I KNEW SHE CHOPPED her own wood, but I’d never seen a ninety-pound, ninety-four-year-old blind woman swing an axe before.
Driving up unnoticed, I stopped to watch. Like a praying mantis covered in draping rags, Kathryn stooped over her chopping block. Sure-handed, she sliced kindling from a round of dry lodgepole pine with her axe. Transfixed, I sat motionless. I was no longer conscious of time; I could have been anywhere at any time in history. This was life hanging on in the most basic sense.
Kathryn burned the wood in her kitchen stove. She boiled water fetched from the ditch beside her house. She was fiercely independent. It cook three years of visiting before she’d let me chop and stack wood for her.
Once a month I bring the Lord’s Supper to a few shut-ins. Willa, a retired woman from the congregation, is my intrepid companion and goad. She reminds me when it’s time to go out and serve our shut-ins again. She lovingly prepares the Communion kit.
Kathryn is one of our stops. Poised erect on the edge of her chair, wearing a straw cowboy hat discarded by a child, and staring forward, Kathryn talks. Like the lawyer she might have been in another era, she gives us practiced diatribes. For years she has lived alone. For countless hours she has murmured to herself the great truths other life. She knows that Christians, especially pastors, are a long-suffering audience. Her head is thoroughly packed with opinions. She has no room for anyone else’s.
“The problem with people today,” begins Kathryn, “is that people do not wear enough natural fibers. Cotton and wool—that’s all I ever wear. Nylon is bad for the heart and causes arthritis. People should stop wearing these new fabrics and wear cotton and wool. I daresay there’d be no need for doctors if everyone wore wool.”
Not missing a beat, she continues, “I’ve never been to the doctor in my life, and I never intend to go to one. No, if people would just use common sense there’d be no need for doctors. We all just need to wear wool.” Since she enjoys near-perfect health, it’s hard to argue with her.
When I can bear it no longer, I usually interrupt, “Kathryn, now I am going to read the Bible, and we will have the Lord’s Supper.”
“Okay,” she says. She stops talking and waits silently, obediently, unguardedly. As usual, Kathryn appears to merely tolerate our agenda. In this context, that’s a compliment. If our presence displeased her, she’d let us know. Once I made the mistake of trying to put my arm around her.
“I don’t believe in love!” she retorted, squirreling away from me.
But then, on another occasion, I read Psalm 23: “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.… ” Looking up after the reading, I saw a sight rarer than a ninety-four-year-old blind woman chopping wood. Kathryn, the highly self-controlled survivor, was weeping and tender; she had been touched directly by God.
I think she was touched by God every time we came. I think the tears were a fissure opened up to show us what was happening inside.
This is pastoral ministry in the most basic sense—friendship, the Word, prayer, and the sacrament come together to deliver to her the presence of God.
Axe to the core
I’m good with an axe. I can dispatch the lever edge of a ten-pound splitting maul to the heart of a round of wood with power and accuracy. It takes confidence and skill to swing an axe with all your might. If you miss the core, you risk glancing the axe off the log; it’s easy to bloody your shin.
Sometimes, when I’m pastoring with all my might, I feel as if I’m glancing off the side of the task instead of hitting the center. I feel blood on the inside of my pant leg. I know then I need to correct my aim. I need better vision. True pastoral ministry isn’t always easy to line up and strike with precision. It takes practice and experience.
Kathryn can swing an axe blind because she chopped wood for eighty years with sight. I’m starting out swinging blind. Furthermore, Kathryn’s round of lodgepole pine sits still on her chopping block. My tasks spin in my head like Dorothy’s farm caught in the vortex of a Kansas twister. I can see them but I can’t touch them. I feel no direction.
In my more lucid moments, I see the tasks of my calling like pictures on a wall. They’re all lined up waiting. To choose one I just step into it. For sermon preparation, I see a stack of books with paper and pencil. For calling I see a closed door that I’m supposed to knock on. For administrative work I see a desk cluttered with rough-torn opened envelopes. For praying I see a worn, bare, dirt trail winding through wild grasses, woods, and rivers that I can meander through.
