Pastor Narcissus

FLY-FISHING AND PASTORAL MINISTRY are like a Woody Allen movie: both are about sex and death, sex and death, sex and death.

Trout rise to eat the insects that ride the stream, suspended on the surface tension of the water. The insects are on their way to mating, fertilization, and then death. The fly-fisher floats a fur-and-feather imitation of the insects on the surface of the water, hoping to trick the trout into a strike. The trout must eat the bug to live. The bug must reproduce to prolong the existence of the species. The fisher interrupts the fish’s feeding cycle by catching it. The fateful meeting of the fisher and the trout are keyed to the reproduction-and-death cycle of the insect.

Pastoral ministry is, likewise, to a large degree keyed to the reproduction and the death cycles of humans. This is the natural relation of the cycle of eros and thanatos, the Greek words for sexual love and death. We conduct ceremonies for the purpose of solemnizing and blessing the birth of humans, the onset of puberty in humans, the mating rituals of humans, and the death of humans. Much of the church’s ministry is organized around the orderly and successful progress of reproduction cycles. We initiate programs to support and enhance courtship, marriage, and child raising. We devise youth groups, one major purpose of which is to keep humans from mating too soon. The modern church attempts to provide program niches for persons not directly involved in the reproduction cycle—singles and seniors—but the church is never as good at that as it is at providing program support for those intimately involved in human reproduction.

Why?

One reason may be that the church and its rituals evolved over a couple thousand years during which successful reproduction was continually threatened by high infant mortality rates and short life expectancy. For instance, the purpose of the genealogies in the Bible is, at the very least, to demonstrate God’s providential care of humanity. God provides for the preservation of humanity generation after generation. In its reproduction rituals, the church affirms and blesses what the genealogies demonstrate.

The church’s involvement in confessing and providing God’s blessing on reproduction goes back thousands of years. It is not less important today. People care only a bit less today about obtaining divine blessing upon marriage and reproduction than they did before. Case in point: modern Europe. Virtually the entire native, Caucasian, atheist/agnostic population is baptized. As a pastor I can say without the slightest hesitation that nonbelievers are often more insistent on the importance of religious ceremonies to begin marriage and to usher in infancy than are believers.

So the church and its rituals are shot through with eros. Many of the church’s oldest rituals solemnize eros, regulate it, even glorify it. Pastors hope that there’s plenty of eros in the marriages in the church. Parish life goes better when marriages are healthy. (The marriage-seminar industry may not, since when marriage is hot their business is not.)

The church is also shoe through with thanatos. We deal constantly with death issues and particularly with helping people not to fear death. Again, many of the church’s oldest and most venerable rituals solemnize thanatos, regulate it, and glorify its defeat.

Fatal attraction

The church acknowledges the proper place of eros in life and it regulates it. But we state unequivocally that eros has absolutely no proper role in the relationship between pastor and parishioner, and it has no proper place in the relationship between the pastor and the corporate body of the church. The result of erotic involvement is always some form of thanatos, for the parishioner and his or her family, for the pastor and his or her family, and for the whole church.

At least part of the problem is, however, that eros thrives in the environment of the true pastoral loves: hesed (loyalty, bonding), racham (compassion), philos (delight and friendship), and agape (sacrificial love). Frankly, bonding to a person of the opposite sex with compassion, delight, and sacrifice is for most humans an aphrodisiac. Pastors who show real pastoral love can, without great care, become ecclesiastically aroused. Believe it or not, pastors can love the whole church erotically.

When pastors build the church on the basis of erotic love for the organization, the next (perversely logical) step is for the pastor to love a parishioner erotically. Often pastors who do this don’t see anything wrong with it until they are confronted. The reason that loving parishioners erotically doesn’t seem wrong to some pastors is because they have spent so many years loving the church erotically that loving a parishioner erotically is a perversely logical form of discipleship. It is shocking how many pastoral sexual affairs start out as pseudo-discipleship, and continue on that basis:

They acted shamefully, they committed abomination; yet they were not at all ashamed, they did not know how to blush. Therefore they shall fall among those who fall; at the time when I punish them, they shall be overthrown, says the Lord. (Jer. 8:12)

What does it mean to love a church erotically? First, the argument of this book is that the pastor can love and must love the whole church, not just the individual parishioners. Now if a pastor can love a church with hesed, racham, philos, and agape, it may well be possible, even if it is wrong, for a pastor to love the whole church with a kind of eros.

