503 - "Tell Us What You Don't Know"

"Tell Us What You Don't Know,"
or, To Be a Pastor to People Who Can't Even Predict the Weather
By Browne Barr

Here, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, I believe we stand on the threshold of a renascence of Christian faith that will be as energizing for Christian people and as reforming of the social order as the Great Awakening of the eighteenth century. If that be true, and if Christian ministers and churches pray to be channels of that renewal, an urgent early step would concern leadership, to clarify the task of the ordained minister, the pastor and preacher in the local church.

I propose, therefore, a refreshed definition of the pastor's task, to place that vocation within the light of two reconsiderations of the nature of the human situation. I believe these two reconsiderations are increasingly entering the public domain and provide the basis for hope for a dramatic revival of Christian faith in the next century. The first has to do with our understanding of the creation; the second has to do with our understanding of our creaturehood.

ON CREATION

Science itself, the captive and custodian of predictability, is excitedly discovering that we live in a creation where human beings cannot even predict the weather. In 1961, Edward Lorenz, a meteorologist at MIT, "discovered a disturbing fact. He learned that getting more information about such variables as wind speeds, air pressures, humidity, temperature, and sun spots won't help increase the accuracy of a long range weather forecast." ¹ This was not to say that dynamic systems like the weather are not determined by their causes, but that the causes are infinite and, hence,

Browne Barr is Minister Emeritus at the First Congregational Church of Berkeley and Dean Emeritus at San Francisco Theological Seminary. His most recent book is Never Too Late to Be Loved. How One Couple under Stress Discovered Intimacy and Joy (1996).
¹ Quoted in John Birggs, Fractals: The Patterns of Chaos (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), p. 15.

504 - "Tell Us What You Don't Know"

effectively beyond our grasp. "The wind from the wings of a mosquito in Madagascar," writes John Birggs, "can be enough to change the behavior of a weather system," even in Chicago. ²

This discovery about the inability of the meteorologist accurately to make long-range weather predictions no matter how sophisticated the instruments has sent researchers to examine all kinds of systems, from electrical circuits to the human brain. They are coming up with an altered view of reality. They find there an infinite amount of feedback, invasion, interference, which forever alters the reality observed so its behavior cannot be reliably predicted: A Sierra stream flowing under the predictable effect of gravitation is folded back into itself, its "natural" flow changed unexpectedly by the invasion of a single leaf, which, touched by an unpredictable breeze, falls from a nearby willow into the water. The pattern, the design, the flow of the stream is altered into a new way that the finite human observer could not possibly have predicted.

This profound change in viewing the created universe, moving from linear to nonlinear assumptions, from confidence in the predictability of the created{ order to awareness of its unpredictability, while prompting a refreshing humility in the human observer, may open for our age a renewed reverence for the mystery of life. It may also bring an openness to the Christian story of that Almighty God who "has gathered the wind in his fists and wrapped up the waters in a garment" and has also sent his only begotten Son, conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary, to dwell with us full of grace and truth-unsearchable mysteries whose only language is poetry and song.

W. E. Hocking once wrote, "Religion is bound up in the difference between the sense of ignorance and the sense of mystery: the former means `I know not,' the latter means `I know not but it is known.' " So the Old Testament asks, "Who has established all the ends of the earth?" and the New Testament responds, "Not one sparrow"-not one Madagascar mosquito ="will fall without your father's will." Fear not, you are worth more than many Madagascar mosquitoes.

We are entering an age, then, that may well be prompted to take a more sober view of coincidence, a more reverent view of Providence, a readier and gentler openness to the heavenly leaf falling into the flowing stream, God in Jesus Christ entering human history. It will summon congregations, leaning forward in their pews or moving toward the holy table, to plead with the preacher, "Don't tell us what you know! Tell us what you don't know, I so together we may worship God."

ON THE HUMAN CREATURE

This brings us to the second matter under serious reconsideration at the end of the twentieth century. This second concern has to do not with the whole creation but with the human creature, with you and me, worth more

² Ibid.

505 - "Tell Us What You Don't Know"

than many Madagascar mosquitoes. It is often framed in questions about
the

A Roman Catholic essayist once wrote about the day when he asked his teacher, "Sister, what is the soul?" As she pondered a reply, she glanced out the window and saw a bridal party arriving at the church for a wedding. The gentle afternoon breeze had lifted the bridal veil from the shoulders of the bride and it floated gently upward as the bridal party moved through the sunny courtyard. of the church. "There, there," she said, pointing to the party below. "See the bride's veil? The soul is like that."

That sister, whose church mercifully had not allowed the sense of transcendent mystery to be lost in the wrapping of pretentious human reason, answered that child better than most of us could have. That is a modest, picturesque, graceful answer. It is about as good as I have been able to manage. But it is essentially preliminary and unsatisfactory.

For years, I have been uneasy about using the word soul because it has been on such a :long detour through the homelands of the Greek philosophers that Christians generally now use the word in a way that contradicts biblical thought about the unity of the human person, soul and body. We Christians have been separating soul and body, while modern psychosomatic medicine has been playing the biblical tune, affirming the inescapable unity of soul and body. What is it in us, and in our nation and in our world, that we call soul, that affects our health as persons and our conduct as a nation, that colors all our relationships and is at the center of our identity? What is it that lives with us and dies with us and is resurrected with us, is us? The soul? The persistence of that question is the second source of my optimism about a looming Christian renewal.

