Ministry Remnants: Pray for Your Pastor

Ruminations on a Sunday Morning...

What does a pastor do early Sunday morning?

• pray
• wonder
• worry (yes, pastor's do that, too)
• pray
• prepare
• think of details like lights and announcements and music
• worry about who no longer comes and why
• pray
• worry about normal struggles with health and family and finances and planning
• wonder again how it is possible to effectively preach, lead, love
• struggle to affirm the expected confidence in God from the inside out
• (the list is long)

On a Sunday morning early when I need to be doing something other than random ruminations, I remind all who may see this that the pastor is human, too. Yes, pastor's have responsibility like you have responsibility, and no one is holding a gun to the preacher's head. It is a 'chosen' mix of love and duty and least of all should a pastor seek pity.

Prayer, however, is in order, for every Sunday morning is a reminder that this is God's work and sheer folly to engage without His help.

Bottom line? 

Pray for your pastor today.

- He deserves criticism, no doubt, and heaps enough on himself. 

- He's not world-class or even close, that is true, but he wishes he were. 

- He may overlook you and your concerns: this grieves him. Try to find it in your heart to forgive. 

- He has too many things going. Scold him for it if you must, but remember he is probably like you: Do you have too many things going?

Your pastor loves you, loves the church, and wakes every Sunday with a mix of trepidation and hope:

"I can do this!"

"Are you kidding?!"

"My head hurts, I am not yet ready -- I can't do this."

"Yes, you can!"

The voice goes silent and the pastor presses on.

Pray for your pastor today.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, 1918-2008

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, 1918-2008

"One word of truth will outweigh the whole world"

So once said Alexander Solzhenitsyn , Russian dissident, Nobel Prize laureate in Literature, exhile to US for 16 years, hero in his native Russia. He is perhaps most well known for The Gulag Archipelago, his account of the Soviet prison system in which he lived for many years. While I am not a Solzhenitsyn scholar, of course, I am in the ranks of a great many who find him an inspiration and modern prophet.

I read some of his Oak and Calf, a sort of literary bio. Among the more remarkable accounts therein is his record of how he preserved his writing during the years when his work was forbidden. He literally memorized — if my memory serves — entire books. He also would write in tiny print and save the rolled MS in cannisters which were then buried.

I often wished I had taken time to travel to his American home in Vermont in the ’80’s though it’s doubtful I could have met him. And, of course, he had his detractors in recent years — you can find a dissenting view here.

But on any account his life is remarkable: from a young soldier on the front lines in WWII to political prisoner to father (one of his sons is Ignat Solzhenitsyn, conductor and composer in Philadephia) to dissident author, Nobel laureate, exhile, a Soviet non-person, modern prophet, American resident, returning hero to his beloved homeland in 1994.

He seemd like the aged sage that would always be here — and so he is for some time to come if we will have the sense to remember the kind of thundering and wise things he said. I have excerpted below some of his statements from the famous speech he gave at Harvard on June 8, 1978 . It was not what Harvard wanted to hear, but they, and we, need to take to heart what he said.

I was sad to hear of his passing. Ironically I have been reading his novel Cancer Ward not knowing he had died. My friend, Steve Blakemore, posted about his death on his excellent Third Millenium faith email which you can join here . He quoted from Solzhenistsyn’s 1978 Harvard Speech and I enjoyed re-looking at it. I hope you will have time to savor — and receive a helpful jolt — from the comments excerpted below.

It is time, in the West, to defend not so much human rights as human obligations. Mere freedom does not in the least solve all the problems of human life and it even adds a number of new ones. . .

We have placed too much hope in political and social reforms, only to find out that we were being deprived of our most precious possession: our spiritual life.

After the suffering of decades of violence and oppression, the human soul longs for things higher, warmer and purer than those offered by today’s mass living habits, introduced by the revolting invasion of publicity, by TV stupor and by intolerable music.

If humanism were right in declaring that man is born to be happy, he would not be born to die.
It is not possible that assessment of the President’s performance be reduced to the question of how much money one makes or of unlimited availability of gasoline.

People also have the right not to know, and it is a much more valuable one. The right not to have their divine souls stuffed with gossip, nonsense, vain talk. A person who works and leads a meaningful life does not need this excessive burdening flow of information.

Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic disease of the 20th century and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press. In-depth analysis of a problem is anathema to the press.
Such as it is, however, the press has become the greatest power within the Western countries, more powerful than the legislature, the executive and the judiciary.