Second, the church is by its nature an erotically charged environment—it affirms, regulates, and blesses eros in its proper place—which makes the possibility that the pastor could love the church with eros quite conceivable.

Third, the obvious truth that the four great loves of pastoral ministry are also the four great loves of marriage—and that the exercise of these loves makes the pastor a possible object of erotic attraction for parishioners—increases the possibility that the pastor may covertly substitute eros in pastoral work.

Still, the idea that we can have an erotic attachment to a church may seem far-fetched. But consider this: Pastors commonly use erotic terminology to describe the effect of their ministry. Pastors say they want to excite the church, or turn the church on, or even light the church’s fire (The Jim Morrison School of Ministry).

Most of us want to lead exciting worship and preach on-fire sermons. Many parishioners want us to. When pastors deliberately set out to excite their congregation in worship and preaching, what is getting excited? Are we only exciting parishioners spiritually?

But what are we really talking about?

Nothing more than good, old, all-American narcissism, a bastard love that has no place in pastoral work.

The story is told that Narcissus, a son of a nymph, flirted injuriously with the affections of the nymph Echo. Echo eventually pined away to become nothing more than a disembodied voice. Narcissus, bent on further pseudo-conquest, messed with the mind of another nymph, who tattled on him to a powerful god named Nemesis. Narcissus’ nemesis became his love for his own image. One day, wandering in the forest, he came upon a pool of water into which he glanced. Narcissus saw his own image, became fixed to it, and could not break away. He died beside that pool—in love with himself.

This story is cold over and over in pastoral ministry: Pastor Narcissus is in love with himself; chat is, he is erotically in love with his church, which he sees as an extension of himself. This is seen in two ways:

First, Pastor Narcissus is attached to his image in the pool of the church. Pastor Narcissus is attracted to the visage of the whole church as it is being built under his leadership. What great things he has done! These things reflect well on him. There is much yet to be done, but he is determined to continue to build the church according to his vision. Anyone who stands in the way is dispensable on account of a greater good, which is the enlargement of the pastor’s image.

Eros may seem a strong or odd term to apply to a pastor’s love for what he sees of himself in the church. But none of the other loves fits. Philos comes close, but philos for a church is love for what God has made the church to be; it delights in God’s goodness for the sake of the church, not for possession, self-aggrandizement, or personal enjoyment.

Erotic love for a church, on the other hand, is a form of possession of the church. It is love for the aggrandizement of self in ministry and for the pastor’s image, which he has foisted upon the church. It is to be tempted by possession, self-aggrandizement, and personal enjoyment to dearly hope our church will “make us proud.”

Second, Pastor Narcissus lacks boundaries. He doesn’t know where he ends and the church begins. By fixing his gaze upon the church as an image of himself. Pastor Narcissus sees the church as, at the very least, an extension of himself. He sees the church and its individual parishioners as something he wants and as something he cannot live without. He is attached to it and to them as if by an umbilical cord. The line between what Pastor Narcissus makes and what nourishes him simply disappears. If Pastor Narcissus takes the credit for making the church, then most surely he takes credit for the fact that the church provides for him. Eventually he cannot imagine life apart from the church he has made and its nourishment.

If Pastor Narcissus thinks he needs or wants sexual attention, he simply takes it. He takes it from himself for himself. After all he built it—it is his, he needs it, he deserves it. This is bogus eros and has nothing to do with adult sexual love. Pastor Narcissus is not looking for love or adrenaline; he seeks death. Sex with a parishioner is an escape into certain death.

We must never believe a pastor or a parishioner who has been involved sexually when he or she says: “We didn’t mean to hurt anyone.” In Proverbs, wisdom tells us, “Those who miss me injure themselves; all who hate me love death” (Prov. 8:36).

Narcissistic attachments are deep and primitive, and probably all of us who pastor struggle with them on some level. The question is how this crazy stuff gets out of control.

The answer, I believe, is ambivalence.

I discussed ambivalence earlier in this book as the numb state of existence pastors fall into when, through the pounding they receive in ministry, they don’t feel they can risk love again. Love is dangerous.

But ministry can’t be done without some kind of love. So ambivalence retreats into self-love and self-protection. To put it in psychological terms, when ambivalence takes over a ministry, the pastor’s inner child becomes the pastor of the church. Obviously this happens a lot. Laypeople can attest to how intractably childish some pastors can behave. Of course, these same laypeople don’t recognize that the blows they deliver on a regular basis force the pastor into primal retreat.

