Merton, and Daniel Berrigan. At the time, I probably couldn’t have worked for the church if I didn’t think people like that were at the heart of the church. I thought they were leading lives I would have called philosophical (much more so than the academics who called themselves philosophers). These were lives that loved wisdom, sought wisdom, lives that tried to think, act, and feel wisely, lives that paid a price, as Socrates did, for their choices, their activities.
As Socrates did, as Jesus did. Towards the end of my service, I used to say, partly to be provocative but mostly to be honest, that I wasn’t a Christian because I believed God created the world (or that humans had souls or that there was a heaven waiting for good little boys and girls): I was a Christian because I couldn’t get away from Jesus, from the stories he told to snare us in his world, from the stories told of his time in our world.
I don’t think Jesus and Socrates would have had a hard time recognizing each other, or Jesus and Diogenes the Cynic, for that matter. (In fact, John the Baptist, Jesus, and Paul don’t make a bad philosophical trio.) The simple life pictured in the gospels, the scorn of the world’s pomp and glitter, the self-possessed courage before earthly power, the sense that grew among the Christians that they were citizens not of a tribe but of the world, are elements in a life that most of the children of Socrates would find congenial. Paul’s boast in Philippians could have been spoken by many of them:
I have learned to be content with whatever I have. I know what it is to have little, and I know what it is to have plenty. In any and all circumstances I have learned the secret of being well-fed and of going hungry, of having plenty and of being in need. (Phil 4: 11–12)
Given this convergence, I came to think, as I grew older, that the path of wise living wasn’t really that hard to find. It was, as always, living it, wanting it in the first place, that was the problem.
Holy Things
There was a little café on the south side of town in our first parish. It was just across the river from the parsonage yard, an easy walk down the highway. We’d eat there sometimes if we were hosting a pastors’ meeting and, at first, we thought it would be a handy place to grab a quick lunch or to treat ourselves to dinner. This turned out to be harder than I thought, especially if we wanted to eat our food quickly, or taste it while it was still warm.
Everyone in town who was on the church’s books but who would never enter the church except for weddings and funerals would stroll over to our table, greet us not as distant acquaintances but as bosom companions, and stand there hovering until whatever we ordered had begun to decompose. They’d tell stories, share philosophical reflections, and generally make me perspire with impatience and discomfort. Then they would sigh in satisfaction and depart, proclaiming some variation of: “Well, I’d better let you eat your dinner.” They would sometimes add: “ . . . so you can get back to work.”
In a way, it was another version of church membership: they really did want us to know them and to know they considered themselves members. (They wanted everybody to know it. That’s why they hovered so long.) And, to be honest, they weren’t the worst members the church had. They just made eating in town impossible. If we were going to dine out, we had to leave town and, eventually, as more people knew us, leave the county. (Or order something that could be eaten cold.)
One of the people I met this way was a tall, thin, rugged-looking old fellow, with a stately walk and a quiet manner, named Arlan. I knew a lot of his kids and grandkids since the family really was strongly connected to the church; his wife was a mainstay of the women’s group, especially if cooking was needed.
Arlan not only looked like he’d stepped out of the nineteenth-century frontier, he tried to live as though he were still there. He and his wife had a little farm, and they still cooked on a wood-burning stove. She baked all their bread in this contraption. It pained Arlan to buy anything he could make himself—or have his wife make.
There was an obsessive minimalism to him. He liked getting by with little and worked at getting by with less and less. I offered him a cup of coffee once and he scoffed at the idea, proudly declaring he drank nothing but water. (I helplessly thought of General Ripper from Dr. Strangelove.)
I liked Arlan and, despite his quirks, had a lot of respect for him. He was bull-headed and he didn’t have the broadest outlook on life, but he had a commanding air, great natural dignity. He drove one of the school buses, and I heard his discipline was both absolute and effortless.
One day, after one of the milestones of life—birth, marriage, or death—had brought Arlan to the church grounds, we were talking on the front lawn, beneath the large cross on the church’s brick front. Arlan pointed at the church’s name, very elegantly set in metal letters across the brick. He said, “I gave those letters in memory of my daughter. She died in a car wreck the year they rebuilt after the fire.” It was characteristic of Arlan that he gave me no other information, just noted the memorial and the reason. But it was a proud and solemn pronouncement, and it was a moment with something to say about church and community.
For this man who never came to a regular worship service, this place was holy ground, a fitting site for holy things, things set apart in devotion and love.
(A few years later, Arlan’s wife, Flo, was killed in a freak road accident when they were on one of the few vacations they ever took. I told someone that doing that funeral was like burying my grandmother. After the funeral, Arlan gave us a dozen rolls Flo had baked and frozen before the trip. She was a fabulous baker, but I had a hard time bringing myself to eat them: it was like eating consecrated bread.)
I used to point out to my confirmation students that there’s no scene in the New Testament that depicts Jesus telling his disciples to write down what’s going on. I was trying to make them think about the essentials of faith and the growth of tradition. Jesus never tells his disciples to get busy and build churches either. Yet Bibles and buildings are part of the reality of Christian faith. It’s not only impossible, by now, to think of Christianity without its writings and places of worship; it’s impossible to think of this community enduring through time without preserving its stories or venerating the sites of its central acts.
Births and deaths happen where they happen, but a community brings the babies and those prepared for burial to the place of worship for those events to be marked, marked by symbols of a greater life. It’s the action of marking that gives weight to the site. Baptize enough babies, marry enough men and women, say the last words over enough loved ones in the same place and you can’t think of it as anything but holy ground.
But that place is there for those times only because it’s there already for something more encompassing: it’s the place we enact the primary rituals of faith, every week of every year for as long as the community lives.
This is the dominating rhythm of every pastor’s life. Everything I did, everything that happened to me, all the things I’m setting down in these fragments, happened within the movement of each week toward the Sunday service, and the place of that Sunday in the cycle of the church year. Both the joys and the sorrows were tempered by the worship cycle. (One more thing for the reader to remember.)
It’s not hard for most people to appreciate the beauty of ritual, but I think its power, its force over a community, the way it steadies and broadens life, can only be grasped if you’re living with its rhythms. In a strange way, the stylized world of ritual and symbol takes you out of your life and into a greater life. That’s where the steadiness comes from.
There are always reformers around who want to dissolve “Sunday” into “Monday” concerns, as though faith would be enriched that way. It never seems to occur to them that faith could just as easily be impoverished by the pettiness and provincialism most people’s ordinary lives are overwhelmed by. I often thought, when we prayed the Prayer of the Church, that many of us were being forced to think and feel beyond our own lives in a way we seldom did otherwise. I thought, in any given week, the Sunday gathering was probably the most profound encounter most of us had with thought, music, history, and the great world beyond our