A Cure for Seriousness

I am prone to a kind of Captain Ahab syndrome: an obsessive, self-absorbed, grim pursuit to the death of the great white whale of ministry.
— John Ortberg

When we take our children to the shrine of the Golden Arches, they always lust for the meal that comes with a cheap little prize, a combination christened, in a moment of marketing genius, the Happy Meal. You're not just buying fries, McNuggets, and a dinosaur stamp; you're buying happiness. Their advertisements have convinced my children they have a little McDonald-shaped vacuum in their souls: "Our hearts are restless till they find their rest in a happy meal."

I try to buy off the kids sometimes. I tell them to order only the food and I'll give them a quarter to buy a little toy on their own. But the cry goes up, "I want a Happy Meal." All over the restaurant, people crane their necks to look at the tight-fisted, penny-pinching cheapskate of a parent who would deny a child the meal of great joy.

The problem with the Happy Meal is that the happy wears off, and they need a new fix. No child discovers lasting happiness in just one: "Remember that Happy Meal? What great joy I found there!"

Happy Meals bring happiness only to McDonalds. You ever wonder why Ronald McDonald wears that grin? Twenty billion Happy Meals, that's why.

When you get older, you don't get any smarter; your happy meals just get more expensive.

Not long after we'd had the first public Sunday service at our church, I talked to a friend who pastors a church he helped found thirty years ago. "Savor these days," he advised me. "You'll discover one day that these early days will have been the best years of your life."

I nodded, but inwardly I told myself he must be crazy. The early days are chaos and uncertainty. Someday we will have stability and continuity, we will have security and resources and credibility; we will have arrived. "That's when I'll be happy," I whispered to myself. That's when fulfillment will kick in, when we have arrived.

Saving Face

On the last day I worked with him, the man who mentored me in pastoring said he had two things he wanted me to remember. One of them I've long since forgotten (which means either it was pretty superficial or I'm headed for serious trouble), but the other has stuck with me. "Have fun," he said. "Being in ministry should be fun. If you ever have an extended period in ministry when you're not having fun, it's a warning that something needs to be attended to."

But when I talk to other pastors, fun is usually not high on the list of topics. Anxiety, pressure, anger, and fear get more air time. And when I look at myself, I see stretches of time far too long where joy is not prominent. Are we having fun yet? And if we're not, when will we?

I treasure a classic line I heard in a church I served years ago. One of the staff members didn't smile more than two or three times a year. An old deacon finally asked him, "Pastor X," (not his real name), "are you happy?"

"Yes. Of course."

"Well, tell your face."

Tell your face. I have wondered many times since what my face is trying to tell me about my soul.

There are certain warning lights that indicate when my joy tank is running on fumes. I am prone to a kind of Captain Ahab syndrome: an obsessive, self-absorbed, grim pursuit to the death of the great white whale of ministry.

Some time ago, I was giving our three kids a bath. I'm a busy guy, so I bathe all three at once to save time (I know this will have to change some day, probably when they're in high school). Our oldest child was finished and combing her hair, our youngest was playing with his armada, and our middle child was on drip-dry. I was reviewing my sermon notes (polyphasia, doing multiple things at one time, is a common symptom of joyless ministry).

"Hurry up," I said to our middle child, more out of habit than anything else. She was doing a dance called "Dee Dah Day." This consists of running in a circle, chanting "Dee Dah Day" over and over as in some pagan fertility ritual.

"Hurry up — Now!" I said, this time with some anger.

"Why?" she said.

I didn't have an answer. I had nowhere to go, nothing I had to do. I had just become so preoccupied, so addicted to hurry, so grimly task focused, that I was incapable of celebrating a Dee Dah Day moment. I know the day is coming when the Dee Dah Day dance will not be performed again, when I will give a thousand dollars to see it once more, but it will be too late. Impatience, preoccupation, hurry, obsession with church life — these are indications that my joy muscle has seriously atrophied.

The Paradox of Joy

G. K. Chesterton wrote once that it is in paradox that the truth of Christianity emerges most clearly.

For instance, about human nature some say we are essentially eternal spirits; others say we're just highly evolved lumps of clay ("portable plumbing," as one poet says). Christianity holds both extremes simultaneously. The same is true about the Christian view of human nature: it's both pessimistic (human beings are sinful) and optimistic (we can be saved).