Socialism of any type and shade leads to a total destruction of the human spirit and to a leveling of mankind into death.

Very well known representatives of your society, such as George Kennan, say: we cannot apply moral criteria to politics. Thus we mix good and evil, right and wrong and make space for the absolute triumph of absolute Evil in the world. On the contrary, only moral criteria can help the West…. There are no other criteria.

On the way from the Renaissance to our days we have enriched our experience, but we have lost the concept of a Supreme Complete Entity which used to restrain our passions and our irresponsibility.
Such a tilt of freedom in the direction of evil…was evidently born primarily out of a humanistic and benevolent concept according to which there is no evil inherent to human nature; the world belongs to mankind and all the defects of life are caused by wrong social systems which must be corrected.
Destructive and irresponsible freedom has been granted boundless space. Society appears to have little defense against the abyss of human decadence, such as, for example, misuse of liberty for moral violence against young people, motion pictures full of pornography, crime and horror.

I have spent all my life under a communist regime and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed….[However, yours is the opposite error, so I would say],whenever the tissue of life is woven of legalistic relations, there is an atmosphere of moral mediocrity, paralyzing man’s noblest impulses.

On Javert, Breaking Rules, Love, and the Easy Burden

Take my yoke upon you. Let me teach you, because I am humble and gentle at heart,

and you will find rest for your souls.(Mt. 11:29)

In Rafael Yglesias' screen play of Victor Hugo's timeless Les Miserables, Javert, the soul-less villain, finally captured the convict Valjean for good and has a gun to his head.

“It's a pity that rules don't allow me to be merciful,” Javert says. “I've tried to live my life without breaking a single rule.”

The line is thunder to the human heart. We imagine the keeping of rules is a good thing and the breaking of them is bad. We are right, and suffer the pride or shame that goes with either.

And yet Javert, it seems, had made rightness his highest goal. Separate from God, rightness builds its own prison, an echo-chamber of moral superiority that, in the end, can justify almost anything. Javert had devoted his life to rightness and in the end his life was forfeit at his own hand: he self-destructed in suicide. Javert found himself in a vortex from which not even Valjean's mercy could save.

And how else could life end for us if we make our supreme goal – the idol to which we daily bow – “living without breaking a rule?” Rules beget rules and crush the soul. Mercy cannot breath, and eventually dies.

A dear friend once said this to me in a different way. Listening to my struggle through tears and meandering, he said, “Sounds like you are in a valley.”

"Yes," I replied. "But what are we doing looking at all of this stuff, misunderstandings, stubbornesses, ideals all but crushed. What is this!?”

“We are in the laundry room, sorting.”

I liked the analogy, helpful instead of condemning. I wanted to say something about diapers and their messes, for that was the kind of 'laundry' at hand.

“I think you are fighting a phantom,” he continued. “I think the answer will be found when you quit straining. I think the answer is gentle, and you've not tried that much. How 'bout gentle?”

I didn't know what to say and then the conversation was abruptly interrupted.

And so I have often wondered: “Gentle. What does that mean?”

The Canadian teacher and psychologist, Jordan Peterson, gives a clue in one of his life rules: “Learn to treat yourself like someone for whom you are responsible and for whom you care a great deal.”

Really?! “Care for a great deal?” I care for myself well enough, especially my bodily wants. But can I be tender with myself? Can I forgive? Can I begin to ignore, and eventually quit the negative, perversely addictive self-talk? I think Peterson has it right. If I cared for someone else a great deal, how would I treat them? The answer gives guidance for how I should treat myself.

And so, how does this come around to Javert? Javert was his own cruel task-master. There was no room for love, only rules. He could not show mercy to himself, nor, in turn, to others. He self-flaggelated, and in it all a creature emerged whose only goal was to avoid breaking rules.

This is like Lewis's deep remark about selflessness. “We have it backwards” – my paraphrase. “The emphasis must not be on avoiding selfishness but on showing love, learning to demonstrate care and consideration for the needs of others.” Merely avoiding selfishness, like Javert's avoidance of rule-breaking, defines our life by a negative. It is a trajectory of despair. Love could not save him because he was bound to rules.

