Real World Pastoral Concern

To my virtual parishioners and other readers: Here on this blog I remain the pastor. I’ve noted often enough my real calling is elder, but online the difference is minimal because of how virtual communication works. Were I free to choose, I’d be very happy to have someone take over the role of meat space pastor in my ministry and leave me the organizational task of elder. I remain confident this could happen. It won’t happen with our social and political context as it now appears to be.

That is, so long as people think the world will continue along its current path, no one will sense a need for what I envision. For quite some years I’ve known my training and preparation were for a more difficult life. Sitting fat and sassy in semi-retirement is not a happy situation, in the sense that it does little to stir my energies. It’s okay to come home and rest now and then, but this stuff got old a long time ago. Had I not been able to study and write, I would have continued in the suicidal depression where I was a decade ago. It’s not as if I know enough and have written it all out, but that without a change of context, there is little more I can say.

It troubles me some to realize that it’s highly likely I won’t be able to get busy with the work to which I’m called until things get rough on everyone everywhere. Pretty soon, I suspect there won’t be much of a place of quiet rest for anyone. Once the shit starts, there aren’t likely to be any breaks. I’m doomed to feast or famine, it seems, but nothing in between. Such is life; so we prepare. For a Christian Mystic, worldly sorrow is just background noise. We don’t belong here in the first place.

On the one hand, I’m prepared to play pastor in meat space, too. On the other hand, I’m praying God assigns me to serve alongside a pastor who can tolerate my beliefs. So far, no one I’ve encountered fits the bill. Actually, that’s a major understatement; I’ve faced at best humorous contempt, and often outright hostility, when I could get any attention at all. I’m not looking to be in charge of doctrine, but a partnership that makes room for what drives me.

I think it should be obvious there has to be some geographical proximity because my calling as elder simply has no meaning otherwise. If other people sense no need to hang out with me, the congregation remains just the tiny handful already involved here where I reside. The business of virtual elder-pastor brings but a highly restricted service that demands so very much of the participant. It’s doable, but not optimal. I can’t picture myself as an elitist who only works with the few who can operate on that level. The world is filled with marginal humanity who need shepherding and I can’t ignore their plight, seeing I am myself marginal in some ways. Too much of what needs doing requires physical proximity to help them.

So it’s the current structure and system that inhibits a shift I see as utterly necessary. People won’t view me as a shepherd until they sense the threat that I am trained to fight. That’s what I’m waiting for.