Philosophies that try to reduce life or reality to a single theme lose the wild, diverse richness that makes Christianity ring so true. Christianity works at both ends of the canvas and paints a whole picture.

There is a paradox about ministry that, when I hold both ends with passion, helps me to keep a firmer grip on joy. When I let go of one or the other end of this paradox, joy is at risk. The biggest paradox might be this: my work matters immensely, and yet my work doesn't matter at all.

Lightness of Being

Take the second half first. When Theodore Roosevelt went camping with his friend, naturalist William Beebe, they used to sit under the open sky at night and search for a tiny blob of light near the constellation Pegasus and chant together, "That is the Spiral Galaxy in Andromeda. It is as large as our Milky Way. It is one of a hundred million galaxies. It consists of one hundred billion suns, each larger than our sun." Then Roosevelt would say to Beebe, "Now I think we are small enough. Let's go to bed."

For me, this stargazing and perspective-restoration takes place at a retreat center about thirty minutes from my office. I go there once a week and meet with a group in which we reflect on our prayers over the past week. Our lives are connected only through this group. No one in the group is familiar with my church or even my denomination. I have the gift of anonymity, of being with people who will not be impressed by my success or cluck their tongues over my failure. Sometimes just being on the grounds at this center, I am given the gift of solitude — true detachment (at least for a moment or two) from the rewards and punishments of my "world system" that seeks to squeeze me into its mold.

There I get an occasional glimmer of the immensity of God, and I can rejoice in my smallness and enjoy "lightness of being." Then I recognize my most strenuous efforts are the strategical equivalent of a hyperactive three year old helping Julia Child with the cooking. I become a little bit less messianic.

When I let go of this truth, my joy is at risk. Some time ago at a retreat, a group of us who worked on staff together responded to the question "What is the greatest fear in your life?" All of us but one were around age 30, and we all gave roughly the same answer: our biggest fear was "not making a difference."

To a degree, this is probably healthy; impacting people is a good thing. But it became apparent as we talked that much of what fueled this fear was the need for visible, readily apparent success. We were all under the illusion that somewhere out there was a level of success high enough to satisfy this need once and for all.

Anthony Meisel introduces The Rule of St. Benedict by noting how one of the goals of Benedictine life was to liberate members of the community from this fear. Since their primary task was union with God, their work was to be evaluated not by "material results" but by "growth in virtue." The Rule intends to free people from the enticements and terrors of the world and its values, from addiction to success and fear of failure, and so learn truly to desire God.

Not that the Rule was always successful, but it made a peacefilled path that tried to evade the danger of obsessing over success. Meisel concludes, "For the man of the twentieth century, such serenity and freedom would be treasure indeed."

In general, I take myself too seriously and God not seriously enough. Joy comes when I get it the other way around.

Manageable, Meaningful Work

The other side of this paradox is that what human beings do is of immense importance.

It's hard for ministers to be convinced of that considering how our culture sometimes perceives us. Garrison Keillor writes about when the mayor of Lake Wobegon, Clint Bunsen, hosted a group of ministers on a tour called, "Meeting the pastoral needs of rural America":

"They got off the bus, and Cliff thought, Ministers. Men in their forties mostly, a little thick around the middle, thin on top, puffy hair around the ears, some fish medallions, turtleneck pullovers, earth tones, Hush Puppies; but more than dress, what set them apart was the ministerial eagerness, more eye contact than you were really looking for, a longer handshake, and a little more affirmation than you needed. 'Good to see you, glad you could be here, nice of you to come, we're very honored,' they said to him, although they were guests and he was the host."

The world isn't always impressed with ministers. Yet the doings of the most apparently insignificant person (or store-front pastor) will last when every government and civilization and multinational corporation has been consigned to the ash heap of history. Through people wearing Hush Puppies and fish medallions, through people wearing ephods and robes embroidered with bells and pomegranates, through people as ridiculous as you and me, God has chosen to express himself, to make himself known. That is something I can never take seriously enough.

Joy is not found in ceasing from all effort. We may be prone to base identity overmuch on achievement, but without any achievement there is no identity. There is surely a connection between joy and what we do with our lives.

