Ian, born in Wales, was twenty-five years my senior. He was pastor of an old, historic Presbyterian church in Baltimore. When he was young, his family had moved to Scotland, and he spent his early years as a pastor in the Highlands before immigrating to America. His accent preserved the soft burr of his cradle tongue. I knew he went to the Rocky Mountains in Montana every summer on holiday, the same range of mountains that extended three hundred miles north to the sacred ground I had grown up on and was now returning to each August. At area church meetings we would sometimes exchange Montana stories.
One summer night he was mugged while walking his dog. His assailant took his watch and then, just to let him know who was running the show, threw him to the ground and kicked him a couple of times in the ribs. When I saw him a few days later, he was bruised, sore, and still feeling the emotional effects of the violence. He told me that he was looking forward to leaving the next week for Montana, where he would vacation for a month near Yellowstone Park, far from the crime-ridden city. The high country there is pristine and exhilarating. There it is impossible to harbor a mean thought for more than ten seconds, let alone act in a mean way. The nearest criminal is at least a hundred miles away as the crow flies.
Six weeks later at a gathering of pastors and elders at Govans Presbyterian Church, he had his arm in a sling. We had both recently returned to Maryland from our holidays. I asked, “What happened?” He told me that he had been riding a horse on a mountain trail in the Bridger Range, and the horse had been spooked by a coyote. He was thrown into a rocky ravine and broke his arm. And then he said, “It is safer to walk on the streets of Baltimore at night than in the mountains of Montana in daylight. Those mountains are magnificent. But they have twenty different ways to kill you. Just like the church.”
The conversation stuck in my memory. It was lonely in the badlands. I didn’t know him very well but liked and trusted him. A couple weeks later I telephoned and asked if I could come and talk with him. We arranged for a Friday-morning appointment. It was his phrase “twenty different ways to kill you, just like the church” that I wanted to talk about with him.
I told him about the transition I found myself going through from the high-energy years of organizing, developing, and building Christ Our King Church and now into this slump, what felt like congregational passivity. I told him about my reflections on wanting to stay with these people but wondered if I had the emotional wherewithal to do it. They were reducing me to their level—flat and complacently self-satisfied in the wake of our achievement. I didn’t seem capable of rousing anything approaching the enthusiasm of the last three years. And my supervisor’s counsel, “start another building campaign,” seemed cheap. I had a vague idea of what I wanted but didn’t know if I even knew how to begin. I had been a competitor since getting out of diapers. I was addicted to adrenaline. And now I was realizing how my already well-honed competitive instincts were exacerbated by the competitive and consumerist church culture that surrounded me.
Was it realistic to think I could develop from a competitive pastor to something maybe more like a contemplative pastor—a pastor who was able to be with people without having an agenda for them, a pastor who was able to accept people just as they were and guide them gently and patiently into a mature life in Christ but not get in the way, let the Holy Spirit do the guiding?
He suggested, “Why don’t you come into Baltimore and see me every couple of weeks or so, and we’ll talk. I know it isn’t easy for you. It isn’t easy for me.” Two years of biweekly conversations on Friday mornings were the result.
Ian’s early years in the Scottish Highlands had shaped his imagination. The Rocky Mountains in the American West weren’t the Highlands of his homeland, but there was that quality of fresh air and wildness that gave him a feeling of “home.” Yet he missed the heather. I learned from him that a lot of Scots had immigrated a hundred years or so earlier and taken up sheepherding along the Rocky Mountain front. A lot of the names of people and names of places reminded him of Scotland. He also introduced me to a Montana novelist, Ivan Doig, who told the stories of many of these Scots who found themselves at home in this austere country. Jan and I are still reading those novels. And I learned that Ian was one of the early translators of Karl Barth into English. He insisted that Barth was a “pastor’s theologian” without peer and that I should immerse myself in his writings. Which I did.
After a few weeks of our getting acquainted, Ian suggested that we begin our biweekly time in the prayer chapel adjoining the sanctuary. He sat on one side of the chapel, I sat on the other side, fifteen feet or so removed. We knelt in our respective pews. Out of his Scottish prayer book he read prayers aloud for twenty minutes. I prayed in silence. He never suggested I do otherwise. He was, it turned out, a fierce Barthian with little tolerance for a spirituality emotionally soaked in feelings.
After the twenty minutes of prayers he said, “Eugene, let’s get a cup of coffee.” We crossed the street to a neighborhood coffee shop and talked. We talked about Barth. He told me of his youthful bird-watching in the Scottish Highlands (he was an avid collector of birds’ eggs) and the newspaper column on birding that he wrote for the local paper. We swapped stories of hiking in the mountains of Montana. And we talked together of the dangers of being a pastor in America, where the magnificent church, like the magnificent Rocky Mountains, “has twenty different ways to kill you.”
The conversations came to an end when he was called to be the professor of preaching at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. Several years later when he was retiring from his faculty appointment there, he called and asked if he could recommend me to become his successor. But by then, thanks to him, I was more than ever what I had been becoming for a long time—a contemplative pastor.
In these early years when I was becoming a pastor, I needed a pastor. Some deep and cultivated pastoral instinct in Ian responded: he became my pastor without making me a project, without giving me advice, without smothering me with his “concern.” There wasn’t a hint of condescension, not in his prayer, not in his conversation. I learned, without being aware that I was learning, of the immense freedom that comes in pastoral relationships that are structured by prayer and ritual and let everything else happen more or less spontaneously. The competitiveness didn’t exactly leave me, but it developed a root system that didn’t depend on artificial stimulants or chemical additives—like “start another building campaign.”