How we need this lesson. Do I care about others, or do I care about being right? We can live both of course. But we will find, I think, we are most right when we lay aside a singular focus on rightness and consider those around us. In this, love sets us free and we find the gentle way, learning to be free of striving, learning to be gentle with ourselves so we can, in turn, be gentle with others. How I long to learn this good way, this easy way to carry burdens, this letting go of the need to be right.

God is with us, and Jesus calls us, so beautifully, to His easy burden. That's the one I receive today, with gladness. And I want to be together on that journey with my wife and family, and with all who share this wonderful gift of life.

On being "Merely Dead"

Wonderful lines from Wendell Berry

What hard travail God does in death

What hard travail God does in death!
He strives in sleep, in our despair,
And all flesh shudders underneath
The nightmare of His sepulcher.

The earth shakes, grinding its deep stone;
All night the cold wind heaves and pries;
Creation strains sinew and bone
Against the dark door where He lies.

The stem bent, pent in seed, grow straight
And stands. Pain breaks in song. Surprising
The merely dead, graves fill with light
Like opened eyes. He rests in rising.

Keeping Relational Reverb in Check

My friend, Roger, explained how reverb works in recording. “While playing in a room with normal recording, that is recording as heard in 'the house', there will be reverb: the normal echoes and bouncing of sound the ear is accustomed to. Then, when the recorded music is played back in a room, especially the same room, the reverb is doubled and can be unmanageable to the ear.”

The same happens in our relationships, especially those 'in the house.' We have all kinds of reverb going on in our souls and minds. We see shortcomings that trip us up. We can't quit a bad habit, we feel cantankerous most of the time, or we are self-critical without relief. This creates reverb. It bounces around within and drags us down in self-imposed defeat.

Then, the inevitable happens. Our faults, for which we already feel deep pain and which cause no small bit of internal noise, irritate those closest to us. Well-meaning, having borne with us for long days and years, they do not mean to add to the noise. But often that is exactly what happens. Either we assume they feel this way, or they actually say it: “Must you really keep doing that? Is something wrong?”

Now the sound is doubled and spills out, either silently or in painful words: “Want to know what's wrong? I'll tell you what's wrong. You! If you would leave me alone we'd be ok!”

And so it goes, one pain feeding another, rebounding, unmanageable, painful to the ear, devastating to the soul.

There is a better way. Take it to the Lord in prayer. Let him heal both the self-talk and the behaviour it breeds.

How does he do this? Time, talking, others, learning. There is no other way but the the patience and quiet and taking it on the chin when others object, learning to help them bear the burden you yourself have helped cause. Without this we never grow. But when we give up our selfish desires and refuse to insist on our own way we die the death of Psalm 126, putting the seed of self in the ground.

And then, as with all seeds, “the corn of wheat” comes to life and we find a harvest of joy, bitter tears forgotten.

Relational reverb is real and when it doubles we can't live with it for long. Learning the peace of Christ brings the sound of forgiveness which doubles joy instead of pain.

The Indispensable Attitude of Gratitude

Today is the anniversary of my father's passing in 1993. We miss him every day, with gratitude for all he was and gave. In the goodness of God his life lives on and we want to do the same, live beyond our years in the lives of those we love.

Below is a piece that ran in the local paper for a weekly ministerial article to which I contribute. Some family asked me to share it and I do so in the happy memory of my Dad, Larry Huff.

The Indispensable Attitude of Gratitude

The joy of Thanksgiving has been deep in my soul since a teen-age November on my Grandpa's Kansas farm. While Grandma, Mom and others prepared a feast in the warm kitchen, Grandpa fired up the old John Deere and powered a buzz saw with a long, heavy belt. My Dad and Uncles joined in and we cut limbs for hours. I loved the work so much it hurt, a deep joy I hoped would never end, a sense of grasping the immortal for a moment before it is gone. Those times are the right stuff of life. They feed body and soul: teach, nurture, strengthen. They remind us why it is good to be alive, and they keep us going, even on our worst days.

I needed that thirteen years later when my Dad died the day after Thanksgiving. He had been recovering from a terrible injury and was due to begin rehab the next week. And then the call came: “Your Dad suffered a seizure and did not recover. I am so sorry.” My wife and I embraced and wandered through the mist, arranging a flight back to Kansas. In those hours my Grandma called, the one who always had the right words. “I am sure there is nothing I can say to help you work through these moments.” And she was right. There were no words. In the midst of hopeful expectation, two young boys still at home with Mom, one grandchild and another on the way, my Dad was gone. This was zero-option full stop, the deep pain of soul known by those who have lost.

