Pastoral Wisdom

Paul writes - A Kiwi friend, Martin Davies included the following in a newsletter – a miscellany (Dec. 2005) – which he sends to a group of people, my good-self included. Much resonates with both my own life, and feels pastorally relevant to a number of blog friends whose journey’s I follow. The section drawn from Martin’s miscellany feels as though it needs a wider readership. It’s well worth taking some time to sit with it. There’s a wonderful depth of wisdom and the application has application beyond those who are “bishops, ministry-teams, deacons, and priests.” Thanks Martin.

“….Let me borrow and expand some words from the sixth-century St. Gregory the Great’s Pastoral Rule; written for bishops, and equally applicable to ministry teams and deacons and priests:

While they are preoccupied with exterior matters, they must not lessen their solicitude for the interior. Nor when they are preoccupied with the interior may they relax their watch on the exterior.  Otherwise, by giving themselves up to pressing duties from outside, they would experience an interior collapse; or by keeping themselves busy solely on interior matters, would be neglecting their external duties towards their neighbour.

There will always be tension between the need to make time for daily waiting upon God in prayer and praise, and the immediacy or even the urgency (some of it imagined) of the tasks to be done.  But we will be able to resist the temptation to make our mark and even perhaps to single-handedly save the church or the world, if God remains for us, the One to whom we give glory.

A Lutheran pastor wrote to me after we had both stayed in an American monastery:

What I am trying to retain … is a sense of deliberation that the monks have: that eternity has begun; there is all the time in the world because God is in control; I need to work hard, but I don’t feel like “success” depends on me.  My ongoing struggle is to be satisfied with the work I have gotten to, and not to worry about what I have not gotten to.

Andy Ballentine

In the widely varying circumstances of your lives and ministries, you will need to find a way to ensure that the work of ministry does not run away with you; and that your own ambitions do not (in my Lutheran friend’s words) get in the way of being satisfied with what you have gotten to, rather than preoccupation with what you have not gotten to; and that waiting daily upon God in prayer and praise remains the basis of all that you are and all that you do…”

A great Advent reflection. The challenge will be to live in response to it, particularly the two highlighted sections. God, grant me grace sufficient to live more deeply interiorly and exteriorly; to live less with worry, more with satisfaction, and more trustingly. Amen.

Comments

[Dean]

Well said. I especially affirm the statement about the "sense of deliberation that the monks have: that eternity has begun; there is all the time in the world because God is in control; I need to work hard, but I don’t feel like "success" depends on me." This is genuine faith in the God who is and ever will be.