I’m a long distance runner. The first year of the pandemic, because I had quit the gym and running was supreme social distancing, I trained for and ran a solo marathon. I got up on a rainy Saturday morning in early September, laced up the shoes, and over the course of about four hours slogged my way multiple times around a neighborhood lake. It was basically just me and the foraging armadillos and a few startled deer.
At the end, there wasn’t a finish line or a medal, just the reward of having run those 26.2 miles knowing I hadn’t caught or transmitted Covid while running. And I drank a lot of Gatorade and made myself some nachos.
This commitment to running long distances has inscribed itself in my personality. In ministry (and maybe generally in life) I’m tenacious. Once I have something in the wheelhouse (blogging, a friendship, a hobby, LGBTQIA+ advocacy) I’ll stick with it.
That tenacity has carried me pretty far. 2022 will be the 20th year I’ve been in this pastoral ministry gig, and I can say with considerable confidence I feel called to keep at it. I still quite like Jesus, and am proud of the ministry of our local Lutheran congregation as well as the multiple ministries we have launched the past few years.1
But…
I started to realize in the spring of this year that I’m struggling. I’m exhausted, and needing space to reconsider things. So much has changed, and I haven’t fully had the chance to process those changes. And unlike 2020 and 2021 when I seemed to have the capacity to enter into emergency mode and simply pour myself into the next pressing thing that presented itself, here in 2022 I’ve hit a kind of wall. Or perhaps even more significant than a wall, in 2022 I find myself attempting to keep running longer than a marathon when all I had trained for was those 26.2 miles.
Pastoral ministry, perhaps like any caring profession, accumulates exhaustion. Part of that is simply the nature of being in a caring relationship with so many people. Over time, I am aware of more and more struggles in individual and family life. You grieve with one family and preside at a funeral, and then the next trauma will come, and you’ll walk alongside parishioners again and again.
However, that’s just the emotional burden of direct care-giving. But what we all have now experienced the last two years is the additional trauma of living through crisis, through a pandemic. And because this pandemic has been so long (and isn’t over) we haven’t really had the chance collectively to do the recovery work those who go through briefer (if also more intense) crises do.
But there is more going on these days than the regular stressors of care-giving and the heightened stress of the pandemic. There’s also what Bruce Rogers-Vaughn identifies as the unique challenge of offering pastoral care in a neoliberal age. Rogers-Vaughn argues that in his work as a therapist he is seeing an additional layer of suffering. We all are somewhat well-equipped to address first-order suffering (caused by the human condition, like illness or plague) and second-order suffering (caused by human evil, like war or ecological devastation). But we are less prepared to address third- order suffering, “the new chronic,” still ill-defined and difficult to name but clearly present as a general malaise in the culture writ large.
Somewhat idiosyncratic to my own call here, but perhaps with parallels in other pastoral calls, we also went through a very significant church split back in 2014 over same-gender marriage. It basically boiled down to me remaining committed to presiding at same-gender weddings and about 40% of our congregation leaving as a result. That was another level of trauma I had been processing between 2015-2019 and just beginning to get my head around when the pandemic hit. I guess on the upside, because that whole group left in 2015 I have not had to deal with, to the degree many of my mainline Protestant colleagues have, the continuing presence of Qanon and other conspiracy types in my church, because the purple in our church is less between Democrats and Republicans and more between Democrats and Socialists. But that’s a tale for another day.
I’m very aware of the Great Resignation (which is probably better described as the Great Renegotiation, since most of those who quit jobs last year found other jobs). Record numbers of employees changed jobs in 2021, over 40 million of us. We know many professional fields are seeing higher levels of resignations, but it appears the clergy are especially prone to this. One study indicates that at the beginning of 2021, only about 29% of clergy considered leaving ministry, but by the end of 2021 an astounding 51% of mainline clergy were considering it.
I personally am not considering leaving ministry, but I have decided, for my own health and the health of our congregation, to take time for rest. Although I don’t have the funding or the time to do a full-on 3 month sabbatical like many clergy in our denomination do (I need to get my act together and apply for a sabbatical grant next year), I’m just going to take a month this summer and just rest. In the same way I treated rent assistance, and Marshallese assistance, and various other ministries over the course of the last two years as emergencies to address, I now realized in order to process the layers of my own pain, I need to give emergency attention to my own rest and resilience.
