Pastors often face emotions in others: the grief of a widow, the turbulence of a teenager, or the wrath of a powerful board member. But what about pastors’ own emotions-anxiety about the congregational meeting, love for God, frustration over unmet goals? How should these emotions be handled? Can pastors allow them to show? If so, how? And to whom?
LEADERSHIP editors Jim Berkley and Marshall Shelley posed these questions to Robert Hudnut, who represents the third generation in a family line of pastors (and recently his daughter became the fourth). He graduated from Princeton University, and Union Theological Seminary in New York. Following pastorates in New York and Minnesota, he was called to Winnetka Presbyterian Church in suburban Chicago, where he has served for eleven years.
In his most recent book, This People, This Parish (Zondervan) Bob radiates love for the people and the work of his parish, and LEADERSHIP found he also can speak candidly about the fears and anxieties of the pastorate, the emotions most pastors find more difficult.
How do people expect you as a pastor to handle your emotions?
First they expect the pastor to be “the big leader up there on Sunday morning”-in charge, with all the answers. There will always be some of that since we labor under the authority of God. The pastor preaching the Word of God finds that expectation to be “in control.”
On the other hand, I am in this church because about an hour or two into my initial interview, some of the committee were in tears, and we found ourselves embracing. With that kind of open acceptance of a pastor, I knew this would be a terrific place to minister.
What caused that open emotion?
We were talking about a trauma the church had been through, and I was sharing where I had been in my life and how I’d left the pastorate for nearly three years to serve as head of a public-interest organization in Minnesota. The atmosphere was ripe, and we felt permitted to express our emotions.
What emotions do you find recurring in your own life as a pastor?
Let me take them chronologically. First I think of the joy and relaxation with my wife on Sunday afternoon after the morning’s activities are over. My wife is the organist and choir director in our church, so we process what happened in the service. We both feel a sense of emotional release, and that’s where the week both ends and starts.
You can look at it so soon afterward? It doesn’t take you until Tuesday morning?
Oh, no. We do it right after changing clothes.
The release comes, however, as a direct turnabout from Saturday night, when the tension has really built. I often wonder why I subject myself to Saturday nights. It’s like a term paper and final exam every week. Saturday night’s sleep can be a challenge.
Because Sunday morning will arrive whether you’re ready or not?
No, it’s basically anxiety: Will it be good? Will I have made a contribution?
The other day I was talking with my mother about my job. She said, “You’re making a wonderful contribution with your life.” I want to believe that, but sometimes I wonder.
I find that on some Saturday nights I’m asking, Am I doing anything worthwhile? Have I made any difference in anybody’s life? How many have turned the corner for Christ?
And on Saturday night it’s all yet to be proven?
Exactly. But by Sunday afternoon it usually has been proven. I can feel the reverberations, and they’re mostly good. And with those feelings fresh, my wife and I critique the service.
But aren’t there some Sunday afternoons when you look at each other and say, “I wonder if anybody got anything out of it at all”?
You bet, and when those come, we feel frustrated. I tend to be down when nobody says anything about the sermon-good or bad. But that wasn’t the case last week. A guy came up and said, “You asked for specific sermon feedback; I’ll give you some: you repeated yourself on several occasions. But that was okay, because it tended to imprint your message on our minds.”
On Sundays when there is nothing, though, you wonder if any impression was made. Fortunately, most frequently we feel elated. I think for me that has a lot to do with the fact that I have preached the Word of God, that I can honestly say I gave it my best shot.
What do you do on those down Sundays?
After we’ve eaten lunch, I go to work on the sermon for the next Sunday.
Immediately?
Well, if the Bears are playing, I’ll watch them. But on Sunday afternoon, even though I’m pretty tired, I get out the Bible and start on the next week. I pull out the commentaries and get as much done as I can before an evening meeting.
I find myself being reinvigorated, reenergized. I get new emotional energy as the Bible begins to course through me again. Working in the Word brings me back up emotionally. It has its own inner momentum. Remarkable.
We all know it’s supposed to do that, but why does it do it for you?
I don’t know. That’s a great mystery. But when I start to think about what I’m doing, getting back into the Word tends to shove aside nagging frustrations.
