Travis Lowe’s Reviews > The Pastor as Minor Poet: Texts and Subtexts in the Ministerial Life (The Calvin Institute of Christian Worship Liturgical Studies > Status Update

“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.”