To be, or not to be (a minister)

What can, and cannot be set down in 150 days between Sundays

My friend and I were out at a gay bar a few weeks ago. We were talking to this girl, in all the usual ways girls talk to girls they've just met in a gay bar. Flirty, and easy, and fun.

But then she wanted to know more about us - what our jobs were. We tried every diversion that was not a complete lie. But instead of letting it drop, she was entertained, encouraged even. She pressed, she guessed, and her guesses got increasingly strange. It was getting weird. Eventually, the game felt silly, and I gave in.

“We’re preachers,” I said, picking what felt like a sexier noun than minister. Would pastor have been better?

It didn’t matter. It took a few sentences to get there, but before long I found myself listening to her story of religious trauma. Thick, and detailed, pouring out right there on the patio at one of the busiest bars in West Hollywood. I glanced toward my friend for help, but she had wisely turned toward the girl on her other side and was now fully occupied. I was the one who had broken the truth, so I was the one who would hear the confession.

I took a breath and nodded. “That sounds terrible.”

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There was a moment in seminary when I wondered if my life would forever be only God talk. Carri worried about it more than I did, but a part of me wanted it to be true. Relieve me forever of small talk, give me only the biggest conversations—yes, please.

I didn’t completely get then how the big talk would be mostly about other people’s biggest questions - their crisis, their longing, their loneliness, their gifts - which does not mean that ministry does not often meet me in all of these same places in myself. There is a flow of mutuality in this work, especially after a decade with the same community. It’s rare that I preach a sermon that doesn’t, in some way, try to answer my own deepest questions.

And still each year, there is a piece of my own disorientation and deeper desires that accumulate, as they just are too complicated and needy to be tended to by the people I serve. I hire a professional to hold these with me for an hour every other week. I talk to friends who are also ministers, the only ones who understand this peculiar loneliness—the way I spend my life tending to the most intimate parts of human existence, while necessarily neglecting my own.

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By the way, “the people I serve” is an increasingly confusing term, especially in these days of online church where any person might be tuning in at any time. When does someone become a part of the church? When do they start seeing me as their minister, with all the expectations that come with that role—even if they don’t realize they have them?

And I ask this knowing too well that most of the time, that is the case. People don’t have an awareness of these expectations. That is, until they have been broken, and the betrayal hits not just in the “people are sometimes disappointing” place, but in a God place.

This is not to confuse ministers with God—far from it. I’m wrestling with the opposite, which is our humanity.

I mean instead, that often in the human heart, people designated with religious authority hold power whether we mean for them to or not. We need for them to be something, and someone, in ways we don’t totally always understand, or even find logical, maybe even that we actively reject.

This is not the same as wishing for ministers to not reveal vulnerability, or to appear non-human or entirely unrelatable. We do want our ministers to be real people, have real questions, real struggles. We just don’t want to feel like those questions, or struggles in any way would compromise their capacity to fundamentally be there for us.

This is ultimately the agreement of ministry. It’s what we sign up for. It is the yes of ordination. And, as my friend and mentor the Rev. Nancy Bowen has said - it is the sort of yes that is like throwing up. You only do it because you can’t not.

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We often talk about the impossibility of true consent in ministerial relationships—that even when people say they want to release a minister from the role, to move into a more mutual relationship, they don’t always know what it will ask of them until it’s too late.

Just last week I sat with someone who attempted to make this shift years ago now, and move into a different sort of role. Except that even today we agreed: there is a part of the past relationship we had that will never be set down. I will always, in some way, be her minister. She will always, in some way, be someone I serve.

Except now, there’s a loss. We can’t go back to the singular clarity of roles. And so we keep trying to find our way to the blessing of who we are now.

We talk about this impossibility of consent for our people, but I also think consent is impossible for us too. Even though I would not, and truly could not, undo my yes to minstry, I also know that despite moments of realizations in seminary and other moments along the path, I could not have properly understood the sacrifice required. The ways that setting it all down, even in a gay bar in an entirely different city, can become impossible. How much ministry keeps pursuing you, even when you attempt to let it go.

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A few days ago, I cleaned out my closet. I sorted it into three piles:

1. Things I will wear during sabbatical.

2. Things I will (probably) wear after sabbatical

3. And then of course, stuff I am ready to let go of.

The items in category 2 went to the basement until I will retrieve them in August. (August! What even IS August?) Blazers and dress pants and every shirt that can only be washed on delicate. Also winter clothing because theoretically spring and summer are coming. (Of course we woke up to winter weather this morning. Sorry about that.)

All this to say, during the next few months, there are things I will be - have already - set down. And all of this—the setting down, the space between now and then—feels like practice. Practice for the day when I will set it all down for real.

Because despite what people may think, ministers are not the constant of the church. We are always temporary.

And if that’s true, then there must also be something at the core of me that is not minister. A center of gravity that belongs only to me. A place responsible in the ways all people are responsible, messy in the ways all people are messy, courageous in all the quiet ways that most people are courageous. Able to encounter every terrible thing that is happening in our world without clarity or a list of next steps.

That is, still confused and without sufficient words on Sundays, and flooded at various times with flights of annoyance, anger, desire, despair. And, sometimes, just a person in a gay bar, dancing and leaning in close, requiring no deeper processing, or true confessions.

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Setting Down
The schedule, which is of course mostly
the glorious tyranny of Sundays
to stop orbiting around the next
and the one after that
and after that
and -

To surrender the need
to make everything fit into a narrative
that you can speak out loud without
crumbling in dishonesty
within the next two to six days.

To stop wondering
if you have precisely the right number of words
to deliver meaning on the appropriate schedule—
the right amount of challenge and comfort,
poetry and practicality, passion and humility.

To find, somewhere in all of it,
the good news that is not
make-believe or made for someone else,
but ready and real—if you’ll just
receive -

And then, the need to let it all go
every fought-for word, and turn of
logic, every story mined from memory
every imperfect bottom line
as quickly as possible
to make room for the next Sunday
to plant itself inside you
with all the same tenderness.

To love the new day
before you are ready.

And also the days between Sundays
where the conversations at first feel
inconvenient compared to precious preparations
for this one upcoming hour

Eventually you learn that nothing
is a distraction or diversion
that even the plumbing has a place
in the story of life trying to sort itself
into all that is worthy
that is, the being church, together

You learn to find the sacred in
the ones who arrive
determined to misunderstand
the holiness in the insurance
that covers nothing
the song of organizing meetings
that are so profoundly dis-organized
and the prayer that is
holding space for the marriage
and the moving out
the blessing that is
being the first to know
the diagnosis, the divorce,
the despair, the discovery
and the miracle of life that arrives
as if there is some plan
after all

Set all of it down
every joy and injustice
learn a new center of gravity
even for a time
make space for all this holiness
to be quiet and without deadline
for a while
listen for the grief that is yours
practice following another’s call to action
set down the microphone
preside over rituals
that make sense only to you
want unreasonable things
and stay out late on Saturday nights
singing songs that have no purpose
but joy