In recent weeks, my thoughts occasionally dwell on my vocation as a pastor. It’s been fifteen years since I served as a parish pastor, and in some ways, I am not the same person I was in 1994. But on the other hand, the man I am today is one in continuity with the man I was then. These thoughts and wonderings are especially important, as I will begin a time of serving as an interim pastor for a nearby congregation on July 1, 2009. After talking with the bishop of the Nebraska Synod, it seemed good to follow this path as a way for both the Church and for me to test my vocation to parish ministry in a place that has much of the terrain of a call to parish ministry, but in other ways, is more contained, both in duration and scope.

This upcoming change has led me to pray for God’s guidance, for a spirit of peace, for wisdom to serve him and the people, and for the attentiveness to his will for my vocation and for the direction of the life he desires for Anne and me. It has also led me to approach my reading and study with eyes open and ears attuned to some themes I might otherwise have missed.

One passage in The Wounded Healer, by Henri J.M. Nouwen, rose up from the page and caught my attention. Nouwen writes:

For a man of prayer is, in the final analysis, the man who is able to recognize in others the face of the Messiah and make visible what was hidden, make touchable what was unreachable. The man of prayer is a leader precisely because through his articulation of God’s work within himself he can lead others out of confusion to clarification; through his compassion he can guide them out of the closed circuits of their in-groups to the wide world of humanity; and through his critical contemplation he can convert their convulsive destructiveness into creative work for the new world to come (p. 47).

What speaks to me in this passage is, first of all, the central perception of “recogniz[ing] in others the face of the Messiah.” This reminds me of—it returns me to—one of the key elements of the discipline of the life of an Oblate, to practice hospitality because one is welcoming Jesus Christ in one’s neighbor. Secondly, the task of making the hidden visible and the unreachable touchable is a sacramental and proclamatory ministry. Nothing is more hidden than the presence of Christ in the Eucharist, yet no hiddenness is more touchable than Christ present in the bread and cup.

Nouwen also links the identity of the man of prayer—Homo orans—with leadership. Then he roots that leadership in the insights offered from personal experience of God, in the compassionate journey into a greater awareness of our place in God’s world, and in the contemplative turn to creative lives attuned to God’s kingdom. This is all, in a way, so simple, and yet in its depths, is the work of a lifetime.

My hope is that the foundations I have, with God’s help, laid in my life over the past year as a Novice Oblate will serve as a strong base upon which God may build my service as a pastor. It doesn’t seem to be a way that depends upon a glossy portfolio of snazzy programs, but rather is a journey that I can share with others. When I think of it that way, I am comforted by a verse I encountered in the Office of the Readings this morning:

Do not fear nor be dismayed, for the Lord, your God, is with you wherever you go (Joshua 1:9b, LH).

Ut in Omnibus Glorificetur Deus.