Status Updates From The Pastor as Minor Poet: T...

Some good observations.

“The hard part isn’t finding something new or clever in the text. What is difficult is finding the congregation in the same text over and over…those in the pews will not be startled by the power of Gods works unless the preacher is.”

“Great and almost epic ideals such as heroism, sacrifice, passion, and the pursuit of truth are hard to find in literature today because they are hard to find in the nervous, reactive society our literature depicts.”

“Only scarred-over wounds contribute to gravitas in a pastors soul; there are no healing scars for hurts that continue to fester in secrecy.”

Unless it takes a hard turn in the home stretch this is the most meaningful meditation on priestly/pastoral vocation I’ve read. That’s not to say it’s exhaustive, or even the best place to start. But a decade into people calling me, “pastor” and three years into, “reverend” or “father” this is the message I needed to hear about my vocation.

“No one in seminary taught me how to walk around the flat plains of routine conversations about ordinary things…my mistake in those early years was assuming that if people weren’t in crisis then I had little to offer them.”

“[Pastors] souls are crowded with all who have made their way deep inside. And of course, there is also the nagging presence of those holy words that will not go away. This is how pastors love their congregations — they take them into their souls, where they carry on both sides of a conversation between the people and their God.”

“Pastors aren’t afforded the luxury of skimming over the top of their own losses, thinking, “That was no big deal.” The big deal is learning how to dig through loss to find the hints of hope — not a cheery optimism, but deep, from-the-bottom-of-the-soul hope. After years of excavation through their own losses, pastors learn how to find this sacred subtext in others.“