I’m reading a book right now on religious trauma by Brooke N. Peterson. In a clarifying early chapter she writes,
"To name an experience as trauma, it is not the extreme nature of the event, but rather the way that the traumatized understands their life in relation to the world around them; trauma shatters the structuring of relationships and wounds in ways that compromise our understanding of meaning."
I’d say the cumulative effect of a) a church split, b) the Trump presidency and the rise of authoritarianism, and c) the pandemic has traumatized me. It has shattered the structuring of relationships and wounds in ways that compromise some of my understanding of meaning. I’m trying to make sense of this moment we’re in, feel some responsibility to be able to help others make sense of this moment we’re in, and I don’t think I can do it if I don’t first put my own seat belt on and fit the oxygen-mask over my own face.
I’m fully aware that it isn’t only clergy who are struggling. The other day I commented that it seems half the world is Covid positive right now, to which a parishioner responded, “And the other half need a nap.” True. But the unique challenge of the role of clergy, especially those of us who strive to treat the polis itself and the community in which we reside as part of our call, is that we simply cannot perform our role well if we have neglected the care of our own soul and self.
Returning to Bruce Rogers-Vaughn. In his fascinating book he envisions the church as communities of the expelled. He believes that neoliberalism is not simply antigovernment and antiunion; it is also antichurch.
“One exhibit of this broad dismantling of collectives is the continuing decline of religious institutions in the United States, a steady erosion that signifies the general marginalization of religious collectives under neoliberal governance.”
I think progressive churches are even more susceptible to this neoliberal erosion, and perhaps it is the one thing we might learn from the Christian Right: to survive we’re going to have to shore up this thing we believe in, our communities of faith.
Rogers-Vaughn sees the negative energy of neoliberalism against communities of faith as an opportunity to discover once again the core definition of communities centered in the way of Jesus.
What if the church understood itself to be the community of the expelled—all those pushed out by the many forces of neoliberalism, from nationalism to racism to homophobia to classism and more? That certainly is one thing Brooke N. Peterson discovered in her book, that the LGBTQIA+ folks she interviewed both experienced religious trauma in the faith communities that expelled them but then also found comfort and healing in a return to more progressive communities of faith.
Pastors are in a unique position. Rather than thinking about how to find a spiritual home, their calling is to be about the business of shaping a spiritual home for others. But shaping some kinds of spiritual homes, especially for the expelled, inevitably has a push factor for those made uncomfortable by a church that is less cis, oddly political, more queer. It’s pretty much guaranteed if you focus on being a community of the expelled, some people will leave.
This particular moment leaves those of us who lead such communities of faith wondering whether the center will hold at all, and if it will, to what degree we are personally responsible for holding the center. Mixed in with that is all our own personal pains, our struggles with whatever ails us, from addiction to abandonment issues to trauma-work to just simply not knowing what we don’t know.
I know that I am not alone, even though sometimes my pain tells me I am.
I’m a little lost these days, and not as organized or high-performing as I would like. And I feel called to pastor the church of the expelled, as difficult as that is going to be. It’s a beautiful vision I can see in and through my own current pain and exhaustion, and it keeps me going.
The expelled are not homeless at all. In the church, they are cast out together, and the care of souls occurs as the community finds life in its collective resistance.
Like http://queer.camp and http://canopynwa.org and
https://www.littlefreepantry.org and https://www.facebook.com/thetransitioncloset/
I've always appreciated your dedication and work. We first crossed paths when I was investigating a project possibility for us at Vintage Fellowship to piggy back on, which turned out to be LIRS relative to sponsoring integrating
families from the near East.
Some of the ideas I hear you expressing in this post sound very similar to idea that Bonhoeffer expressed in his Letters From Prison.
I certainly hear what you are saying about your personal traumatization. Rest, contemplate, and integrate. The many things that you are involved in are healing for many, but somehow you yourself needs an inflow of energy to sustain your healing ministrations.
Tom Christian
First let me say how happy I am to see you realize you need time to care for yourself and that you weren’t leading up to telling us in your letter that you were thinking of leaving the ministry. You are a gift to those in your flock who try to embrace the middle of political issues, whether young and dealing with negative discrimination or old and trying to understand all the changes in politics, gender identity, hate of government and the anger that seems so prevalent in society now. You seem to envelope all of us with your caring demeanor which is needed so badly right now. Rest, rejuvenate your spirit and come back with words of wisdom. Thank you for being the caring Pastor you are.
Daisy Masoner