Two or three months after I had entered the womb “a second time” and come out as a pastor, I removed all of my academic diplomas from the wall of my study and replaced them with the framed portraits of three men whose company I wanted to keep as I lived into my newly realized vocational identity. I was not exactly putting the world of academia behind me—I would always be on familiar terms with that world and would participate on the fringes as an adjunct professor and visiting lecturer—but it was no longer my vocational home. The diplomas verified my vocation in terms of the world of intellect and learning, classrooms and libraries—professor. I anticipated that my life now as pastor would be worked out in quite different conditions—intimate relationships, a tradition of holiness, and the cultivation of souls. The world of learning was still there in all its glory, but my vocation now was not about the learning itself but about integrating learning into prayer and worship and the ordinariness of everyday living. Sanctuary, workplaces, and households would provide places to keep my vocation local and personal.
My picks for mentors were John Henry Newman, Alexander Whyte, and Baron Friedrich von Hügel—the company I would keep to stay in touch with the conditions in which I was now working. The three, though long dead, were no strangers—I had been in prayerful conversation with them for a long time—but now I embraced them as colleagues, not just as admired ancestors.
One phrase of Newman’s had resonated for years in my memory: “The people of Birmingham also have souls.” That phrase now became personal. The sentence was Newman’s reply to a friend who vehemently protested his leaving Oxford University for Birmingham, England, to gather together a few priests and start a small school for boys in the working class world of steel mills and hard labor, a world without a shred of culture, a world indifferent to learning. At the time, Newman was widely considered to be the leading intellectual at Oxford, maybe in all of England. His influence was magisterial in the Church of England. He wrote magnificent sermonic prose and sacred poetry. He was the primary theological voice at the time (it was the middle of the nineteenth century), giving shape to the church’s thinking. His name was on everyone’s lips. Then Newman converted in midlife to become a Roman Catholic priest, abandoned Oxford and its elegant surroundings, his place of intellectual prestige and religious influence, and chose to spend the rest of his life in the Birmingham of belching steel furnaces, teaching boys in an ugly neighborhood where no one read books. Newman in Birmingham? It was like Einstein leaving Princeton to start a school for street kids in the Bronx.
I was no Newman, but I loved the world of Newman—the storied antiquity of Oxford, the finely honed intelligence crafting sentences of beauty. And though I was no longer aspiring to be a professor on a campus of shaded lawns and venerable buildings, I thought it not out of the range of possibility that in a few years I might become the pastor of a university church where I would be immersed in a culture rich in tradition and art. That fantasy was aggravated during these badland years by discovering that in the cultural flatland of suburbia the people to whom I was pastor had no interest in books or the life of the mind. TV Guide seemed to be the only reading material in evidence in the homes I visited.
Newman chose Birmingham for his work. I didn’t choose suburbia. It was given to me. And now, as the energy of the early development years of Christ Our King Church was waning, I was becoming dissatisfied with the gift I had been given and was looking around for a new challenge, a challenge that included at least some intellect in it. It was while daydreaming this new fantasy that I tripped over this sentence that had caught my attention when I first read it years earlier but had been lying dormant in my memory: “The people of Birmingham also have souls.” You don’t have to be an Oxford don to have a soul; you don’t have to be interesting to have a soul; you don’t have to have leadership potential to have a soul. I was rebuked out of my fantasy. Souls. If Newman could do it, I could at least try. Birmingham souls. Suburbia souls. I needed to renew my conversations with Newman, cultivate a way of understanding these men and women in my congregation in terms of who they were, not in terms of how they either interested or bored me, not in terms of what I could make of them—but souls. Which I did.
Baron Friedrich von Hügel had long been a significant voice in my life. The world of religion teems with naive superstition, mean-spirited polemic, and unscrupulous deceit. Writing and teaching on the spiritual life brings out the worst in a lot of people, ranging from the superficially trivial to celebrity showmanship to idolatrous fads to the devil showing up as an angel of light. It isn’t long before pastors learn that a lot of people lie in the name of God. In this confusing melting pot of the neurotic, infantile, and religion-as-commodity, von Hügel is conspicuous for his sheer sanity. Like Newman, he was English, but he didn’t have a job or position. He was a scholar, studying and annotating old manuscripts and writing on the spiritual life as a layperson. He lived on a modest, private income with his wife, three daughters, and dog, Puck.