My brother-also a pastor-is now mayor of Indianapolis. He’s affecting the lives of millions who live in the area. I’m affecting a few people-perhaps in a more personal way. So what’s best? I don’t know.
Like most pastors, I’m in a constant state of tension: Am I doing enough? Are my talents being used enough? But when I get to the Word of God later on Sunday afternoon, I put all those Hamlet-like questions aside and focus on my meat and drink.
You can’t always be studying the Bible. How else do you cope with that inner angst?
I find two basal emotions. The positive one is love and the negative one is fear. Every other negative emotion is ancillary and can be traced to fear: I fear I’m not doing enough; I fear I’ve done the wrong thing; I fear I won’t do the right thing. I fight the fear of inadequacy, of not getting the job done, of not being the kind of person I could be.
The answer is to get rid of my fear. But how do I do that? Well, I don’t do it. The events of my life are bringing me to the point where God can do it through me. The key is we don’t have enough faith in the Lord. Love is letting go of fear. And God is love. And perfect love casts out fear. If I don’t love God enough to let go of my fears, then I try to handle them myself-and go on fearing.
Do you cooperate with God in the process of freeing yourself from fears?
I think of a psychiatrist, who in medical school had a fear of dying. He was called to an emergency on the psych ward when a fellow with mental problems and tuberculosis began vomiting blood. The psychiatrist found the only way he could calm the guy was to embrace him while blood showered all over him. The answer is to embrace your fear.
It’s Jacob at the ford of the Jabbok. He had wronged his brother, and he felt such guilt and alienation he was afraid to meet him the next day. So he wrestled with God, wrestled with his fear. But then he embraced his fear-went right into the teeth of it-crossing the river and meeting his brother.
So I find myself embracing my own fear of mortality when I go into the hospital where someone is dying. And I embrace my fear of missing the mark that God set, of producing less than my best on Sunday morning, by going right up into that darn pulpit.
My wife will often say to me, “It will never be enough, will it, Bob?” And she is right. Still, that idealism, that perfectionism, riddles me, but as I’m riddled, I’m opened. So it may not be all bad.
That’s a lot for Sunday. Take us through the rest of the week.
Monday, which is theoretically my day off, is invariably the day surgeries are scheduled. Last Monday, it was an eighty-three-year-old man being operated on for cancer. It has gone to the liver, and he’s got six months to live, maybe two years at the most. And so the emotion I feel is the immense frustration of not being able to say the right word in the right place at the right time to make him feel the right way to die.
So I go from the elation of feasting on God’s Word and doing the intellectual work in one’s closet, into the maelstrom of life. Reality. And I feel frustration and agony.
It all hit hard on a Monday just a few weeks ago when one of my friends died in the hospital. When I arrived, his widow was at the bedside. Then their daughter and her little children came, and we formed a circle around his bedside and gave him to the Lord.
The little grandson turned away. He didn’t want to look at his grandfather. What could I say that would make it better for him?
A month earlier I lost another friend. He had had a massive stroke and there was nothing to his brain. When the time finally came to give him up, his wife, their four children, some friends, and I held a Communion service around his bed. I asked his wife to stand by him, and she put the bread on his tongue and the grape juice to his lips. We prayed and said the Twenty-third Psalm.
As we left the room, my friend dying, the emotion was despair. It’s the dark night of the soul. It’s hard to hear a word coming out of that darkness.
And yet, the whole point of the so-called dark emotions is to enable the God within to move out. The Latin, ex movere, means “move out.” So that emotion is the act of God’s moving out into consciousness through these crisis experiences of our lives. It’s the critical moments of life that are enabling God to emerge from darkness. As Isaiah says, “I will give you the treasures of darkness” (Is. 45:3). These negative emotions yield the treasures. And they came in the crisis, from the Greek for “turning point.”
So I go into these experiences with the people, and in so doing find God emerging.
How did he emerge? Could you see God at work in the midst of these sad experiences, or was it only later that you could pull out the meaning?
To a certain extent, all theology is in retrospect. You turn and look, and God was there. People always want to know, “Where’s God in all this?” and that’s an awesome question, an immensely frustrating question. My job, I guess, is to try as best I can in the moment to elicit God for the people in such situations-before the reflection, before the retrospect.
