Reality bites here, doesn’t it? Many of us feel painted into a corner in our ministries. We’re already short on time, energy, help, encouragement. And we feel awfully long on obligations. Listening, and the discipline we think is required for it, feels more like a burden than a blessing.
And in that place of exhaustion and inadequacy, God waits to speak and to shape us. He wants to connect, to converse, to ground all our work of mission in the life of a mystic.
By “mystic,” I do not mean a sorcerer of Marvel’s Dr. Strange variety, nor do I mean someone who looks like Thomas Merton or Julian of Norwich and whispers unattainable platitudes to the sparrows in the garden. I mean a person who has the regular, life-shaping experience of spending direct and open time with God. A mystic is one whose theology is not only known, preached or believed—it is experienced. God is known, both with the mind and with the heart, through the rational processes that humans use to think and the many nonrational processes that humans use to love. To the mystic, God may be spoken of as a friend, a lover or even a rough sparring partner, but he may not be spoken of as disconnected.
The life-changing experiences of faith cannot be separated from rigorous, excellent theology and strategic mission and ministry vision. But they don’t come because of that theology or that strategy. Those experiences that have touched you and me and the people we serve came, and will come, because God was invited to show up, and he did.
There is no power in heaven or on Earth that can compel our God to do anything. But those who live as his children need only ask, and he delights to fill us and our ministry with his presence.
Conversation, this quiet perennial ministerial mysticism, requires a different set of practices than we typically discuss as being in our ministry toolboxes. So how do we get to a point where it is integrated in our lives? Three key shifts must take place: our posture, our priorities and our attention.
From Giver to Receiver
Many of us who are called to lead in the church have become entrenched in the expectation that we are the Person Up Front. The one others look to for wisdom. The one who gives. This is fine, and necessary, if it is not our permanent mode of being. But when giving becomes our default, all kinds of things go awry. We assume that others are all waiting with bated breath to hear our latest vision for ministry or theological insight. We slowly cease to be able to receive.
A posture shift here means to break our expectation to be the center of attention. The Desert Father Evagrius Ponticus (by all accounts a hotshot pastor before he was led into the Egyptian wastes) was once told, “If you wish to save your soul, do not speak until you are asked a question.” Not all of us need to heed that advice, but many of us (myself especially) do. A shift in posture means more patience, more familiarity with silence and awkward pauses, more expectation that what God is about to do in a room or relationship might be coming from someone else, perhaps the Spirit himself. (This, by the way, is remarkably, deliciously freeing.)
From the Urgent to the Timeless
This relates to “the tyranny of the urgent” that Charles Hummel wrote about—misplacing our attention on what is most pressing instead of what is most important. To become people of the conversation, the missionary-mystic, we need to step back for a moment from our hum of activity and distraction and ask, What is needed here? There is no escaping the fact that ministry is a demanding calling that is often defined by urgency. But the trick of health, happiness and holiness is allowing ministry to be shaped by urgency while not allowing it to shape you.
A priorities shift means that we must surrender our sense of value and ask for God to give us his. It is a deft balance, but there are times when half-an-hour of a tyrannically busy day is best spent in playing Legos with one’s child, in eating a particularly good lunch or in walking, rather than driving, to the next appointment. We can find connection with God in our daily moments of renewal. But those moments will not come unless we scavenge and protect them. (Find the healthiest old pastor you know and ask him or her how they practiced this.)
From Distraction to Devotion
I once read an interview with Henri Nouwen in which he commented that the pastoral vocation attracts an unusual number of insecure people. Ouch! But he’s so right. And when we are faced with our insecurity, most of us try to distract ourselves from it, through work, media or some other means. We devote ourselves to our distraction, slowly patterning our lives around it. This is a counterfeit of what we ought to be doing—patterning our lives as a constant return to meeting God.
This is the essence of devotion: devoting ourselves to something larger than we are, giving our life to it. True devotion is so much more than simple quiet time with morning coffee: It is a slowly patterned life of attention, a soul inclining closer to God. It is replacing our many everyday idolatries with a posture of constant, often wordless, worship. Attentive worship. A worship of attention.
The very simplicity of connection is what makes it so difficult. An attention shift requires help from the Holy Spirit, and a great deal of trial and error.
I have struggled for years with simply consecrating my time spent doing the dishes after our family’s supper. I feel that the hours of sudsy practice I have spent simply trying to experience God while I do a mundane chore have moved me inches, not even yards, toward where I’d like to be. But they have moved me. I take joy in that thought.
“I listen, and ask what I’m hearing.”
What humility. What attentiveness. What if we—pastors, deacons, elders, leaders—gained such a reputation? What if our conversation with God became such a rich and simple pray-without-ceasing experience that our inner life could not help but burst into outer fruitfulness? What if, instead of scarcity, we felt abundance? Instead of depletion, rest? Instead of loneliness, deep communion with the one we most long to be with?
There are a thousand ways to be distracted, but only one way to be devoted: connecting with God. Opening my ears, and with them, my heart for the conversation, the “turning” with him.
Asking for the Father to speak. Asking for the grace to listen.
Because, as I’m learning slowly, strange things happen when you can’t see.
Paul J. Pastor, editor-at-large for Outreach magazine, is the author of The Listening Day: Meditations on the Way (Zeal Books) and deacon of formation at Theophilus Church in Portland, Oregon. Twitter: @PaulJPastor