is a deeper, internal simplification of one’s personality, stilled, tranquil, in childlike trust, listening ever to Eternity’s whisper.”
These books-along with The Spiritual Life by Evelyn Underhill, Gift From the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh, and Working the Angles by Eugene Peterson-were read in a time of hunger and thirst. They went to work on my life. I began to understand and define my own spirituality. I began to see my spiritual life and the spiritual journeys of others as my context for ministry. These writers were actually answering my “why?” And their answers profoundly effected my “how?”
For example, I had often felt out of place and useless in a hospital-I couldn’t work the machines, I couldn’t apply the technology, so I was a fifth wheel. Underhill, Peterson, Kelly, and others clarified my role.
As a minister, I was not primarily to assist the medical team or to interpret the crisis to the family. Far more important, my role was to humbly remind people caught up in crisis or facing tragedy that God was present in their hour of need. I was not there to explain God or defend him against the accusations of a grieving family; I was merely to point to his presence.
During this time I was dealing often with death and crisis. I did a funeral for a little boy who had never made across the street, another for a teenage girl who had been raped and murdered. I was called to hospitals to watch as the medical team helplessly struggled and gave up.
In each instance, God was there. And the people caught up in such tragedies needed God. In their complex and trying situation, they needed to know he was there. They needed that reminder more than they needed an extra paramedic.
Reading about saints, of course, is not going to make me a saint. But it pushes out my boundaries and expectations of pastoral ministry. It gives me a fresh vocabulary of spiritual experience. It models the way of life I was searching for.
I found, though, that spiritual reading could do all that far more effectively when I shared the journey with another human being.
A Soul Friend
For three years Dale and I met every Wednesday morning. We invested our time in one another, to work on our souls together.
We read together. We read the books listed above and many others. Dale held me accountable-I knew I had to discuss Pascal’s Pensees with a friend who had agreed to read it with me-so I had to read it! He pulled me all the way through The Brothers Karamazov.
We talked about what we were reading and learning. We talked about the formation of our souls. We talked about our ministries. We laughed together, relaxed together, and prayed together. We shared our thoughts, our souls, and our lives.
The search for such a soul friend was long and lonely. I knew it had to be an intentional relationship, defined deliberately and entered into mutually.
Dale’s and my commitment to one another began as a commitment to ourselves: we were each searching, each serious about a spiritual life, each ready to make real commitments towards a deepened spiritual experience and ministry.
We shared those longings in an informal monthly support group. Our friendship grew naturally around our interests. Only after we had grown to trust one another-and that took a while-did we agree to a serious weekly meeting to read, share, and pray together.
The books we read structured most of our conversation. We were reading life-changing spiritual classics, so, we asked each other how they were changing our lives. What was Underhill actually saying to us? How do we bring that into the hospital waiting room?
We held one another accountable not only to read but also to pray and practice whatever discipline we felt our lives needed. We discussed our daily routines. We asked one another how we could bring our growing spirituality to bear upon our preaching, our marriages, our prayers. In the light of what we were learning, we talked through the politics of our parishes and denomination and possible career moves.
We met weekly for breakfast and talked all the way through lunch. And then we prayed I will never forget those prayers.
A Spiritual Journal
Once during a long drive home, I happened to remember a Down’s syndrome friend. In my imagination, I tried to envision my friend Barry in heaven, whole, fully realizing the potential this life had never let him achieve. I found myself trying to feel a bit of what Barry’s mother would feel when she first saw her son in his heavenly visage. The meditation became powerful and moving for me. I promised my- i self I would-record it in my journal.
Getting to my looseleaf notebook that evening resulted in another deep experience-I used my imagination in a deliberate way to enter fully into this scenario, to get a glimpse and feel of heaven, of human life, of potential and loss, and God’s dream for who we could become.
The meditation became the basis for a later sermon, one of the finest I have preached, and I’ve since used it in a variety of settings. It not only “preaches,” it also states an essential part of my belief and my message. Without a journal, though, it would have remained just a passing thought on a long drive.
On my spiritual journey, I quickly discovered the value of journaling. Rarely, though, do my reflections end up in sermons or classes or even conversations. Journaling has been vital to me first because it helps me be honest with myself, and honesty is essential in soulwork.
Journaling comes easily for some; for others it is a painful exercise combining morbid selfexamination with writcr’s block! But the commitment to keeping a journal has proven to be significant to many pilgrimages-it has for me.
My journal began as a forum to find a language to be honest with myself about my self. I needed to put words to my deepest longings, to express the dissatisfactions. It became a record of my journey, capturing personal, subjective discoveries that I would have otherwise forgotten.
Like most people, I tend not to take my soul seriously. I pay little attention to a silly dream, a wistful longing, a fleeting thought, a troubling memory. The commitment to keep a journal is a commitment to see if such things are nudgings of the Spirit.
A record of where I went, with whom, what we ate, and how we liked it does us no good. But tracking the deep longings, penning the images that open into gateways to
God, writing out meditations that stretch my spirit so far that I begin to see who I am and who I could be-that journal became a serious tool for soulwork.
I use a looseleaf notebook divided into several sections, including: The Present; Quotations; Personal Formation; Dreams; Desires, Decisions, and Goals; Meditations and Reflections; and a Reading tog. I find that by dividing my reflections into such u areas, I better attend to the various dimensions of my soul.
A journal is, by definition, personal-I don’t write as if I were readying the material for publication. Still, this example of a few years ago illustrates how I record such reflections:
Today my son started kindergarten.
Today my little boy walked down the hall and into his little classroom,
Wearing his little new school clothes,
Walking so slowly,
Finding his name on the desk, on the wall peg, Finding his place . . . Oh, Lord, watch over this little boy. Watch over him, as he grows, and learns.
Lord Jesus, remember what it is to be five, To be little, to be learning, Lost in fantasy, living in worlds of Batman and blocks, McDonald’s, California Raisins, and Sesame Street, Learning to write his name, And always wondering why?
Help me to remember how young he really is,
Help me not to expect too much,
To be patient,
To understand his world, to remember what it is like
To be a kindergartner,
A blossom in the garden of children.
It’s not great poetry nor full of penetrating insights. But it did help me thoughtfully enter into one experience of life and to turn it into prayer. I was able to find God there, in the midst of life.
I’ve never brought that prayer into the pulpit. I’ve never shared the feelings with anyone as they went through their own “kindergarten crisis.” Still, the discipline of entering fully into life, reflecting upon my experience, searching for God there and finding him, has made me a better pastor.
G. K. Chesterton once said of Christianity that it had not been tried and found wanting, it had been found difficult and left untried. The same could be said of this deliberate development of the soul.
I found that each of these practices take time and commitment. They are work. I could be out calling on visitors instead of reading a spiritual classic. I could be counseling instead of meeting with my friend again. I could schedule a meeting for the time I planned to journal.
But I found I could overcome that voice if I used my datebook as my ally. Soulwork is work, part of my vocation, so I schedule it in my week along with my many other responsibilities.
And that attitude has helped me cut through the convoluted knot of my crowded schedule and once again take control-or better, allow Another to take control-of my life and ministry.
Copyright © 1992 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
