In a poem, the same poem I mentioned earlier, Denise Levertov describes a dog going “intently haphazard.” I can see that dog. I used to own that dog, going from bush to fire hydrant to tree, sniffing his way along, pausing momentarily to add his scent to what he had just come across, “intently haphazard.” There is obviously no lack of intention in the dog’s behavior, but if you could have asked him what his intention was and he could have answered, he wouldn’t have been able to tell you where he was headed—just one scent after another. Seemingly haphazard. But not without purpose. A doggy instinct for what he wouldn’t be able to name keeps him true to who he is, a dog. At the end of the day it is all absorbed in his canine psyche.
Something like that is the way pastor feels to me. Pastor: not something added on to or imposed on who I am; it was there all along. But it was not linear—no straight-line development. Seemingly unconnected, haphazard events and people turned out to be organic to who I am. In retrospect the intent comes as no surprise.
The topographical map of my developing pastoral vocation begins on the sacred ground of Montana, touches down at my university in Seattle, my seminary in New York City, graduate school in Baltimore, gathering stories along the way, with an eventual arrival at a corn field in Maryland, the building site for a new Christian congregation.