Pastoral Carnality

Gordon Lathrop’s The Pastor: A Spirituality is a wise and beautiful book, to be savored slowly. It’s not perfect; it’s marred here and there by a form of lefty Lutheranism. But it’s such a lovely book that it seems almost obscene to review it. I’ll limit myself to quoting a few favorite passages.

A pastor is “among symbols, as a symbol” (1). “In a society often starved for meaningful symbolic practice, the pastor may . . . discover that she or he is the only keeper of communal symbols in sight. Many people may turn to the pastor for a few appropriate words in a time of need or change, for a shared ritual on an occasion of loss, or for counsel on a rite of human passage when . . . the group discovers it has lost whatever rites it once had and does not know where to begin. Sometimes, on such an occasion, just the presence of the pastor may seem enough: the pastor then is the symbol – for mystery, for wider connection, for a barely remembered past, perhaps for good, most likely for God” (4).

As a presider at the liturgy, “you need to begin to know in your heart – imprinted in your flesh, in the very way you carry your body – the deep structures of the liturgy” (25). Knowing the liturgy by heart is not the same as memorizing the set portions: “you need to be coming to know, in your bones, the deep structure of the whole order of service, the liturgical ordo. . . . Ritual structures may then become in our hands what they really are: patterns of meaningful communal action, not merely printed outlines in the bulletin or pedagogical tools in the classroom” (26).

Preaching has to be assembly-based, biblical, and eschatological. On the assembly-based character of preaching, Lathrop offers an exercise: “Imagine that you have gathered your entire family at the one-hundredth birthday of your great-grandmother. All the family, all the dozens of descendants of this woman – are there. . . . Then, because you are known as a good speaker, you are asked to say something to all that gathering in the park. Your task will be to bring the meaning of this event . . . to expression in words. The celebration will be marred by phoniness or lying or by talk only about yourself or your experiences. Preaching is like that” (47).

He suggests that we prepare to preach by paying attention, a simple-sounding instruction that is much harder than it appears: “I have found that years of familiarity or common presuppositions may have left me with a prematurely narrowed sense of what this Scripture passage may mean or who these people are” (55). But attention isn’t confined to the word or the people: “I read a little history and some ethnology, and I try to listen carefully to the personal stories that are told to me, not immediately imposing my meaning on them. . . . I walk on the streets of my city, watching faces, and I walk in the nearby woods, attending to the actual place on earth where I love. In both places – streets and woods – I try to see what is happening. . . . I go to museums and to art shows. I try to keep learning languages other than those I already know. I try to see if I can observe in what ways women and men, young people and older people, gay and straight people may or may not differ in their experience of the world. . . .” (56).

The two keys to good preaching, he says, are “attention and imagination” (58).

Christianity began as a meal community, and it continues as a meal community. Pastors are ordained to be table servants, both at the Eucharist and “extending a life of hospitality into the flow of their own daily existence. Welcoming others to a gracious table, treasuring and sharing food, being with others as a good guest, thinking about and exercising appropriate limits in consumption, simplifying one’s own consumption, caring about world hunger – these disciplines also belong to the practice of a table server.” 

The pastor’s work is, in fact, so involved with flesh and matter that Lathrop wonders if he chose the wrong subtitle for his book: “The very materiality of the central actions of the Christian church . . . may suggest that the spirituality of the pastor, of the one who cares for the stewardship of these central things, might better be called a carnality” (70).

Read and become wise.