Calling

Rev. Lillian Daniel

Senior Minister of First Congregational Church, UCC, in Glen Ellyn, Illinois.

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March 26, 2010

Excerpts FROM This Odd and Wondrous Calling

Excerpts FROM This Odd and Wondrous Calling by Lillian Daniel and Martin Copenhaver. (©2009 Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, Grand Rapids, Michigan. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, all rights reserved.)

Casting Out Demons

By Rev. Lillian Daniel

I had always imagined that the first time I tried on the ministerial role it would be in the pulpit, but instead I was in a mental hospital.

On the first day of my first seminary internship, I walked into the Mental Health Center with a tentative step. After passing through locked doors, I found myself in the ward looking for my supervisor, the chaplain. “You’re going to be working here as a chaplain?” a nurse asked, as if she could not believe it. “You seem too young.” I was twenty-three.

She told me to wait with the patients. At this inpatient facility in a New England town, university professors sat next to the homeless in a common area, bound only by their shared struggles with mental illness. Other staff stared right through me, as if I were simply another graduate student recently admitted to the ward as a patient.

I was enormously relieved when the chaplain opened her office door and let me in. “I don’t think anyone is going to take me seriously here as a chaplain,” I told her. “A couple of the staff already said as much when I was waiting out there. I wish I were already ordained.”

“What difference would that make?” she asked.“Well, they all respect you when you’re ordained,” I explained. She gave me a hard look. But after twenty minutes on the job, I had some other important questions to ask her.

“What am I supposed to be doing in this internship, anyway?” I asked. “Frankly, I don’t see what I can do to help these people before their medications kick in.”“Just wander the floor,” she told me. “Talk to the patients. Embody the loving presence of Christ. Make conversation.”

I was horrified. Making conversation at a church coffee hour is hard enough. The idea of making conversation in a mental hospital set my heart beating fast.“Can’t I lead a spirituality program or a worship service?” I asked.“You’ll get to do that eventually,” she said. “But why don’t you start by leaving this office and going out to talk to that gentleman?”

I looked out from the womb of her office window to see a lone man rocking back and forth on the couch, muttering and shaking his head, as if to disagree with his own last comment. The idea of making conversation with someone who was already making conversation with himself did not appeal to me, but I ventured out.

It turned out he was more than willing to talk. I felt as if I were drowning in his agitated words about angels, an angry God, and the Central Intelligence Agency. I found myself correcting him but later I found out that my role was not to point out the difference between fact and fiction. Instead I would listen to conspiracy theories that made me laugh, to paranoid worries that made me sad, and to ideas about God that would make me cringe.

At this facility, the staff met as a team to review cases. I learned as much about medical culture as I did about mental illness. While we called ourselves a “team,” this hospital hierarchy made the church hierarchy look like the work of amateurs. It was easy to see there were tensions among the different healers, from the aides to the social workers to the psychiatrist who shared with many of the patients the habit of wearing her dark sunglasses while indoors.

I suspected the chaplains were at the bottom of this hierarchy, since some of the medical staff seemed to lump the delusional patients together with anyone who professed faith. After all, we both talked about and trusted in things that were unseen. I would complain to my supervisor that none of the staff listened to me. Her response was always the same. She sent me out to listen to the patients.

How cruel it seemed to me that people in the grip of delusion often turned to God, only to dredge up some punishing vision. How interesting it was that the deluded seemed to relate to the devil so much more strongly than those we call sane. In my mainline Protestant upbringing, I don’t think I’d ever once heard a sermon preached about Jesus casting out demons, but that was the story they wanted to talk about on the floor.

As the patients grew more used to me in the role of student chaplain, they began to confide in me the things they could not tell the rest of the staff. “Whatever you do, avoid the water fountains on this floor. The water is poisoned,” that rocking man told me. “I’m only telling you this because you’re a woman of God.” If this was pastoral authority, it wasn’t what I had in mind.

After months of wandering the halls, making small talk amidst the bizarre talk, I finally got to lead my first worship service. This was not only my first time leading worship at the hospital; it was my first time leading worship ever.

A small group gathered in a dark conference room. They were the usual lively mix you find in a mental health facility, professionals and parents, street people and suicide attempters, the addicts and the alienated. They were the people Jesus cared about.