Word had gotten around, and men and women came to see him for counsel and direction as they sorted out their lives in matters of love and faith and obedience. But mostly he wrote letters. He wrote letters to me. They weren’t addressed to me—he died seven years before I was born. But as I read the letters, I realized that they were, in fact, addressed to me, a pastor searching for a language and disposition for discerning a whole and healthy way of life as I lived with my congregation. He was wary of working up enthusiasm for Jesus (“nothing was ever accomplished in a stampede”), warned of simplistic, impatient “solutions” to living to the glory of God (“please, no cutting of knots”), and insisted over and over that every soul is unique and cannot be understood or encouraged or directed by general advice or through a superficial diagnosis using psychological categories (“there are no dittos in souls”).
In my prepastor days I had learned much personally by reading von Hügel. Now I was letting his letters form in me a pastoral way of using language that was conversational—not condescending, not manipulative, but attentive and prayerful. Not instructional, preparing my parishioners to pass examinations on matters of sin and salvation. Not diagnostic, treating these unique souls as problems to be fixed. Now as I read and reread and reread, I was letting von Hügel soak me in holy mysteries, so that as I talked and listened informally, conversationally, without pastoral self-consciousness, I was inviting people into the ways of God that are “past understanding,” not just instructing them in how to get across the street without stepping into moral mud puddles. I recognized this as holy wisdom, knowledge distilled into reflexes and synapses, knowledge lived. I needed to keep company with this man. I didn’t want to be a pastor who talked too much, who knew too much. I didn’t want to be a pastor who treated souls as dittos.
Alexander Whyte entered my imagination and became a companion as the pastor I was not yet but wanted to become. Not as a ditto. In the same way that souls are not dittos, neither are pastors. And Whyte was safe that way—there was no way that I could copy him. He was a pastor in Scotland a hundred years preceding me, in the late Victorian era in a culture that was stable, still defined by habits of churchgoing and a common morality. Those conditions had long ago been eroded in the secularized America in which I had become a pastor.
But I needed a pastor. I was new at this. The requirements of organizing and developing a new congregation provided a sufficient harness for keeping me connected with what had to be done to get started. But when those requirements had been completed, I realized there was not an adequate interiority to support the work I was doing. To adapt and reverse C. S. Lewis’s famous line, my outside was bigger than my inside. I installed Alexander Whyte as my pastor.
At six o’clock every Sunday morning, I read one of his sermons that he had preached from the pulpit of St. George’s Presbyterian Church in Edinburgh. I had already prepared the sermon I would preach that day—now I let him preach to me. I did that for the next twenty years of Sundays. The quality that I wanted to absorb, and did, I think, was the fusion of scripture and prayer, prayer and scripture, or something more like scriptureprayer and prayerscripture. It was this fusion of God speaking to us (scripture) and our speaking to him (prayer) that the Holy Spirit uses to form the life of Christ in us. It was all the same thing, the listening and answering, that provided the core of worship in Whyte’s practice. He had a truly biblical imagination. The entire biblical narrative came alive when he preached—not explicitly, but the tone and the allusions developed a storied coherence around every text. As I sat under my pastor’s preaching, scripture ceased to be a sequence of texts and became a seamless story. And I was a participant in the story.
After his death, his son-in-law wrote a biography of him—one of the great pastor biographies. I mined it for access to his character, to his interior, to the kind of interior that I knew was required to maintain a pastoral vocation with integrity. It soon became clear that there was no pretense in the man. He took his pulpit seriously, he took his congregation seriously, but he didn’t take himself seriously. When a newly ordained seminary graduate, commenting on his long and distinguished life as a pastor of St. George’s Presbyterian, asked him for advice as a young pastor starting out, Whyte said, “Relieve yourself as often as possible, and take a long vacation.” He was not given to pious clichés. I liked that.
I had grown up in a Christian culture that gave a great deal of attention to feelings. I had one pastor when I was an adolescent who always greeted me with “How are things with your soul today, Eugene?” The first few times the question left me stuttering and tongue-tied. I hardly knew I had a soul. Mostly I had hormones. But after seven or eight of those encounters that left me scrambling to salvage some shred of feeling that I could offer to validate my soul, I quit trying. I soon realized that before I had stumbled through the few clichés that I had picked up in his company, he had lost interest in my soul, if he ever had any in the first place, and was on to other matters—a divine-healing mission trip to Cuba that he had just returned from in triumph, an elk-hunting party that he was getting together for men of the church that (after some prayer) he was now generously inviting me to join, a deal on tires that he had just learned about that I might want to look into for my newly acquired used car.