All I end up doing, basically, is being with people. But that’s a frustration in itself, because you want to do more. You want to be able to polish the magic lamp and have the genie come out to make the people feel all right. You feel so inadequate at times.
How do you know that God has emerged, or that you really have made a difference?
I’m like Diogenes-going to all these dark corners looking for God. I finally get a glimpse of God when, say, I see the widow on Sunday morning and she returns a winsome smile from the depths of her terrible sadness. Or in another widow we’ve just nominated for elder of the church, you sense towering spiritual strength.
God’s exact hand in any of this always eludes me. It’s like the mercury from a broken thermometer on the bathroom floor. You can’t pick it up. You can’t put your finger on it, because it always squeezes away. Yet I try, and the trying is both the frustration and the elation. That’s what keeps me going.
I sometimes feel like Winston Churchill. When the bombs were falling around him and people were moaning about how terrible it was, Churchill said, “I find it exhilarating!” If I didn’t enjoy the pursuit of God, and God’s pursuit of me, I’d be no good for the job.
Where does the rest of the week take you?
Wednesday afternoons I teach the seventh and eighth graders. It’s a great time in my week when I can be with fresh, enthusiastic young people. At dinner I sit at a table of fourth- and fifth-grade boys. Then I meet in my office with all the senior highs for “Bobtalk.” We talk about anything from sex to drugs to suicide to their spiritual lives. We end the evening with grades two to twelve gathering in the sanctuary for worship. The emotions of Wednesday are joy, excitement, feeling young.
Thursdays are fun, too, because I sing in the choir. I love that hour and a half of abandonment when I can relax and sing my heart out. It’s a breath of fresh air to be a participant rather than a leader.
What about the other routines-sermon preparation, calling, counseling?
Every morning I’m in the Word of God. In the afternoon, I go to the hospitals or have counseling appointments. This is basically service, giving out. In counseling, I walk with people through their particular valleys. It’s rare that someone will share a peak.
To keep from being too burdened with their emotions, I have learned how to be somewhat detached professionally. Otherwise, the burdens would do me in. But occasionally I go down the hall to the fountain under the balcony, and I’ll just sit there with my head in my hand and watch the water flow.
A lot of things trigger a pastor’s emotion-who is in the hospital, your own health, if you’re tired or not. How do you keep your response constructive?
The image that comes to mind is a waterfall. Emotions come rolling over the falls, but then they go through the turbines and get channeled into electricity. I try to transmute those emotional energies into something constructive.
My wife helps me with that. My biggest negative emotion is impatience, which comes from impatience with myself. But if I get impatient around the house, my wife will sometimes stand up and salute. That works to snap me out of it. We all need people like that.
I also try to exercise as often as possible. I’ve probably ridden my stationary bike half way to India by now.
Dealing with people and problems and institutions can create anger. How do you handle anger?
I can think of several ways. The first is by taking it to God in prayer. Second, I take it to my wife, and we work it through. A third way, and this I cannot emphasize enough, is talking with another clergy couple whom we meet weekly for breakfast. They are a terrific help. The fourth way is constructively expressing the anger when appropriate. I need a lot of help here since I’m more apt to suppress it.
The fifth way is a rational approach: I preach about it. Preaching enables me to see what the Word of God says about it. Once when I preached on anger, I processed my own anger by finding out what the biblical rationale for anger was and how to deal with it.
Have you ever mishandled your emotions?
One Sunday in the narthex a woman said, “Bob, I’m cross at you. When you greet people, you aren’t looking at them. You’re looking over their heads to see somebody else you might want to catch. Your eyes are always darting around.”
I didn’t feel particularly angry toward her or her constructive criticism. But I did inform her that sometimes other people are there who may need me more than she does at the moment. That was a defensive shot on my part. I was deflecting her criticism, which I don’t think was necessarily helpful.
I err more on the side of suppression rather than expression. When I served in Minneapolis, I remember meeting one of our church members at intermission in a theater and saying, “Hi, Joe!” I stuck out my hand, and he refused to shake it. He turned away. I later learned he didn’t like the way the church was being run and he was angry at me. I knew I had to go ask him to express his frustrations, but I never went, and he drifted away from the church.
That’s the error in suppression-not picking up the telephone and taking the initiative with someone who is distressed over something.
