PeaceBang

Bucking Bronco On the Prairie

I said to a friend today that I feel that ministry is a bucking bronco. You just get on there and hang on some days.

I switched my day off from Monday to Friday, which is making me a little bit confused this week, like “what day is it now?” But I’m excited about the change because it makes Sunday the beginning of the week rather than the end, which works for me theologically as well as energetically. It was weird to get up early on Monday morning this week and get into the office instead of sleeping late and lolling over my coffee, but I really loved being able to follow through with things that came up on Sunday, and I think I may actually be able to take the entire day off on Friday, amen! When I took Monday as my day off, I would inevitably start to hyperventilate at about 4pm wondering how many e-mails were piling up, and feel inexorably drawn into my study before dinner. How else to prepare for the onslaught that was Tuesday and Wednesday? I certainly didn’t have the energy to tackle that pile on Sunday afternoons or evenings! As a result, I very rarely took a full day off. It was more like a morning and afternoon off. That isn’t good.

So this is good. Taking Friday off also helps put me in better sync with the rest of the working world and allows me to say “TGIF” with everyone else, which makes me feel more like a normal person. I know that shouldn’t matter but it does — and if I don’t have ministry duties on Saturday morning or afternoon — wow! — it’s almost like having an actual weekend experience!

Even with all this massaging of my schedule, however, I am learning that unless I make space within myself that is free from the concerns of church, it doesn’t matter how much time I take off, or what days. I have been working on what I call “pathological availability” for some years now in my spiritual practice (put your hands together in a prayer pose, close your eyes and flare your nostrils when you say that…. “my spirituaaaal praaactice”) and am finally achieving some wideness in my soul that is unoccupied territory. I envision it as a big, wide prairie where nothing happens but the wind blowing through, and it feels really, really peaceful and holy.

(Wait a sec while I go dunk my head in the toilet before I get transported directly to heaven and ascend to the right hand of the Father and everything! whoo!)

But rilly.

Every few years I get a tiny intimation that what I am working on in the spiritually and emotionally is actually WORKING and I experience a lot of amazement and gratitude. You have to understand that when I got the call to ministry I thought it was the biggest mismatch of all time, like casting Zero Mostel as Tony in “West Side Story” or Carmen Miranda as Lady Macbeth: this is not a good idea!

I still feel that way sometimes. Like why is it a good idea to have a woman doing this work who has such a naturally testy temperament when there are so many truly good and nice people in the world to be ministers? Why come after me when it takes me a monumental effort to simply not spend most of my day totally disgusted with all of humanity, including myself? I keep saying to God, “why don’t you get a nice person? Wouldn’t that be better for everyone?”

But you know how God is. God didn’t make me nice. But God did make me a big believer in the goodness of Church, and God did make me a hard worker and not too dumb, either. So I work hard for the Church because I love it, but the hardest work of all happens between my ears every day and every night as I fight my own nature and try to keep myself worthy of this work. It’s a flipping PARTY when I make real progress, and that’s what I’m celebrating now.

It’s not that things in the exterior world are calmer or under control (god awmighty they’re not, believe me!), but after years and years of working on it, I have finally succeeded in clearing out some empty spaces in my being where worries and plans, vision and creative process and strategizing, fussing and obsessing about the church used to take up every inch of territory. Now there’s a little prairie in there. It is the prairie where I said “God, I give up. I am anxious and preoccupied and thinking and planning and worrying almost all the time, and no one has ever needed me to do this. No one ever asked me to take vows of perpetual concern, no one ever required of me that the church occupy every corner of my heart, mind and soul. No one asked me, no one expects it, and only my ego has caused me to become sick with the notion that by worrying and obsessing I can achieve anything positive for myself or my church.”

Over the past two years I have become physically aware that neurotic anxiety about ministry colonizes my body far too easily and too often, like a medicine ball aimed right at my chest. Every day for two years I have gamely tried to throw it back, mostly just managing to drop it on my toe. But you know, either that medicine ball has become lighter or my arms have gotten stronger, because I started throwing it farther and farther in around August (I know — it’s easier when you’re on vacation!), and now it doesn’t come at me as often as it used to. Today I felt it coming at me and I did something I’ve never done before: I stepped out of the way and watched it go flying by. That thing is HEAVY. Damn. It could really hurt a person.

So I’m trying to stop carrying around that medicine ball and to stay in the prairie more often. I highly recommend it. One thing I have figured out is that carrying around that medicine ball doesn’t even make you a better minister, just a more burdened one.

And I think that’s enough mixed metaphors for tonight. Good night, ya’ll. See you on the prairie.