Whereas bitterness causes pastors to put up barbed-wire fences, ambivalence can break down a pastor’s sense of personal boundaries. The blows come from every side, and eventually the pastor simply lays down the fists and gives in to the attack. Sadly, ambivalence sees death as a reasonable solution. As the defenses go down and the will to live lessens, merging into some kind of peaceful place without pain can sound good. So can getting forced out of the ministry through having an affair—a form of death.

The sorry, wimpy state of the ambivalent pastor hardly seems to fit the picture of the lusty, selfish, church-building, parishioner-abusing Pastor Narcissus. But they are definitely the same person. That abused children can become weak adults who abuse children is quite suggestive to this discussion. That powerless, ambivalent adults are frequently violent suggests the same. So does the sad truth that when we are weakened by life’s heatings, we often find it difficult to live by our most dearly held values. This is a good enough reason to leave a pastor-killing church or any church that pummels its pastor to the point of childish, moral weakness.

Whether outwardly successful in ministry or not, often Pastor Narcissus is a pastor who has been beaten up many times in life and in ministry. It is sad, but it is no excuse. Pastors can choose not to become ambivalent in ministry by, among other things, choosing to love the church properly as an adult or by leaving the church.

And though the pastor cannot help but administer the ceremonies of the sex-and-death drama of the church, the pastor can and must transcend that drama or perish in it. The pastor cannot escape involvement in the sex-and-death drama in the church but can transcend the drama professionally—clerically—in a manner similar to the way a fly-fisher is involved in but still transcends the sex-and-death drama of the trout stream.

The fly-fisher’s involvement is from the outside. The fly-fisher uses the tools of fly-fishing—the fly rod, the line, the reel, the artificial fly—to involve himself or herself in the sex-and-death drama of the trout stream. The tools of fly-fishing are the logical but objective extensions of the fly-fisher to catch the trout. The fly-fisher does not jump into the water and grab the fish by the gills.

The pastor uses the tools of ministry to affirm, regulate, and bless the sex-and-death drama of parish life: the Word and the sacrament. To the extent the pastor’s exercise of these tools represents genuine pastoral love and the desire to bring men and women to obedience to Christ, they are the logical but objective extension of the pastor into the sex-and-death drama of the parish.

But there is a line pastors cross, where they stop exercising the ordinances modestly. They get cute, original, and personal with the biblically ordained tools of ministry. They inject themselves into the ceremonies they perform, the sermons they preach, and their calling. This is a crossing of personal boundaries into the sacred arena. Whenever a pastor performs ministry in a way that makes it seem like his personal involvement is more important than the ceremony itself—as if without his vital, personal input this sacrament is flat and ineffective—I wonder if Pastor Narcissus isn’t at work.

When the pastor stops ministering Christ and the love of Christ and ministers himself and his own love, the pastor’s life is no longer the parable of Christ; the pastor’s life is the “thing” itself. When the pastor/parishioner relationship becomes the parish cult, Narcissus’ invasion of the parish is complete; all that remains is for Pastor Narcissus to dive into the bottomless pool and die.

As vital as they are to pastoral ministry, personal relationships between pastor and parishioner are not actually the pastoral ministry. The pastoral ministry is the communication and administration of Christ in Word, sacrament, and in the pastoral relationship, which is indeed personal but is much more and much different than merely a personal relationship. The pastoral relationship is a specific kind of personal relationship that exists within the community of the church, is .governed by its order, and, by various ordained means, communicates the transforming love of Christ.

This brings me back to the importance of agape to ministry. Pastoral relationships that are not governed by the agape love of Christ for the parishioner and the agape love of the pastor for Christ will always degenerate into a destructive form of personal love, which is not pastoral love. The pastor’s agape love for God is the free, transcendent decision of the pastor to love the church sacrificially for the sake of Christ and not for the pastor’s own glory.

The pastor’s agape love is first and foremost love for God. We must love God first, and then our church and our parishioners for the sake of our love for Christ. Only in this way can Christ stay at the center of the church, instead of the pastor moving to the center of the church. The church must be the body of Christ. It must reflect his love, project his image, and be his witness to the world. The pastor is the servant of this love, this image, this witness.