What signals you that you are mishandling your emotions?
I once had difficulty with an associate pastor. The situation became so painful I could hardly eat or sleep. It arose, by the way, because of my tendency to suppress rather than express my emotions. I finally suggested we go to an outside party for help. So we went to a Christian counselor every week for an hour. It was intense, and terrible, and painful.
I should have provided important feedback long before it came to that, but I have a tendency to avoid confrontation. So I just put it off, as I did with the fellow who wouldn’t shake hands with me. But he was not with me every day, and with him I got away with it. Fortunately my associate was finally called elsewhere.
But before that resolution, my prayer life was affected, the sermon, everything. When something really big like that comes into your life, the emotional upset overturns everything else.
Is there a link between emotional and spiritual health?
After my associate and I parted company, I was in the grip of negative emotions, and that made me spiritually barren. For a few weeks I was not much good to anyone. I can reflect on that experience now without thinking emotionally, and I believe those negative emotions became a great opportunity for God.
How?
They stopped me. They made me unable to do anything. They almost paralyzed me spiritually. Then it had to be all God.
Characters in the Bible-Moses and David and Habakkuk-all learned in retrospect that in the depth of horrible negative emotions, God was there all along.
After my traumatic experience with my associate, I became more spiritually aware than I had ever been. I was more receptive, more honest, more willing to express than suppress, more alert to the signals of God.
That’s not to say that positive experiences like falling in love, getting married, or being commended for doing a great job don’t also provide an opportunity for God. God utilizes the moments of elation as well as the times of despair.
So you’ve never gotten to the “I quit” point?
No, and the reason is that I think being a minister is the greatest job in the world. As a pastor, I’m able to utilize my intellectual, my emotional, and my volitional self: head, heart, and hand. I think; I feel; I act-it’s all there. That’s why I went into the ministry in the first place. It was the only profession I knew where I could do these three things in such rich abundance.
EXCERPTS FROM THIS PEOPLE, THIS PARISH BY ROBERT HUDNUT
Her older brother was killed by her father. He fell off the back of the car as his father was backing up. ‘Oh, Daddy,’ he said in his father’s arms as he died. Her father never got over it. ‘He was broken down for two years,’ she said. And then it was with him the rest of his life.
There are such things that are with us the rest of our lives. They haunt us day and night. They are the images of failure and despair that we cannot seem to shake. Of course, there are images of success and hope, too, which are also with us day and night. The object is to make sure that the first set of images does not overwhelm the second.
* * *
“My wife came after me with a butcher knife. My son decked her. She tried to drown our nine-month-old baby. She kidnapped the two smallest children. I didn’t know where they were for eight months. One day they appeared on my doorstep.”
My friend is asking for a blessing. He wants to be able to see God in the horror of his life. I am the one he has come to. I pray before he comes and after he leaves. Although I may not feel up to it, I know it is up to me. …
The answer is for both of us to be sensitive enough in the moment to be surprised by God, and then to share our surprise.
* * *
I come back from taking my friend Communion. It is the first Sunday in Lent. I sit by the memorial fountain with my head in my hands, listening to the water. My fiend has cancer. He knows it will not be long. His outlook is as bright as ever, but he knows. The poinsettias from Christmas are still blooming. I plunge my face into the fountain. I want to be clean, clean.
Sometimes it is too much. I yearn for someone to call me and say he or she knows it is too much. His illness is known throughout the parish. So is that of the others who are ill and divorcing and losing their jobs. But no one calls, and plunging my face in the water is as if to relieve me of the pain of this people, this parish.
* * *
The Pastor must beware of trading family in on church-family. One becomes close to a large number of people. Their joys become the pastor’s joys. So do their sorrows. Before long the pastor feels pulled between family and church-family. Both need attention. Both are in need day and night. With the pastor’s strong Calvinistic work ethic, it is easy to find oneself being pulled away from one’s family. …
The doctor or dentist or lawyer or accountant or mechanic goes home from patients, clients, or customers. The pastor goes home from brothers and sisters in Christ. They are intense competition for sons and daughters and spouse. There is only one way to keep the church-family from winning. It is to cut one’s own family into one’s schedule with a blowtorch.
Copyright © 1987 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
