Tuesdays

I was a new pastor, only recently secure in my vocation as pastor, and still in the early days of realizing what my workplace, my congregation, consisted of and what was actually involved in going to work every day in this workplace. For a number of years I had assumed that I would be a professor, with students in a classroom. But then the Pastor John of Patmos epiphany in New York City catalyzed my identity as pastor. Pastor was my vocational home ground. Drawn into it by many previously unrecognized threads, I entered a life centered in sanctuary and congregation, contextualized by growing up on the sacred ground of Montana.

The two years of Tuesday mornings further clarified my new working life as pastor. I joined the group of sixteen out of a sense of community service. I, along with my clergy companions, was asked to help the mental-health professionals at this time of social and moral confusion and distress, and it seemed like a good thing to do. In the process I was introduced to the complex field of counseling and psychology.

The pastoral counseling movement in the American church had been in session thirty years or so at this time. Most seminaries were giving at least some training in dealing with the emotional needs of people. But not my seminary. I had only peripheral acquaintance with it and not much interest. I was intoxicated with the miracle and mystery of language-American English to begin with, but Hebrew and Greek not far behind. I was intrigued by the complexities involved in understanding all the operations of the Trinity and the many dimensions in which these operations entered human lives.

But people in particular-it seems odd to even say this now-I had pretty much taken for granted. I liked some of them and didn't like others. I tried to be polite to those I didn't like. I had my life to live and they had theirs. Those close to me, my wife and children in particular, I took delight in knowing in more and more detail, and if I came across details I didn't like, I brushed them aside, pretending that they didn't exist, or clumsily tried to eliminate them by rebuke or "good advice."

And now I was gathering a congregation to worship God. When the invitation came to join the Phipps Clinic project to prepare pastors to serve the community in the way Dr. Hansen would guide us, I didn't anticipate that it would have anything directly to do with understanding my work with the congregation. It was a time of social disruption when many of the landmarks, family and neighborhood security systems, were either eroding or falling apart. I thought I was just being helpful, doing good Samaritan work, on those Tuesday mornings. Maybe something like a payback for the good Samaritan work psychiatrist Dr. Wall had done to help me out as a pastor.

What happened, though, is that it became a major factor in understanding congregation and the nature of my work in it.

I was in the process of coming to terms with my congregation, just as they were: their less-than-developed emotional life, their lack of intellectual curiosity, their complacent acceptance of a world of consumption and diversion, their seemingly peripheral interest in God. I wasn't giving up on them. I didn't intend to leave them where I found them. By now I was prepared to enter a long process of growth in which they would discover for themselves the freshness of the Spirit giving vitality to the way they loved and worked and laughed and played. And I was finding areas of common ground that made us fellow pilgrims, comrades in arms in recognizing unexpected shards of beauty in worship and scripture and one another. I was learning to not impose my expectations of what I hoped for them but rather let them reveal to me, as they were able, who they were. I was becoming a pastor who wasn't in a hurry.

Meanwhile on these Tuesdays I was being given another way to give definition to congregation. In our Tuesday seminars I was given a vocabulary and imagination to understand the people in my congregation as problems. This was refreshing. Here was a way of giving clarity to this haphazard gathering of people with various, mostly undefined, aspirations to get in on something more than they were experiencing, something that had to do, maybe, with a vaguely imagined God. Defined as problems, my congregation gave me an agenda that I could do something about. Problems have names: anxiety, alcoholism, depression, narcissism, Oedipus complex, transference, counter transference. Once there was a name for the problem, you could do something about it.

On Sundays, as I looked over my congregation, they often appeared as a gray assemblage of weakly motivated people hoping for something, as yet undefined, that might fill in the gaps in their jobs and their marriages. On Tuesdays I was being given an entirely different way to define my congregation-as problems. People with problems, men with baggage, women with neuroses. I was fascinated. The intricacy of emotional problems was intriguing. I listened with new ears and heard with heightened attention. If problems were the problem, problems could be fixed. I found that I was good at this. I had an aptitude for dealing with people in need. I liked helping them. I liked helping spouses understand and work on their marriages. I liked helping parents understand and guide their children. I liked helping people understand and forgive their parents. I was soon devouring the writings of Erik Erikson and Carl Jung, Bruno Bettelheim and Viktor Frankl.

Being a pastor put me amid people with needs: marital needs, family needs, identity needs. I was doing good work, work that gave me satisfaction, work that was recognized and praised by others as good work. I didn't know at the time how close I was to abandoning my haphazardly intended but finally achieved pastoral vocation. It was a time when pastors all over the country were abandoning their vocation to take up counseling. I could have ended up among them.

 

2 Comments »

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