All human beings seem to have a drive toward growth and mastery. But as Gilbert Brim writes in Ambition, "One important source of happiness is working at the right level of challenge, whatever that level might be for each of us.… It is the challenge more than the material achievement that brings us happiness.… There is the intrinsic satisfaction of achieving a goal itself — having food, health, wealth, love; but, as I will say often, the happiness derived from the achievement itself does not last long. When we win, we rest a moment but then move on; the joy of success is soon gone."

Brim notes that studies indicate major social characteristics like age, gender, education, income, and race combined can account for only about 10 to 15 percent of the variation in happiness among human beings. He writes, "I believe most of the differences between us are caused by our individual actions, by whether we have found a way to live at the level of just manageable difficulty."

This realization has both enlightened me about the futility of thinking any achievement can bring lasting fulfillment, and it also gives me the goal of seeking to live each day at the level of "just manageable difficulty." For me, this varies from day to day; some days just getting out of bed pretty much takes care of it.

At one point, it meant saying no to a terrific educational experience. I didn't want to say no. "But I know you," my wife said. "I see little enough of you as it is already. If you take this on, in addition to everything else, I will get only the leftovers. You won't have enough energy left to give to our relationship, let alone really to enjoy life."

I didn't enjoy that conversation. I like to think that I have unlimited reserves of energy and competence. But I know if I hadn't said no, the only person more miserable than my wife would have been me. (I don't tell her that, because I'm still spending the chips I earned for making the decision "for her.") So I had to cut back to a level of "just manageable difficulty."

Finally then, in my ministry I'm left with the same paradox I see in my daughter's young life. When she marches off to her first day of school, washed and dressed and combed and camcorded with elaborate care, I want to yell at her, "Don't worry about school. Don't worry about A's and B's, about whether or not you get a happy face, about what your class standing is or whether the teacher likes you. Don't carry with you any of those silly anxieties. It doesn't matter! Be free!"

At the same time I want to yell, "You are off now on a great adventure. Now you can ask questions, think great thoughts, discover deep truths that perhaps no mortal creature has ever seen. It is a precious gift, your mind, so don't waste it, don't take it for granted."

Each day as I drive to my office, I expect if I could hear God yelling, he would be yelling something similar to me.

Living the Joy We Preach

Above all, the issue of joy revolves around a question I'm spending more and more time with these days: Is the life I invite people into the life that I'm living?

At a pastor's conference not long ago, I met the main speaker. He talked candidly about his life, and not far beneath the surface he admitted to some burnout and exhaustion, marital strain and personal stress. Nor was this an exceptional time, he said. His view of ministry was that it would take a couple of psychological cornermen to keep repairing him between rounds and sending him back into the ring.

He invited people into a life of peace, joy, and trust, but the reality of life in ministry was hurry, crisis, and fatigue. One got the sense that people were invited to be saved, but if they got deeply enough into ministry, they too would enter into this frenzied lifestyle, all for the purpose of producing more of the "saved" who would ultimately look like them.

This stood in vivid contrast to a man who has written extensively on spiritual life and is also in high demand as a speaker. During an evening I spent with him in his home, he never hurried. The phone rang, and he just let it ring because he was with another person; he was not its slave. He never looked at his watch; he never dropped a name. He appeared to have no place else to go and nothing else to do even though he was a busy man and this night was of no "strategic value" to his career.

He gave the impression that he had gained the power to simply live in each moment with God as it unfolded. The life he writes about, the life he invites people to lead, is the life he himself lives.

Ultimately, then, joy in ministry is a product of a joyous relationship with Christ, nurtured in prayer and worship. It is there that Jesus says to us, "Take my flesh for your bread, and my blood for your wine, and you will finally find food that can nourish your soul. Take my words, and you will find life. For the meal of sacrifice and death — of ministry — is in fact the meal of great joy. It is not just a happy meal; it is the meal of hope, the last supper before the entrance into the kingdom. And the little prize inside, the gift that costs everything and costs nothing, that is worth so little and yet valued beyond price — the little prize is your soul."

And to some of us, as a gift beyond comprehension, he entrusts the task of delivering this meal to his children, to our brothers and sisters. "And remember," he says, "it is a happy meal. So be happy."

And tell your face.