Thomas Moore's 1992 book, Care of the Soul, became an instant best seller, so deeply is the child's question our question: "Sister, tell us, please, what is the soul?" On the first page of his introduction, Moore replies: "It is impossible to define precisely what the soul is." Then, he continues with a provisional definition, slanted by his own education and limitations, but offering something to begin filling that lovely, white, graceful veil, shimmering in the sun. "Soul has to do," he writes, "with genuineness and depth, as when we say certain music has soul.... it is tied to life in all its particulars-good food, satisfying conversation, genuine friends, and experiences that stay in the memory and touch the heart. Soul is revealed in attachment, love., and community." ³

THE PASTOR'S TASK

Fifty years or more ago, many Protestant seminaries had a required course titled Care of the Parish. It was usually taught by some former minister. When that minister was just an ordinary fool who had latched on to a seminary appointment for status, tenure, and a pension, the course was a waste of time. But when that former pastor was a fool for Christ's sake,

³ Thomas Moore, Care of the Soul: A Guide for Cultivating Depth and Sacredness in Everyday Life (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), pp. xi-xii.

506 - "Tell Us What You Don't Know"

the course was a delight, full of stories of God's unpredictable invasion of life and the "soulfulness" of the pastor's incredibly beautiful task among his or her people "tied to life in all its particulars-good food, satisfying conversation, genuine friends, and experiences that stay in the memory and touch the heart" (Moore). Imagine getting paid for nurturing all that. Care of the Parish. I should say!

In many seminaries, such a course today would not be called Care of the Parish but Cure of the Parish. And this is the curse of the subtle but strangulating change of the parish ministry in our time from a servant vocation to a profession, from, if you will, the family physician in the family of God to the specialist, who is so set on curing that he or she has no time for caring. Curing the wounds of persons or the trouble of a parish or the frightful pain of the world is not the church's task. Our task is to care for those wounds and troubles and pain.

When I entered my last pastorate in 1960, I took a different view. Fresh from the faculty of Yale Divinity School, I set the course of my pastoral work by arranging my day for fifty-minute appointments to see the people in my +'',care, at their initiative, in my office. The model was of the psychiatrist, not the parish hound who sniffs out the lonely, the hurting, the

"The primary task of the minister in caring for souls when they are plunged into grief is not to be the grief counsellor but to orchestrate for them the caring of the whole Christian community."

angry, the defeated. That artless beginning was the beginning of the end of the last fragment of the servant vocation in my soul until the secretary with brusque and intimidating ways, whom I had inherited and who was old enough to be my mother, said to me one day: "But Dr. Barr" (get the "doctor" that is a mark of professionalism, not servanthood) "what about all the little people, like some of the ladies in the sewing group? They're never going to come in here for an appointment." Saved by grace, but professionalism is rampant in this old servant vocation: The warning signs run from ministers' shoes that seldom need new soles to screening telephone calls in the church office.

Professionalism tends to define people, as John McKnight has suggested, not as people in a place (such as a parish) but as individuals in a system It takes away the power of the people, together, collectively, to care for one another. McKnight asks, "How did communities deal with tragedy before bereavement counsellors? ... They came together and sat with each other, cried together and held hands. . . and they had a great meal, and they laughed and they drank, and they cried." They were nurturing their souls, their genuineness and depth-an experience that stays in the memory and touche the heart. "The soul revealed," as Moore says, "in attachment,

507 - "Tell Us What You Don't Know"

love, and community." "But," McKnight continues, "now we are enriched because instead of that we have a person with a Master's degree in bereavement counselling who can come to our home and sit with us and put inputs into us that will help process our grief. "⁴

The primary task of the minister in caring for souls when they are plunged into grief is not to be the grief counsellor but to orchestrate for them the caring of the whole Christian community. The pastor cares for the soul of the church when she or he helps people come together and sit with each other and cry together and hold hands and have a great meal, a heavenly feast or an earthly one. It is then that the Comforter comes, the leaf falls, God folds back with God's unpredictable invasion, and the caring of soul is tended to by that powerful mystery that transcends us all.

Some worn and familiar stories persist because they touch us truly; so it is with the old story of the child who was sent to the neighborhood store on an errand. She did not return when expected, and her father, going out to hunt for her, encountered her just arriving home. The child explained she had been delayed because she had come across her friend, who had dropped her favorite china doll on the sidewalk.

"It was all broken," she soberly told her father.

"I'm sorry," he responded. "It was nice of you to stay and help her pick up the pieces."

"Oh no," she said, "I stayed to help her cry."

That is caring for the soul.

But the little girls were friends, and the church is commissioned to care for the soul of the world. Much of that world is distant and far away and strange. It is resistant and ugly and blood stained. But we live in a day when that distant world is at our doorstep. To turn from it because we have no power to cure is to deny the power we do possess, the power to care.

That world, from South Africa to Miami to Buffalo Center, Iowa, is a world of the walking wounded, the bewildered, the endangered, the hurt, and the lost. It includes you and me. When you come, pastor, offering to care for bur souls that we may care for the soul of the church and the church may care for the soul of the world, remind us that the world's soulfulness is wounded. Make it clear that you come not as a professional to cure our wounds but to help us cry and laugh and sing, nurturing our souls, increasing depth and genuineness; but broaden our souls also by Word and Sacrament to make room for the invasion of that God who folded self back into the world in Jesus Christ, and who is urgent to hold us in that folding, whose coming changes the flow of the stream of our history and of all history forever. So simple and so profound and so unpredictable is the renascence of faith.

⁴ Newsletter of the National Center for Clinical Infant Programs, May, 1994, pp. 19-21.