Send Your Spirit Out Over Your Community: Practice Of Ministry

You know that post-Sunday tiredness, don’t you, dears?

I spent Friday evening and Saturday morning ’til noon in Maine at our church retreat, so I’m a little extra tired today.

Thinking about ministry, though, as usual. As always. On Friday night, as I was standing in the hallway of our dorm trying to walk as quietly as possible to the bathroom to brush my teeth, it hit me how much like home it seemed to be. The same emotional vibe, I mean.

I thought to myself, “Well, Self, this is interesting. How did that happen? Wasn’t it just eighteen years or so ago that you felt quite awkward at church retreats and rather dreaded them for their requirement that you act both entirely relaxed and yet maintain appropriate ministerial decorum? And you felt like you were performing social bonhomie while feeling weird and insecure and ‘other?'”

I stood in the hallway holding that thought and savoring the silence and the knowledge that behind the closed doors on the corridor, my peeps were asleep, or close to it, and I felt them breathing and I smiled at the parents’ gratitude that our hyper-excited munchkins had calmed down enough about BUNK BEDS to slumber at last.

What has changed?
Faithfulness and the daily practice of ministry has changed me, that’s what.

It all began in intense desire, hopefulness, need and insecurity. VOCATION. ORDINATION. REV’ING. I learned the strange world of ministry day by day, year by year, bizarre crisis by bizarre crisis, death by birth by death, resurrection by resurrection. From the very beginning, I believed that in order to do the work at all well, I needed to send my spirit out over the congregation every day, and for a very long time I had no idea what that meant or what I was doing — I just knew I needed to do it in order to be a half-way decent preacher and pastor.

I still can’t tell you exactly what it means to send my spirit out over the congregation and I still do it all the time. It’s a witchy thing, a prayer thing, a Holy Spirit thing. I irrationally believe that sitting in silence with my ear cocked for a message like a dog listening at the door for her master will provide me with an instinct, intuition or inclination that I need at that moment.

Would we call this listening for Wisdom? Discernment?

I call it desperation. I can’t call or e-mail or visit every single person every day — and I have learned to accept that there is a certain portion of every congregation whom I will never know and who does not wish to be in the psychic air space that we call the covenanted community. I am going to miss a ton of information every day, fail every day to reach out to someone who wishes I would read their mind better and be there for then, and cluelessly and very unintentionally walk right past glaring errors I’ve made. There but for the grace of God, no one has made it their personal job to inform me of those errors and omissions. I know that many of you are not that fortunate, and I am deeply sorry for that because when someone makes it their work to place before the minister all her failings, it blocks the spirit. All that information, when it comes steadily and accurately, forces the heart into hiding.

But I have not had steady critical unkindness leveled at me for many years, and I have not had the tom-tom beat of financial fear and resentment about high expectations matched with low compensation stealing my energy for a very long time. Because of this, I have had the freedom, space, and congregational support to be a minister, a professional soul worker, and when I send my spirit out over the community like a homing pigeon, it comes back to me with information in its beak.

How many times do you sit with fingers on the keyboard, composing a sermon, and stop, feeling with an invisible part of yourself for the contours of what you must say next? You tilt your head to the right or to the left and stare out the window and listen, knowing only that your own take on the gospel message is too little, too limited, there is someone you are forgetting, someone’s life and reality and truth that is not being included and you need help remembering whose it is and what it is.

You are sending your spirit out over your congregation.

Or you are doing dishes, or folding laundry or driving somewhere after having dropped off the kids, and you are reviewing the list of things to be done at church or in your ministry setting. There is this, there is that, there are eight urgent things and thirteen things that you want to organize before the month is out. Then your mind goes blank like a movie screen before the feature begins and you tilt your chin upwards a bit and strain to hear the something beneath the list of tasks you just mentally outlined. If the blank screen had one subtitle projected onto it, it would say something like, “How are they doing?” Or maybe, “Come to me.” You are both the crystal ball and the gazer at it. The ball is suspended in God’s creation, and you know the vision you receive is real. You haven’t even consciously invoked it, so you haven’t engaged your critical intellectual faculty enough to interfere with what you are receiving.

You are sending your spirit out over your community.

On Friday night, toothbrush in hand standing on the third floor of a retreat center dormitory, I sent my spirit out over my community while being physically in the same building with many of them. The homing pigeon came back so fast it knocked me in the heart and solar plexus and it carried this message in its beak:

“SURPRISE, FAITHFUL ONE.”

11 Replies to “Send Your Spirit Out Over Your Community: Practice Of Ministry”

  1. Christine, thank YOU. It’s so hard to articulate the spiritual and metaphysical aspects of the ministry, and if we try, we often sound a bit nuts. You’d think it was permissible for people’s whose actual job it is to live in, trust and teach the reality of God and the Spirit to speak freely on such matters but we live in a post-Enlightenment world and one risks ridicule. So thank you for validating. xoox

  2. This really was beautiful. I do different work, but I know the feeling, and it’s heartening to read your words on it. [Glad it spoke to you. Thank you for writing. – PB]

  3. Thank you. This lovely piece brought to mind the moments, sometimes during the Eucharist, or when looking out and ‘gathering in’ the congregation before a sermon, but sometimes at a social event or a plant sale, when I am knocked back by the realisation that I love these people.
    Even the ones that, to be honest, I don’t always like very much. I love them.
    [Yes. There’s a thing that happens in pastoral ministry: we see people at their most vulnerable. We see the fiercest critics and nastiest church-politics players tiny and hooked up to machines in hospital beds. We know about their disappointing children, their burning and ridiculously petty resentments, and their fear. We don’t need to like them to love them. It’s one of the great mysteries of the ministerial relationship. Even the ones I find exhausting and tiresome and obnoxious, I would run to their side to help if they needed anything and opened the door to me. All other things fall away. – PB]

  4. Wow. You articulated what I’ve tried to explain before (and failed to explain, I’m sure). I have called it “carrying the burden” but that’s not exactly right, or “being on call” but that’s not right either. It’s sending out my spirit, and listening for what she will say about those people who I love. Thank you.

  5. You are so welcome, Beth. I love that I was able to help you articulate this. Thanks for letting me know.

  6. A tired clergyperson here seeking refreshment, and it was found. Bless you, bless you, dear one. X O

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