Holding on to Idealism

This weekend, another seminary graduation came and went. Each time I march in with the faculty, and I see the students alongside, I’m reminded of my own experience in 75, 77, and 84. It’s hard to believe thirty-seven years ago this June, I packed practically everything I owned, crammed it into the back seat of a Datsun, said good bye to my family, and drove from San Diego to Portland to attend Western.

I had a pretty romantic notion of seminary training. After reading the airbrushed catalogues, I assumed the seminary’s backdoor was the Pacific Northwest forest, where I would go for long afternoon walks, reflecting on the theological insights of the day. It turned out to be partially true. I spent lots of time walking through Mt. Tabor’s trails. I determined that I would stay fixed to a deep walk with God. I would not let seminary classes take the place of devotions, the Bible become a textbook. For the most part, I stayed faithful to this. I did not want to lose my first love. Did not want to find my passion cooled. I wanted to develop a critical mind without a critical spirit. I wanted to graduate with a more realistic understanding of life, yet hold on to a youthful idealism that believed God called me and would use me to help advance His kingdom.

I looked out over these students last weekend, hoping that this sort of idealism has not eluded any of them. I hooded the latest doctoral candidates, hopeful they are still passionate. Idealism is necessary for risk takers and dreamers. But it is also dangerous, for it runs head on into realism. There is no getting around the fact that ministry is, for the most part, hard. I tell my students there will be disappointments. You go out with romantic notions of riding a wild stallion in parades, only to find yourself “mucking out the stalls, spreading manure, pulling up the weeds,” as Peterson once put it. Some in religious clothes will receive you warmly and then turn on you. After years of abuse in one church, my best friend in seminary ended up in need of psychiatric care. Some of my peers left the ministry within the first initial years, due to the ungodliness of some churches. It is a broken world.

The biggest challenge is to stay at it, stay fresh—hang on to a certain idealism that you had at graduation. To still believe God wants to enlarge your borders, expand your vision, do the impossible through you. But one has to be so careful of getting in the grind and getting ground up. Every now and then, I still reread Barbara Brown Taylor’s Leaving Church. I look for clues, warnings, for most of us are candidates to write the same book one day. I’m always struck by her candor, her admission. As she puts it, ministry became so all encompassing, she kept the soul so hitched to the plow that “it stood between the traces even after the harness was off, oiled, and hung on the wall.”  It seems to be her way of saying that, as an Anglican rector, she could never take off the collar—could never find any other identity but the one placed upon her by others. As she puts it, “my context was so tightly focused that even my junk mail was Christian.”

To a certain extent, all of us need an annual commencement, a fresh start, a new collar, as well as down times to take it off and read the rest of life.