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February 17 - February 18, 2023
What does it mean to be a minister in our contemporary society?
The four chapters can be seen as four different doors through which I have tried to enter into the problems of ministry in our modern world.
For the minister is called to recognize the sufferings of his time in his own heart and make that recognition the starting point of his service. Whether he tries to enter into a dislocated world, relate to a convulsive generation, or speak to a dying man, his service will not be perceived as authentic unless it comes from a heart wounded by the suffering about which he speaks.
Peter has become a prisoner of the now, caught in the present without meaningful connections with his past or future.
Nuclear man is a man who has lost naïve faith in the possibilities of technology and is painfully aware that the same powers that enable man to create new life styles carry the potential for self-destruction.
Nuclear man is the man who realizes that his creative powers hold the potential for self-destruction.
He sees such an abundance of material commodities around him that scarcity no longer motivates his life, but at the same time he is groping for a direction and asking for meaning and purpose.
Why should a man marry and have children, study and build a career; why should he invent new techniques, build new institutions, and develop new ideas—when he doubts if there will be a tomorrow which can guarantee the value of human effort?
He is confronted not only with the most elaborate and expensive attempts to save the life of one man by heart transplantation, but also with the powerlessness of the world to help when thousands of people die from lack of food. He is confronted not only with man’s ability to travel rapidly to another planet, but also with his hopeless impotence to end a senseless war on this planet. He is confronted not only with high-level discussions about human rights and Christian morality, but also with torture chambers in Brazil, Greece, and Vietnam. He is confronted not only with incredible ingenuity
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When man is no longer able to look beyond his own death and relate himself to what extends beyond the time and space of his life, he loses his desire to create and the excitement of being human.
Beyond the superficial layers of idiosyncrasies, psychological differences and characterological typologies, he finds a center from which he can embrace all other beings at once and experience meaningful connections with all that exists.
There he comes to the shocking, but at the same time self-evident, insight that prayer is not a pious decoration of life but the breath of human existence.
It is my growing conviction that in Jesus the mystical and the revolutionary ways are not opposites, but two sides of the same human mode of experiential transcendence.
I am increasingly convinced that conversion is the individual equivalent of revolution.
The mystic as well as the revolutionary has to cut loose from his selfish needs for a safe and protected existence and has to face without fear the miserable condition of himself and his world.
His appearance in our midst has made it undeniably clear that changing the human heart and changing human society are not separate tasks, but are as interconnected as the two beams of the cross.
Jesus was a revolutionary, who did not become an extremist, since he did not offer an ideology, but Himself. He was also a mystic, who did not use his intimate relationship with God to avoid the social evils of his time, but shocked his milieu to the point of being executed as a rebel.
It is this new world that fills our dreams, guides our actions and makes us go on, at great risk, with the increasing conviction that one day man will finally be free—free to love!
Like that minister, who might have recognized the Messiah if he had raised his eyes from his Bible to look into the youth’s eyes, we are challenged to look into the eyes of the young men and women of today, who are running away from our cruel ways. Perhaps that will be enough to prevent us from handing them over to the enemy and enable us to lead them out of their hidden places into the middle of their people where they can redeem us from our fears.
It is the behavior of people who are convinced that there is nothing “out there” or “up there” on which they can get a solid grasp, which can pull them out of their uncertainty and confusion. No authority, no institution, no outer concrete reality has the power to relieve them of their anxiety and loneliness and make them free. Therefore the only way is the inward way.
The inwardness of the coming generation can lead either to a higher level of hypocrisy or to the discovery of the reality of the unseen which can make for a new world. The path it takes will depend to a great extent on the kind of ministry given to this inward generation.
Not following fathers is quite different from not living up to the expectations of one’s peers. The first means disobedience; the second, nonconformity. The first creates guilt feelings; the second, feelings of shame. In this respect there is an obvious shift from a guilt culture to a shame culture.
Inwardness, fatherlessness and convulsiveness—these three characteristics of today’s young people draw the first lines on the face of the coming generation.