When I step into a task, I see a. list. The list is a technological description of the proper way to complete the task. For sermon preparation, the first instruction I see tells me to do textual criticism on the Masoretic text of my sermon passage, comparing it with its Septuagintal counterpart. I’m not bad with Hebrew and Greek, but textual criticism is part of another life a long time ago in seminary. I can’t seem to shake demands.
Each list has gaps. I’ve learned a lot from veteran pastors, personal experience, and reading, but when I’m honest with myself I don’t feel very smart about any of these tasks.
When I step into the calling task, I see great ideas that worked once and failed every time thereafter. I don’t feel secure in my pastoral-calling technology. I’ve called on plenty of people, and they never came to church again. But I also remember that I have visited some people and God has been there. And who’s to say that God hasn’t been present in the visits when people never came back?
I know this: Bible reading is a powerful force in calling. When I read the Bible, God comes. When I read the Bible during a pastoral call. God enters the room. Sometimes we all are shaken up.
A pastor must be someone who goes around and reads the Bible to people.
“I’m afraid to die,” Kathryn says. This is one of Kathryn’s nagging fears.
“I can’t imagine what God will do with a skunk like me,” she goes on. I lower my tenor voice to a pastoral timbre and give her a lecture on Reformed thelogy—salvation by grace through faith, the death of Jesus, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the dead.
“I’m not afraid of Jesus,” she says. “It’s God I’m not sure of. Jesus is one thing, God is another. I don’t know what God will be like when I meet him.”
Not certain what to say, I change the subject.
“Where did you live as a child?” I ask her.
“We lived on a farm in Alberta, Canada,” she says. “We raised all kinds of animals and grains. Father was a wonderful, hardworking man.”
“Do you have any strong memories of those days?”
“Oh yes,” she says and pauses. “I remember once when I was seven years old my father was driving a large mule-drawn wagon by the house. My little sissy Bess was only about two. Somehow or other she waddled out, and without my father seeing her she got herself under the wheels of the wagon. My father drove right over her.”
I gasp.
“The wagon wheels rolled right over the diapers, and she wasn’t hurt at all. Those diapers saved her life. I never saw the likes of it. I remember it now just like it happened yesterday.”
I read the Scriptures and pray while Willa prepares the Lord’s Supper and serves it around. Before the words of institution, I say, “Kathryn, Jesus is like Bessie’s baby diapers. These elements, the broken body of Jesus and the shed blood of Jesus are Bessie’s diapers … they wrap us up in the love of Jesus and they save us.”
Kathryn cocks her head slightly downward and gives a quick inward laugh. She is peering within. Something is happening. The Holy Spirit is administering the death and resurrection of Jesus to her; she experiences firsthand the steadfast love of the Father. Her joy bubbles outward. She smiles as she takes the elements. They are a sign of an inward grace.
She rarely comments on being afraid to die after that.
Wood-splitting sacrament
What is a pastor? One part of my pastoral life can’t be right: this nagging sense that my ministry is constantly on the brink of total collapse. It’s irrational. I’m liked and respected. I have a theology of God’s love, Christ’s acceptance, and the Holy Spirit’s guidance in my life. I need a good dose of my own theology, but it stays stuck in my head where it isn’t doing me much good.
I’m still a child. I need simple pictures of God’s love. I need transparent parables, symbols that are obvious. When I receive the Lord’s Supper, I see Jesus with my eyes as the elements are passed to me. I reach out to hold them. I feel Jesus with my fingers as I tenderly grasp the bread and cup and raise them to my lips. I smell Jesus with my nose as molecules spin off the bread and the juice into my nostrils. I taste Jesus with my tongue and even hear Jesus as my jaws creak into action, and my teeth masticate the elements. When the story of the Atonement comes to me in the symbols of the Lord’s Supper, God enters and changes my thinking.
Slowly it sinks in, but only through the simplest symbols of God’s love. That’s how my theology gets inside me.
Kathryn and I are in the same boat. We have the same Savior mediated to us in the same way.
I administer the simple symbols and parables that bring Jesus to people and make them unafraid of God. A pastor is someone who brings the Lord to people through administering the Lord’s Supper.