One large woman came into the room early and set up on the conference table an elaborate paper construction made of postcards and clippings, every photograph featuring Princess Grace of Monaco.I took a deep breath and began to read my carefully prepared 25-minute sermon on Galatians. A man began to cough and then shake. Another woman shifted in boredom. A cocaine addict interrupted me.“Are we allowed to ask questions?” he said in the middle of my remarks. I nodded, keeping my finger on the page so as not to lose my place in the sermon. “Exactly how long is this part where you talk on and on supposed to last?” he asked.

Now the large woman felt free to interject. “I’d like for us to pray to Princess Grace,” she said.“Well, certainly, we can pray for the world’s leaders and we will pray for Princess Grace as well.” I said, gently correcting her with a preposition.

“I don’t want to pray for Princess Grace,” she said, gesturing to her makeshift altar. “I said I wanted to pray to Princess Grace.”“Well, we’re not going to,” I explained. “We pray for Princess Grace. We pray to God.”“So give me one good reason for that,” she said.

By now I had lost my place in my notes on Galatians for good. Theological narcissism took hold of me yet again, and I wondered what God was telling me about my future in parish ministry in this, my first sermon ever. The room was erupting into chaos as began my sermon over again, this time with more volume, to drown out the theological hecklers.

And finally, it hit me. This would be no different if I had a collar, if I had the title of “Reverend,” or if Jesus Christ himself was sitting next to me with a bog sign announcing me as God’s gift to the world. These people were ill, they were suffering, and I should have been thinking about that all these months, not my pastoral authority.

I put the sermon aside, to a few sighs of relief from the congregation. “Does anyone want to sing a hymn?” I asked and they smiled. Finally, I was offering something they needed. We spent the rest of the session singing, interrupted by their spontaneous testimonies about devils, UFOs, the Book of Revelation. And other topics I had neglected to touch upon in my own remarks. But mostly we just sang.

Afterwards, they didn’t want to leave. We had our own version of after-church fellowship as we admired the photos of Princess Grace and helped the woman dismantle her portable shrine.

“Church was good today, Pastor,” one man said on the way out.“I’m not really a pastor,” I explained to his back, and his shrugging shoulders. He was out the door but, in the interests of full disclosure, I had to keep talking to the others. “I still have to finish school, you know, do this internship with you guys, pass through the denominational ordination process…”“Whatever,” the Princess Grace worshipper said, patting me on the back. “We’ll see you next week; will you be a pastor by then?”

I have since decided her question was a rhetorical one. She saw through me. As surely as she wrestled with her demons, that year I was wrestling with mine. Was I called? Was there a place for me in the church? Would anyone ever respect me? My questions were not significantly different from the patients’. We are all in need of healing.

I did eventually become a pastor. It wasn’t a one-and-only moment. It wasn’t that moment, or the next week, or even the moment of my ordination, two years later. It was happening slowly, in all the weeks over all the years.

After ordination, I never took to wearing a collar. My supervisor’s words rang in my ears. Not the ones about the collar (giving me, a seminarian, permission to wear one, if that’s what I thought I needed to do), although today I smile at her wisdom.

What has stayed with me more is her advice in my times of vocational doubt. Every time she just sent me back out to listen to the people. They were the only ones who could turn me into a pastor.

Staying in Church

By the Rev. Martin Copenhaver

So many of my close friends have left the pastoral ministry of late that I am beginning to feel like a character in an Agatha Christie mystery. As all the other characters start disappearing I cannot help but wonder, “Who will be next?” It has prompted me to consider again why I remain in pastoral ministry and why I still cherish this vocation.

I have been in pastoral ministry too long now to dismiss the challenges. It is not hard to identify with some of the frustrations that some of these departing pastors express: the sense of confinement, the relentlessness of the role, and especially the press of needy and quarrelsome people. I also recognize that some of the reasons given for leaving are, with the slightest turn of the kaleidoscope, some of the same reasons I stay in pastoral ministry.

On a number of occasions I have hiked in the interior reaches of the Grand Canyon. To me it is a holy place, the most vaulted of natural Gothic cathedrals. It’s not hard to feel close to God there, not only because of what is present, but also due to what is largely absent—the demands of a living community. The California condors make no demands of the living. The rollicking streams offer only comforting words. There is no need to raise money for a sanctuary roof because the blue sky has already supplied it.