And it wasn’t just that pastor. In my church culture as a whole, examining your “soul” was a way to measure the God content in your life. Soul was a kind of internal thermometer you could consult to find out where you stood on the Laodicean spectrum of spirituality: cold, lukewarm, or hot. High on every pastor’s agenda was keeping people “on fire” for Jesus. Worship in general and the sermon in particular were bellows for blowing smoldering embers into a blaze.
But now that I was a pastor myself and finding ways to survive in the badlands, I realized that emotions were not a very reliable witness to the presence of God in my life and that the pastoral manipulation of emotions in others had a very short shelf life.
A friend introduced me to Sister Genevieve, the prioress of a Carmelite monastery: fourteen nuns living a life of contemplative prayer together in their convent, hidden away in a forest of beech and oak trees, the first Carmelite foundation in America. I had never known a nun before. I don’t think she had ever known a Presbyterian pastor. We were about the same age. We became friends. I would occasionally visit with her in her monastery. She had meals with Jan and me in our home and at times came to stay with us in Montana for a few days of retreat and rest.
Conversations and a developing friendship with Sister Genevieve extended my conversation with my three mentors from the cemetery into a larger circle of sympathetic friends, a living tradition that she and her nuns practiced, a way of understanding the soul and the nature of prayer that turned out to be essential to me for surviving in the badlands: prayer as a way of life, not a discrete discipline that one practiced, as I had been taught, to “make room for God.”
In one of our conversations, Sister Genevieve must have detected something in my language that betrayed a romanticizing notion I had developed regarding her convent of nuns, vowed to a life of prayer, protected from the noise and interruptions of the outside world—a holy community in a holy place. She said to me, “Eugene, is it difficult to be married?”
I replied, “Certainly. It’s the hardest thing I have ever done. I lived twenty-five years as the center of my universe, and then suddenly I was no longer the center. There was another, Jan, who had also been accustomed to being the center. It took us both by surprise—you can’t have two centers. Yes, it is difficult. Why do you ask?”
“How would you like to be married to thirteen women? Some of these nuns can be real bitches.”
So much for romanticizing the contemplative life.
In another conversation, we had been talking about the Lord’s Prayer. I interrupted the flow of conversation by saying, “Do you know the petition that I have the hardest time praying, entering into, knowing what I am praying?”
“Of course—‘Deliver us from evil.’”
“How did you know that?”
“Oh, you Protestants. You are so naive about evil. You know everything about sin, but nothing about evil—the prevalence of evil, the persistence of evil especially in holy places, like this monastery—and like your congregation. The mystery of evil. You make cartoon characters out of evil so that you don’t have to deal with it in your own households and workplaces, crouching at the door every time you open it. Or else you deny it and label everything that is wrong with the world as a sin you can name and then take charge of getting rid of.”
It was in these conversations that I was introduced to the sixteenth-century reformers of Carmelite foundations in Spain: Teresa of Ávila and John of the Cross. The insouciant earthy spirituality of Teresa and the richly sensual poetry of John.
My theological education had pivoted on Martin Luther and John Calvin, brilliant and comprehensive thinkers, writers, and exegetes of scripture. They taught me to think largely and passionately about God and the scriptures. For them, reforming the Christian life was primarily (but not entirely) a matter of recovering right thinking, understanding doctrine, interpreting scripture. Teresa and John worked from the other end. They took up matters of the soul, reforming Christian living by taking seriously the life of prayer and recovering the ways of prayer. They gave themselves to discerning the illusions and pitfalls that interfere with receiving what God is giving and reducing prayer to a self-help project with no concern for relationship and love, adoration and mystery.
I had received a theological education adequate for preparing me to be a professor in the classroom, dealing with truth and knowledge—“faith seeking understanding” (Anselm). But now I was a pastor, and a great deal of my life consisted in dealing with souls as they went about their lives in households and workplaces. Scripture and worship and gathering a congregation I was ready for. But the life of the soul and the attentiveness of souls to God that is prayer I had taken for granted. It was simply assumed, peripheral to my training, pretty much limited to being addressed by the offhand question, “Well Eugene, how are things with your soul today?” And now I was being introduced to a vast world that I had known only in books, by Sister Genevieve, who, with her nuns, was living that world, a world in which Teresa and John were major voices. Teresa and John treated the soul and praying rightly with the same disciplined care as Luther and Calvin took with the scriptures and believing rightly. This was something more like “faith seeking holiness.” The more I got to know them I realized that my three “framed” mentors—Newman, von Hügel, Whyte—had drunk deeply from the same artesian springs that had nourished Teresa and John.