Entering Kathryn’s house, Willa and I are assaulted by her tiny one-eyed dog and the smell of its feces. Dirty dishes are everywhere. Envelopes opened and unopened, bills paid and unpaid, discarded eyeglasses, squished tubes of salve, and a broken television litter her table in the middle of her front room.
People from town come by and try to help, but the work is slow, and Kathryn accepts little or no help. A few people she selects bring her water in plastic jugs in the winter when the ditch is frozen. If she’s in a good mood, she’ll accept a box of food from the church.
One day I tentatively approached her with a suggestion: “Kathryn, have you ever considered receiving Meals on Wheels? It’s good, hot food, and the people will deliver it right to your door.”
Her face wizened as she gathered her wits. “That’s one step away from the garbage can!” she declared. (I am about one inch from being ordered out of her house.)
Retreating just a little, I asked, “What’s the garbage can?”
“The rest home,” she said. “And you see, once you start taking help, then they have you. It’s always your own people, your own family that will do you in. They’ll turn their back on you and get rid of you. I’ve seen it many, many times. Don’t think for a minute that I don’t know what they’d like to do with me.”
“But Kathryn, don’t you know that there are a lot of people who love you?”
“I don’t believe in love,” she snapped. “The word love isn’t in the Bible. The Bible calls it ‘charity.’ That’s what I believe in, charity. Anyway, your own folks don’t have charity for old people anymore. They want us in the garbage can to be rid of us. It’s just that simple.”
The conversation ends. Again, there’s not too much to argue with.
Kathryn has no immediate family. She was married once, no children: “Harry and I went our own way a long time ago. We never divorced; I don’t believe in it.” Her only relatives lived in Alberta, Canada: a sister and her sister’s daughter. Her niece came down and tried to help, but rarely got further than we did. No one could consistently help Kathryn with anything.
It was getting cold and icy outside. Inside, Willa and I saw that Kathryn was out of wood. She was agitated. Less stable on her feet, she wasn’t able to get wood like she used to. She mentioned taking some falls in her house. I broached forbidden territory.
“Kathryn, could I get you some wood?”
“Don’t bother yourself with it,” she returned.
As stubborn as she was, I kept pestering her, “I’d really like to get you some, if I could.”
“Suit yourself,” she said.
Feeling as if I’d been granted entrance to the royal court, I skipped outside. For the next several hours, I chopped and hauled and chopped and hauled.
“How does this look, Kathryn?”
I held out an armload of fresh-split lodgepole. She fingered the wood and laughed derisively. “Those are saw-logs to me. I need it split much finer than that!”
I re-split it. Forty-five minutes later there was as much wood stacked in her front room as she would allow.
Kathryn began to thaw a little. She accepted hot meals from people in the church and even accepted Meals on Wheels. People began to help her with her bills. Her niece and some others cleaned her place up.
It was the warmest winter on record, and a storm was coming in. By 4:30 p.m., the temperature was dropping by the minute, the wind screaming. The chill factor was about 20° below zero. We were headed for a week of sub-zero temperatures. On my way home from the office, I stopped by Kathryn’s. Once again she was out of wood. Chop and haul, chop and haul. Standing in her doorway/she stared in my general direction as I returned to my truck. Somehow through wood-splitting. God came to Kathryn.
Ambition abolitionist
I call what I do “friendship.” I have a toolbox. If any of my friends need help, I pull out any tool I have and try to use it to help my friends. I don’t think pastors are meant to be psychologists, but I know a little about psychology and I’ll use it. I know a little about life in the Spirit—that’s a tool too; I try to help people learn how to pray. I know a little about Christian morality, and I’m not afraid to confront a friend with the truth. I can listen to a person in distress. I can visit someone in a hospital and hold her hand while she endures a seizure. I can play a little basketball with some friends or go fishing with a buddy. I can swing an axe.
Jesus was accused of being a friend to sinners, and rightly so. To his opponents, his friendship with outcasts was his blasphemy; to Jesus, it was his calling. Those he chose as friends, he listened to, answered, loved, helped, healed, challenged, and spent time with. For Jesus, this accomplished something like what psychologists attempt to do: He helped people find wholeness.