But to me, the affirmation that God can be found outside of church never seemed like much of a claim. The true wonder is that God can be found inside a church, among the quirky, flawed and broken people who may have little in common and yet are bound to each other. What an unlikely setting in which to encounter God! But the Christian God seems to like to surprise us by showing up in the most unpromising places, like a man from Nazareth and in a motley gathering in a people known as church.

As a pastor, I am expected to care about people I may not necessarily care for. It is assumed that I will act with compassion even when I may not feel at all compassionate. I am expected to forgive when on my own I may be inclined to hold a grudge. Obviously, Jesus enjoined all of his followers to act in these ways, but in most congregations the expectations of a pastor in this regard are particularly high. And I am grateful for that. It is not easy to “seek and serve Christ in all persons,” of course, but even attempting to do so has enlarged my capacity for compassion.

One does not have to be from a tradition in which the priest is called “Father” to find some resonances of the parental role in pastoral ministry. A pastor nurtures, feels, guides, and teaches. There is a special bond between pastor and people. The pastor is charged with caring for the people in every circumstance, in and out of season.

Nevertheless, parenthood is not the most apt, nor certainly the most healthy, image for the role of the pastor. We could take issue with the image on theological grounds, of course, but it is simply too exhausting to think of oneself as a parent to a congregation. The challenge of parenting my own two children is enough without adopting the hundreds of parishioners who are a part of my congregation.

Instead, I have come to view my role as more like that of a midwife, someone who is trained to assist in the birthing process. A midwife performs her role in a whole range of ways, sometimes by coaching the parents, and other times by providing direct assistance, and often, when little needs to be done, by standing by in wonder and awe.

We pastors assist people in “giving birth” to a new or deepened relationship with God. We are not the center of the action, or even key players in the drama. Like midwives, our role can be quite important, but it is limited nonetheless. We perform our role in a variety of ways—for instance by teaching, leading worship, and visiting the sick. We tell the Christian story, coach and encourage, listen and pray. What unites all these roles and activities is that each provides an opportunity to encounter God.

It is a joy simply to be present at a birth. It is something even more—a real privilege—to play a role, however small or incidental, in that birth. Actually, in my work as a pastor, often I am not aware that anything so momentous is taking place. But then someone will report, fresh from a kind of birth, that a particular worship service helped her experience Jesus Christ as a living presence, as if for the first time. Or a young person returning from a church service project will tell the congregation what it was like to encounter Jesus Christ disguised as one of the poor. Or someone will tell me that my prayers at his hospital bed provided ongoing comfort because, when I departed, it was as if I left God with him. Or I will conduct a funeral and the congregation will be so obviously hungry for whatever words might sustain them that they will resemble a flock of baby birds with beaks open wide. To be able to offer the words of promise that their souls are aching to hear at such a time feels like a privilege beyond deserving.

In each of these instances I am very aware that I did not make anything happen. My role, like that of a midwife, was limited. Nevertheless, something I did not provide, something clearly beyond me, that “something” called the presence of God, was at work. On such occasions I feel like a wick that is in awe that it used by a flame.

So, much of the time, I feel like an invited guest to special places where wondrous things happen. I am not invited because I am a special person, or because I have a particular set of skills, or because I have greater faith than anyone else does. Nevertheless, I am invited to those places in people’s lives because I have accepted God’s call to do this holy work.

A few years back I wrote an article that argued that the pastoral life is a form of the good life. I commended pastoral ministry as a uniquely rewarding way of life, which, indeed, I have found it to be. I showed the article to a friend who is a pastor, who had only one comment: “Well, it is a good life, if you are called to it.” And of course he is right. Pastoral ministry is a job laden with challenges and in certain ways it seems to get more difficult every year. So it is not the kind of job anyone would likely pick out from classified ads or at a jobs fair. Then again, if it were a job instead of a calling, I probably would have quit long ago.

My friend’s comment on my article captures an essential reason why people can have such different experiences of pastoral ministry. It still comes down to the matter of call. So I am able both to affirm my friends’ decision to leave pastoral ministry and to reconfirm my own commitment to pastoral ministry.

On the occasion of his retirement, Harry Emerson Fosdick said, “If I had a thousand lives to live in this century, I would go into parish ministry with every one of them.” That is perhaps the strongest affirmation of a call to pastoral ministry that I know. I’m not sure I could go quite as far. If I had a thousand lives to live in this century, I might use one or two to do something else, like become a jazz pianist or an NBA point guard. But, with just one life to live on earth, I am grateful that God called me to be a pastor. And I am staying.