On Being Resigned

originally published 6/13/2017

“For a good man to realize that it is better to be whole than to be good is to enter on a straight and narrow path compared to which his previous rectitude was flowery license.”  - John Middleton Murry 

“You don’t know what love is, you just do as you’re told.”  - The White Stripes 

How does it feel to leave the ministry?  Mostly, good grief.  Honest.  With a heaping dose of “well, now what?” trepidation.  

I should clarify, for those who know the jargon, that I am no longer “on leave from call,” but I have resigned fully from the roster of ordained leaders which my denomination keeps.  And, to quit being so cryptic, I was an ordained pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America.  For just under five years, and after having prepared and studied for four.  Add in the year or so of choosing a seminary and application processes, and we’re talking about the primary focus for at least a decade of my life.  

And that right there, was the trouble.  I didn’t even notice it happening.  Richard Rohr mentioned in a podcast conversation, “It’s a humbling recognition… you probably did your greatest things for the wrong reasons…. that’s how God uses us.”  

I am under zero illusion that my pastoral ministry was my “greatest thing,” but I know I didn’t totally suck at it.  I regularly received sincere feedback that sermons, lessons, visits, prayers, were making a difference to my parishioners and the friends they introduced me to.  Relationships with my congregation went deep; we agreed and disagreed on various topics but always found the bedrock of what values and/or fears were driving us, and if we should give those the weight we gave them.  I won’t be so ridiculous to name drop, but famous-in-ELCA-circles-pastors think well of me, tell me I should publish liturgies I’ve created, invite me to write commentaries, etc.  (I guess that’s the extent of how ridiculous I’ll be. Ha!)  

Basically, as a pastor, I wasn’t a fucking slouch.  I haven’t lost the faith.  But I was divided from myself in an unsustainable way.  The primary focus of my life got out of focus.  I gave myself, bit by bit, to the anxieties of an institution in survival mode.  

Like a good girl (which, swearing and beer aside, I am), I heroically picked up whatever responsibility I could find, to aid and comfort and shore up the sputtering church.  I attended the workshops, I listened to my elders, I challenged them to listen to their youngers, as well as the necessary challenging of the youngers to listen to the elders.  I lost sleep over institutional decline and all the historical factors contributing to it.  

And all the while, I knew that all this institutional fretting - and my own - was utter faithlessness.  

The central event of Christianity, the thing that makes this faith what it is, is death and resurrection.  We confess that there is a gracious rupture in the fabric of reality, so that death and loss, while very real, no longer have defining power.  

There is no overlap between anxious survival mode, and trusting death and resurrection.  None. 

So by grace, I sabotage my nascent careerism before it completely sabotages my integrity.  Give up the prestige - or just the public curiosity and attention - of holding a historic office.  Let go of the oft-cited job security of an aging clergy and the soon-dawning “good calls” ripe for the millennial-pastor pickings.  BARF.  All the ways anxious survival mode plays out in ME, personally, are all the ways I have not trusted death-and-resurrection.  

I confess the dark attraction of clergy careerism, of continuing to play the good girl who’s just such a nice pastor, I confess that I could easily be that parasite on the Body of Christ.  I’m a sinner, and I know I could give it this particular expression, while everyone around me applauds and thinks well of me.  

Isn’t that a trip?  For me, being the ultimate “good girl,” becoming a freakin’ pastor, was sin.  Was just doing-as-told, was fulfilling others’ expectations, was playing into grandiosity under cover of virtue.  Sure, good and true ministry happened.  God is a faithful trickster and grace is permission to stop taking oneself so damn seriously. 

Nothing on this journey is or ever will be wasted, and I am more grateful now than I ever was behind a pulpit.  (And in case you didn’t know, I was pretty grateful and joyful and silly behind that pulpit, too.  “Irreverent” isn’t a new adjective for me, mmkay?)

I am in awe of pastors who feel such wholeness within their ministry.  It would have been cool if I had found that also.  But I find it, paradoxically, in resigning.  The constant clamoring inside me, from the early days of seminary until the day I resigned, “something about this isn’t right!!!” has stopped.  In its place is a calm sense that, “there’s plenty you will still offer, watch for the right way.” 

Resignation is an interesting word.  It’s often associated with defeat, with giving up, with being unable to do or to finish something.  But at its root, it’s a death-and-resurrection word.  To be resigned is to be re-signed, re-signified, renamed, given a new intention.  So hell yeah.  I’m resigned.