Friendship is not a profession. It isn’t even necessary for everyone. We say, sentimentally, that people need friends. But Kathryn, for close to ninety years, proved she really didn’t need friends. Kierkegaard said, “A friend is not what we philosophers call the necessary other, but the superfluous other.”
Psychologists are necessary. Pastors are not necessary. This is a major cause of angst for me. I want to be able to do something like prescribe medicine. I want a title that makes people think I’m an expert at something important. I want to be called something like Ph.D., M.D., or attorney-at-law. What I do is be a friend. It doesn’t impress people and, frankly, it doesn’t impress me. But it’s what Jesus did. And friendship is a parable of the grace of God, so it delivers God.
Friendship isn’t easy for me. My idea of the perfect evening is to do something with my family. My idea of a perfect day at work revolves around my books, my computer, walking, and praying. Alone stuff is what I do best, what I’m most comfortable doing. But in my mind, I see a door I need to knock on.
I have fewer ideas about how I’m supposed to be someone’s friend than I have about any other task in the ministry. I don’t know how friendship happens to me, and I don’t know how to make it happen with other people. I’ve got a toolbox, though, and it’s always open.
What is a ‘pastor? To get a true picture, I boil things down and then peek inside the kettle after the steam is gone to see what’s stuck on the bottom. When I cook down pastoral ministry, I see pastors bringing Jesus to people by being like Jesus. Jesus taught the Word, he prayed for people, he befriended people; and on his last night, to cap it off, he served the sacrament.
A pastor is a parable of Jesus Christ. Serving like Jesus served, pastors deliver something that they are not: Jesus.
“Whoever welcomes you, welcomes me” (Matt. 10:40). Serving as Jesus served means doing the simple things we see Jesus doing: teaching the Word, praying for people, being a friend, and serving the sacrament. But it’s more than that. Being a parable of Jesus demands following Jesus’ way: “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me” (Mark 8:34). This means love and humility—the abolition of personal ambition.
Learning this has changed how I feel about my work. Knowing that what I am called to do is a few simple things gives centrality of vision to my work. It’s like having a round of lodgepole pine sitting straight up and square on a chopping block.
Eventually, Kathryn went into a nursing home. It was a happy thing. She was clean, well fed, and comfortable. Most of us worried about how she’d take it, but in time she adjusted well. The nursing staff was marvelous. She walked the halls a lot and talked with fellow residents.
Kathryn’s close to 100 now. She talks about death with little or no apprehension and accepts help graciously. She is more confused about some things—like where she grew up and where her sister and niece live—but less confused about others.
“I was born and raised in a little hollow just across town,” she says. “My family still lives there … they could come see me if they wanted. I don’t know why they don’t come see me.”
Willa and I try to orient her a little, but nothing helps. We just listen. It feels like a long time.
“Kathryn, it’s time to read the Scriptures, pray, and have the Lord’s Supper,” I say.
“Okay,” she replies. She waits quietly. I read the Scriptures. “Yes, that’s a good one,” she says.
I pray—whatever comes to mind. Something happens. Suddenly we are located together, and God is with us. We aren’t alone anymore, we don’t wonder where we are anymore, and we don’t wonder why people aren’t visiting us; we are at home and well and all together. For an untimeable moment, we rest in the Sabbath arms of the communion of the saints mediated by the Holy Spirit of Jesus Christ, Lord of the church.
My eyes break open after the prayer, and all is peace. Kathryn is quiet, no longer alone; she is located in the presence of God. We serve the Lord’s Supper as a stone altar stacked up to commemorate the place where God met us.
Upon rising to leave, I stoop over and give her a hug. She reaches up and returns my embrace.
“I have charity for you, Kathryn,” I say.
“Well, that’s nice,” she chuckles. “A person needs a lot of that.” She smiles deeply, and her eyes look up at me with all the glistening of someone who can see.
David Hansen is pastor of Belgrade Community Church in Belgrade, Montana. He is a popular Leadership columnist and author of The Art of Pastoring and A Little Handbook on Having a Soul.
David L. Goetz is senior associate editor of Leadership, a publication of Christianity Today, Inc.
Copyright © 1998 David Hansen
