This month we asked our bloggers about how they view the role of pastor, how they understand their pastoral identity, or to share what a pastor really does all week. Here’s how they responded.
This month’s topic reminded me of a similar blog, written years ago here on this site. Scott Hauser penned a few hundred words about his typical day as a pastor (“The ten best parts”). He was my age and also a father. I saw my own vocation in his description of his day: how he had an honest conversation with a parishioner about something meaningful, then read an article by Carol Howard Merritt about something thought-provoking and was anticipating a meeting that evening having to do with something that would make a difference in his community. I have a hard time remembering the details because I was so sad. This same pastor had just died suddenly of a brain tumor.
There’s a picture of him standing at the font and throwing water in the air like Lebron throws chalk above his head. The baptism water forms a perfect arc over Scott’s head and the look on his face says, “I am doing what I was meant to do.”
For me, most days include coffee and coffee-stained books. Most days I read a little here and there — this in the Bible and that in the larger culture. I pray for the needs of the church at noon, then send letters in the mail to flesh-and-blood people I had called to mind. So much of prayer is a calling to mind. A parishioner makes an appointment or just drops by, lingering in the open door of my study. I pay attention and, occasionally, might speak words that (I hope) honor the trust placed in me.
I listen and study as much as I do to be able to say with as much integrity as I can, “I don’t know.”
The poet John Keats defined negative capability as “being in uncertainty, mysteries, and doubt without any irritable reaching after fact or reason.” I have no explanation for the death of my friend hit by the car or my other friend’s miscarriage that led to her divorce, much less the cosmic “why” concerning the death of that young pastor.
I read somewhere that the legendary scholar Thomas Aquinas asked for his thousands of pages of written theology to be burned as he lay dying. This actually brings me comfort, for surely this means that it’s not up to me to have the answers.
I think a pastor is a hunter-gatherer-collector of stories, and that stories are not answers but the very best prayers. And so, I will share this one like throwing baptism water into the air:
This grandmother and I became fast friends because we can quote Anne Lamott: Take it bird by bird, buddy; laughter is carbonated holiness. Recently, I baptized her grandsons—all three of them. And she sent me a card with a big heart on the cover in which she wrote that the best part of the sacrament was when I blessed each of her boys – “May the Spirit of God dwell mightily within you, now and forevermore” – and I turned up the volume on the word mightily. The emphasis was just perfect to her ear. I read her card in my office to a Sufjan Stevens song with the afternoon light slanting through the blinds. The next time I saw this grandmother was at preschool, and I yelled, “Mightily!” She thundered like a revival preacher, “MIGHTILY!” This caused her grandsons and my sons to screech to a halt upon their breakneck tricycles and join our laughter — a carbonated holiness, which, upon reflection, has made me whisper thanks that, day by day, I am doing what I was meant to do.
ANDREW TAYLOR-TROUTMAN is pastor of Chapel in the Pines Presbyterian Church, a congregation in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and has a certificate in narrative healthcare. His recent essays have been published online at Mockingbird and his poetry at Bearings. He and his wife, Ginny, have three children.