In the badlands I had been incrementally realizing that there is far more to this Christian life than getting it right. There is living it right. Learning the truth of God, the gospel, the scriptures involves understanding words, concepts, history. But living it means working through a world of deception, of doubt and suffering, a world of rejections and betrayal and idolatry.
We don’t grow and mature in our Christian life by sitting in a classroom and library, listening to lectures and reading books, or going to church and singing hymns and listening to sermons. We do it by taking the stuff of our ordinary lives, our parents and children, our spouses and friends, our workplaces and fellow workers, our dreams and fantasies, our attachments, our easily accessible gratifications, our depersonalizing of intimate relations, our commodification of living truths into idolatries, taking all this and placing it on the altar of refining fire—our God is a consuming fire—and finding it all stuff redeemed for a life of holiness. A life that is not reserved for nuns and monks but accessible to every Dick and Jane in every ordinary congregation.
In my conversations with Sister Genevieve I realized that I knew a lot more about scripture and truth than I did about souls and prayer. I also realized that for me as pastor, souls and prayer required an equivalent demand on my attention as scripture and truth. This is what pastors are for—to keep these things alive and yoked in everyday life.
I couldn’t have been given a better or more personal introduction to what I so much needed if I was going to be a pastor in the badlands than Sister Genevieve taking me into the living tradition rooted in Teresa and John.
Sister Genevieve and Teresa and John took seriously what I had been taking, rather superficially, for granted. I had assumed that my vocation was preaching and teaching the truth of the gospel and encouraging people to do what they had been told. I had no idea that matters of the soul and prayer had an equivalent demand on my attention as doctrine and scripture.
Teresa and John were theologians every bit as “theological” as Luther and Calvin. But they used a very different language. Teresa told stories; John wrote poems. They were saturated in the same scriptures as their contemporaries a thousand or so miles to the north, and as theologically astute. But they, instead of arguing and defining and interpreting, were expressing and witnessing and insisting on the presence of God no matter how you felt about it—or if you felt anything at all. Luther and Calvin were trying to make the truth clear, which they did wonderfully. Teresa and John were trying to deal honestly and discerningly with the experience of God when it wasn’t plain, insisting that there were necessary obscurities and shadows to be embraced if we were to grow into mature holiness. That we cannot have God on our terms, domesticated to our requirements, reduced to our ideas of what God should be doing. Prayer was our immersion in the way that God is present with us whether we understand or like it or not.
More than anything, my widening circle of mentors was becoming personal—this is what it is like to pray, to live a life of faith and love, to be detached from a life of self and become souls free for God.
Teresa’s earthy spirituality is free of pious pretense. As I was getting to know Teresa, I was told this story. She is sitting in a privy with a prayer book in one hand and a cinnamon roll in the other. The devil appears to her, scandalized at her irreverence. He sanctimoniously reprimands her. She responds, “The sweet roll is for me, the prayers are for God, and the rest is for you.”
John’s poetry is richly sensual. Today he is recognized by many as Spain’s greatest poet. His lines spill out with metaphors and similes—he uses the material and physical world, including its considerable beauties and unavoidable pain and suffering, to make a piece of art out of the soul and prayer.
His reputation, too often reduced to “the dark night of the soul,” with connotations of grim austerity, is misleading. Most of his writing is a commentary on his poems, drawing us into all that is involved in pursuing a life of love on God’s terms, not ours. It is true that he often warned us not to get addicted to “a spiritual sweet tooth,” but that is no more than you would expect from someone who is warning us not to reduce the life in Christ to an infantile preference for something on the level of popsicles and boxes of Valentine chocolates.
Together, under the tutelage of Sister Genevieve, I found these Spanish saints absolutely essential for pursuing a pastoral vocation through the badlands and beyond. I was coming to visualize Luther and Calvin as mountain people, scaling the heights, taking in the horizon, and Theresa and John as valley people, tilling the soil, going to the market, cooking meals. I needed all of them, my congregation needed all of them.