Some Ways Clergy Should and Shouldn't Be

Besides the obvious.

—Metaphysical Helping Professional. Remember when Gandalf is fighting the Balrog and he suddenly starts talking about how he’s a servant of the Secret Flame of Anor? And you’re like “what the fuck is that”? Then you dig around and find out that this is Tolkien’s idea of what the Holy Spirit would look like to people who don’t yet have a Christian vocabulary to describe it with? And you’re like “Whoah, this guy isn’t just a good wizard, he’s down with the king”? That’s what it’s like with some clergy. One minute they’re talking to you about boundaries or recommending that you talk to your doctor about your symptoms or recommending a little good news and positive thinking, and then the next they’re like “Also Satan is going to start messing with you as soon as you start adopting healthier patterns. So let’s pray against that:” like it’s no big deal. They move back and forth seamlessly between the language of a buffered and of an un-buffered self as though the differences between these things are … less than absolute.

A priest like this saved my ass.

—I Spit On the Concept of “Helping Professionals.” I am a Shepherd. This person is more like the guy in the classic Mitchell and Webb “Evil Vicar” sketch, except actually pastoral, and not evil. His, her, or their sense of human psychology might be pretty sophisticated, or it might not, but the vocabulary that he, she, or they use for talking about human psychology could all come out of a Father Brown story. Psychology is important to this clergy person only in that it might help us not sin so damn much, and we need all the help that we can get, wretches that we are, buffeted by every wind, suspended above Perdition by a single fraying rope, et cetera.

—Exemplary fuckup (“fellow pilgrim”). Graham Greene’s Whisky Preacher is the classic type here: he knows the words of eternal life, but that’s about all he (or she) (or they) know, and everybody tacitly acknowledges as much. This type of minister can be great as long as “exemplary fuckup” doesn’t mean a) “I get to be verbally abusive” or b) “I get to fuck the parishioners.”¹

—Hippie Who Didn’t Sell Out. I used to go to a church in St. Paul where one of the ministers lived miles away in an intentional community with a bunch of her college friends. Everybody at this intentional community (at least hobby-)farmed and they had built their own straw-bale houses, they took care of each other’s kids and brought them up together, etc. This minister drove many miles into town to work at this church, which she had also founded with like-minded people she’d met in what I imagine was her idealistic youth (though I never met any version of this woman who wasn’t endearingly, passionately idealistic, which means her young self must have been downright Simone Weilian). She wrote books, the first of which was published by a member of the church who had followed his bohemian dream of starting a small press from his impossibly cool apartment. Her fellow-ministers also wrote books, one of which was a hilarious and insightful Kierkegaard pastiche. They all had kids. I would look at these three ministers, especially this lady, and their various intentional-community-dwelling friends, and think, Oh my God, it’s actually possible to turn 25, or 30, or 35, and have kids, and buy a house, and still not suck! The Suck Police don’t show up at your door one day and say “Start sucking now or we’ll kill your dog!” You never have to start sucking! It’s a choice! And this turns out to be true, sometimes, to some degree, with persistence and luck²: you can do some few of the wonderful, generous, countercultural things you imagine yourself spending your life doing when you’re twenty. But you have to pick the things—you can’t do all of them, and since I am always making up new experiments in living that I could do, picking has proven an issue for me. The nice thing about these people is that it was a real church: a shoestring affair, but we did our best to show up for each other. I love all of these people and the influence of this church on me was wholly benign.

—Pillar of Genuine Wisdom, Learning, and Love. I mean, you do get one of these occasionally so it’s worth mentioning. The rest of you could, you know, at least try.

—Lovable Goofball. Sometimes I think pastors are like novelists. We always need more great novelists, or near-great novelists. We also always need more hacks who get to the point, who know themselves well enough that they don’t clutter the work with bad attempts at the stuff they can’t do. We always need more Thomas Pynchons and Toni Morrisons and Joanna Russes, on the one hand, and more Agatha Christies and Lee Childs (Lee Children?) on the other. What we absolutely don’t need is another novelist who tries risky structural gimmicks that almost pay off, who writes lyrical and thoughtful paragraphs that aren’t beautiful and that don’t think, who imagines a world that kind of convinces but falls apart after a little reflection. Nobody wants to read or write one of those books.³

Similarly, nobody wants to hear an almost-good sermon, an ersatz-good sermon. Nobody wants to hear two or three quotes from middlebrow poets linked together with countercultural wise sayings that everyone in the congregation already agrees with, plus an exegesis we’ve already heard twenty times of the day’s text. If it isn’t beautiful, make it serviceable and short: a couple solid bits of contextual or philological info you haven’t given us before, a comparison to daily life, no straining after eloquence, get off the stage. Be the pastoral Thomas Pynchon or be the pastoral Agatha Christie, but do not under any circumstances be the pastoral Dave Eggers.

—The Very, Parfit, Gentle Exegete. I used to have a minister who would immediately identify the hardest and scariest thing in the week’s scripture readings, like in the first sentence of his sermon. You would be like “damn, where’s he gonna go from here?” And then he’d somehow always find something useful—a livable, plausible interpretation of the passage—to say. Then he’d quit after like five minutes. He did this week after week. The other rectors were stereotypical Mainline clergy, i.e. one person who sounds like your kindergarten vice principal telling you to play nice with the other kids and one person who is 378 years old (approx.). They never acted like they noticed that they were sharing the stage with a rock star, and this just made him seem even cooler. Since he retired I have not been able to let the toad Episcopalianism squat on my life any further.

—The Guy Who Knows Everyone’s Business and Takes Everyone’s Measure. “Guy” here gender-neutral. Knows all the church gossip, what everybody’s kid is good at and what they wish they were good at, what gifts each person has that they’ve never realized they have, what gifts they think they have and don’t, what is finally going to kill the congregation if anything does, etc. The tragedy of this pastor-archetype is that the only people I know who want to be this pastor, and/or think they are this pastor, are terrible at it. They are all extreme Meyers-Briggs Js who are apt to put way too much faith in their own passing and unconsidered judgments of other people, the type of people who get hold of the wrong end of the stick and never let go of it. You’d start to get involved in the church and they’d give you a comprehensive description of who was who, who was motivated by what, and it would turn out to be completely wrong, and then, after six or seven months, it would occur to you to wonder what awful misdescription of you is being incepted into the brains of other newcomers.

Some people, however, are very good at being this guy: they’re the ones who never set out to be and are never aware that they are.

—Sweet little Dostoevsky nerds. Explains itself. We used to have one of these as Archbishop of Canterbury, and that was pretty cool.

1. I’m not even a hardliner about never dating or falling in love across “power lines” here, because sometimes you’re sticking someone at the parish in Bumblefuck, Nowhere, and they’re not going to date at all if the one source of spiritually and politically well-matched adults is off the table, and I’m not one to go around lightly imposing celibacy on other people. My problem is more with the person who’s looking to commit the same fun error in judgement every six months with a different person.

2. You’re preparing a “and PRIVILEGE” spitball right now. Privilege is also luck, at the end of the day, so just keep that spitball to yourself.

3. (Why do you think it’s taking me so long!!!)