When we look for the implications of our prognosis for the Christian ministry of the future, it appears as though three roles ask for special attention: (1) the leader as the articulator of inner events; (2) the leader as man of compassion; (3) the leader as contemplative critic.
Since the God “out there” or “up there” is more or less dissolved in the many secular structures, the God within asks attention as never before. And just as the God outside could be experienced not only as a loving father but also as a horrible demon, the God within can be not only the source of a new creative life but also the cause of a chaotic confusion.
As soon as we feel at home in our own house, discover the dark corners as well as the light spots, the closed doors as well as the drafty rooms, our confusion will evaporate, our anxiety will diminish, and we will become capable of creative work.
The Christian leader is, therefore, first of all, a man who is willing to put his own articulated faith at the disposal of those who ask his help.
In this context pastoral conversation is not merely a skillful use of conversational techniques to manipulate people into the Kingdom of God, but a deep human encounter in which a man is willing to put his own faith and doubt, his own hope and despair, his own light and darkness at the disposal of others who want to find a way through their confusion and touch the solid core of life.
It can become a true celebration when the liturgical leader is able to name the space where joy and sorrow touch each other as the place in which it is possible to celebrate both life and death.
By speaking about articulation as a form of leadership we have already suggested the place where the future leader will stand. Not “up there,” far away or secretly hidden, but in the midst of his people, with the utmost visibility.
When the Christian leader is a man of God for the future generation, he can be so only insofar as he is able to make the compassion of God with man—which is visible in Jesus Christ—credible in his own world.
When they kill, we know that we could have done it; when they give life, we know that we can do the same. For a compassionate man nothing human is alien: no joy and no sorrow, no way of living and no way of dying.
Thus the authority of compassion is the possibility of man to forgive his brother, because forgiveness is only real for him who has discovered the weakness of his friends and the sins of his enemy in his own heart and is willing to call every human being his brother.
But just as bread given without love can bring war instead of peace, professionalism without compassion will turn forgiveness into a gimmick, and the kingdom to come into a blindfold.
It is not the task of the Christian leader to go around nervously trying to redeem people, to save them at the last minute, to put them on the right track. For we are redeemed once and for all. The Christian leader is called to help others affirm this great news, and to make visible in daily events the fact that behind the dirty curtain of our painful symptoms there is something great to be seen: the face of Him in whose image we are shaped.
The contemplative is not needy or greedy for human contacts, but is guided by a vision of what he has seen beyond the trivial concerns of a possessive world.
He knows that if there is hope for a better world in the future the signs must be visible in the present, and he will never curse the now in favor of the later.
I realize that I have done nothing more than rephrase the fact that the Christian leader must be in the future what he has always had to be in the past: a man of prayer, a man who has to pray, and who has to pray always.
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.
As we all know, Mr. Harrison’s is not an isolated case. Many people are the prisoners of their own existence.
The mystery of one man is too immense and too profound to be explained by another man.
The emptiness of the past and the future can never be filled with words but only by the presence of a man.
A man can keep his sanity and stay alive as long as there is at least one person who is waiting for him. The mind of man can indeed rule his body even when there is little health left.
Most people in our society do not want to disturb each other with the idea of death. They want a man to die without ever having realized that death was approaching.
At that moment John is no longer a chaplain trying to do a good piece of counseling, and Mr. Harrison is no longer a farm worker doubting if he will make it through the operation; rather they are two men who reawaken in each other the deepest human intuition, that life is eternal and cannot be made futile by a biological process.
it seems necessary to re-establish the basic principle that no one can help anyone without becoming involved, without entering with his whole person into the painful situation, without taking the risk of becoming hurt, wounded or even destroyed in the process.
Thinking about martyrdom can be an escape unless we realize that real martyrdom means a witness that starts with the willingness to cry with those who cry, laugh with those who laugh, and to make one’s own painful and joyful experiences available as sources of clarification and understanding.
“Who can take away suffering without entering it?”
All this suggests that when one has the courage to enter where life is experienced as most unique and most private, one touches the soul of the community.
Christian leadership is a dead-end street when nothing new is expected, when everything sounds familiar and when ministry has regressed to the level of routine.