And so I reflect on this at Thanksgiving time and wonder how we navigate life with these extremes. Joys that make life rich, mixed with pains that can make one wonder, on the worst days, why we are even here. A simple answer would not be an answer at all, but we seek answers still. In Peter Kreeft's winsome book “Making Sense out of Suffering” he wisely refuses to give answers but instead offers “clues” to this problem. And so it is true. We make it through with clues, possibilities, hopes. Such is the nature of faith, an impossible belief that the impossible, after all, will come to pass.

The remarkable British journalist of a century past, G. K. Chesterton, offered clues about the whole gamut of life, and he was often keen to remind us gratitude is indispensable. “Gratitude,” he said, “being nearly the greatest of human duties, is also nearly the most difficult.”  

Indeed how can we be grateful in the midst of death, suffering and disappointment? One clue is to remember life itself is an incomparable gift, something we could never create and which we should celebrate with feasts and work and laughter. Even watching – (better to play!) – football helps us celebrate this gift of life and remember our blessings.

What can you and I do to cultivate this vital attitude of gratitude? Here are a few things I will try this year:

• Find someone who feels the ache of loneliness and share a gift and a listening ear. “To the world you may be one person, but to one person you may be the world.” The best gift you have is yourself. When you give you affirm the value of yourself and others, and you say “thank you” to the God who gave us both.
• Dare to celebrate, even with a feast. But don't enjoy gifts and pleasures without gratitude for God who gave them. After all, we do not create them on our own, and thinking we do is it's own painful dead end.
• Say grace before a meal, even if you are not accustomed to it. This simple gesture reminds us our life and livelihood is a gift, and it directs our attention to the Giver, helping us see the world as it really is.

Do you long for the eternal, the joy for which there is no word, only yearning? I do. And I believe Thanksgiving offers a window, a reminder that we can know this joy even in the midst of death and loss. But we can never see the world aright without this “difficult duty”, gratitude to God who made life possible. This year I want to learn again to be thankful and taste the surpassing joy of a grateful heart. 

One of my favorite pictures of my Dad, ever in my heart.

New Post n.i.

"Effective writing springs from the creative joy of the writer. Readers gain the most when they are an unintended audience; not a target, but a happy participant in another's joy."

When one insists on inspiration to write, one insists on not writing much. Thus, I am a learner at writing n.i., that is, "no inspiration."

Of course the kind of writing I now indulge is mere string-pushing. I take a thought, such as the idea of writing itself, and push it as one would push a string. It goes in unpredictable ways and yet remains connected to itself.

This, as observed elsewhere, is close to real essay style. Establish a beginning thought and pursue it in a meandering fashion.

So what is my thought? That writing needs to be done. Maybe I'm like the natural-born chef who sees culinary affections on the random grocery store aisle; or the carpenter who imagines architectural wonder arising from a stack of lumber. For me, the writing bent results from jumbled thoughts begging for clarity. My mind resists from laziness because this is hard work, sorting out ideas. But now and then it simply must be done...because.

What needs disentangling at the moment? A thousand thoughts, and one. If I were to grab one from the thousand flitting by it would be, "What makes writing effective?"

A few bullets may address this helpfully so I'll give it a go. To be effective here are three essential ingredients for writing:

• The writing must be real, a clear and honest reflection of the writer's mind and heart. In this way it partakes in the universal human reality of life, the most common ground for connection. How to do this? Just explore what you are thinking or what you have experienced and then talk of it candidly, artfully, transparently. This transparence includes openness to be sure, but you needn't let all your guts spill. If you learn to be appropriately real and open, you will find yourself writing well.
• The writing must be clear, exhibiting a creative and experienced grasp of the language. Quality and beauty co-habitate: where you find one you will have the other.
• Finally, the writer must hold loosely the opinions of the reader and even of herself. Writing is a glad expression of the human heart, much as Creation is an overflow of the grandeur of God. It is not foremost to win or cajole, persuade, entertain, enlighten, impress. Rather, writing springs from the creative joy of the writer. Readers gain the most when they are an unintended audience; not a target, but a happy participant in another's joy.

Writing n.i.? Indeed! But these thoughts help me be more clear about what matters. And so I will leave be, joyful to have written, glad if an unintended reader is helped along the way!