Blessed are the Meek
Moses, by turns raging and afraid, Was meek under the thunderhead whiteness, The glorious opacity of cloudy pillar. Loud is meek, buffeted by winds It changes shape but never loses Being: not quite liquid, hardly Solid, in medias res. Like me. Yielding to the gusting spirit All become what ministering angels Command: sign, promise, portent. Vigorous in image and color, oh, colors Of earth pigments mixed with sun Make hues that raise praises at dusk, At dawn, collect storms, release Rain, filter sun in arranged And weather measured shadows. Sunpatches.
I entered into my pastoral calling with a great charge of educational zest. My mind fairly tumbled with stories and facts, insights and perspectives, that give the life of faith such richness and texture. I had been on an exuberant foray into the country of Scripture and theology in my years of study and was eager to take others on safari with me. I knew I could rescue the Arian controversy from textbook dullness and present the decipherment of Ugaritic in such ways that would enhance appreciation for the subtle elegances of biblical language and story. I couldn’t wait to get started.
No place seemed to me better suited to such endeavors than the Christian congregation. It was far better than any school. People came to church not because they had to but because they willed it. They brought a level of motivation to learning that was far higher than in any academic assembly. Nobody was there just to get a grade or a diploma. They came together in a community of faith wanting to love the Lord with both mind and heart. And they had called me to help them do it.
So I taught. I taught from pulpit and lectern. I taught in home and classroom. I taught adults and youth and children. I formed special groups, arranged mini-courses, conducted seminars. The ones who loitered and held back I promoted and persuaded. I had people studying Isaiah and Mark, Reformation theology and Old Testament archaeology, who hadn’t used their minds in a disciplined way since they got their high school diplomas or college degrees. I didn’t, of course, get everyone, but by and large I was not disappointed. I had a wonderful time.
What Is My Educational Task?
After a few years of this, I noticed how different my teaching was from that of early generations of pastors. My secularized schooling had shaped my educational outlook into something with hardly any recognizable continuities with most of the church’s history. I had come into the parish seeing its great potential as a learning center, a kind of mini-university in which I was the resident professor.
And then one day, in a kind of shock of recognition, I saw that it was in fact a worship center. I wasn’t prepared for this. Nearly all my preparation for being a pastor had taken place in a classroom, with chapels and sanctuaries ancillary to it. But these people I was now living with were coming, with centuries of validating precedence, not to get facts on the Philistines and Pharisees but to pray. They were hungering to grow in Christ, not bone up for an examination in dogmatics. I began to comprehend the obvious: that the central and shaping language of the church’s life has always been its prayer language.
Out of that recognition a conviction grew: that my primary educational task as pastor was to teach people to pray. I did not abandon, and will not abandon, the task of teaching about the faith, teaching the content of the gospel, the historical backgrounds of biblical writings, the history of God’s people. I have no patience with and will not knowingly give comfort to obscurantist or anti-intellectual tendencies in the church. But there is an educational task entrusted to pastors that is very different from that assigned to professors. The educational approaches in all the schools I attended conspired to ignore the wisdom of the ancient spiritual leaders who trained people in the disciplines of attending to God, forming the inner life so that it was adequate to the reception of truth, not just the acquisition of facts. The more I worked with people at or near the centers of their lives where God and the human, faith and the absurd, love and indifference were tangled in daily traffic jams, the less it seemed that the way I had been going about teaching made much difference, and the more that teaching them to pray did.
Help Available
It is not easy to keep this conviction in focus, for the society in which I live sees education primarily as information retrieval. But there is help available.
Most of mine came from making friends with some ancestors long dead. Gregory of Nyssa and Teresa of Avila got me started. I took these masters as my mentors. They expanded my concept of prayer and introduced me into the comprehensive and imaginative and vigorous language of prayer. They convinced me that teaching people to pray was my best work.
Other help has come from an unexpected quarter among my contemporaries, the philosophers of language (especially Ludwig Wittgenstein and Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy). Under their influence I came to be in awe of the way language works and to realize the immense mysteries that surround speech. I started paying attention to the way I used language both as a person and as a pastor. These philosophers gave me a compass that showed me the way to recover the kind of language that seemed more or less native to earlier generations in the faith, the language that was required if I were to keep faith with my pastoral vocation and teach people to pray.
I have reduced and simplified and summarized what I have learned in these respects into a kind of rough language map showing three sections: Language I, Language II, and Language III.
Three Types of Language
Language I is the language of intimacy and relationship. It is the first language we learn. Initially, it is not articulate speech. The language that passes between parent and infant is incredibly rich in meaning but less than impressive in content. The coos and cries of the infant do not parse. The nonsense syllables of the parent have no dictionary definitions. But in the exchange of gurgles and out-of-tune hums, trust develops. Parent whispers transmute infant screams into grunts of hope. The cornerstone words in this language are names, or pet names: mama, papa. For all its limited vocabulary and butchered syntax, it seems more than adequate to bring into expression the realities of a complex and profound love. Language I is primary language, the basic language for expressing and developing the human condition.
Language II is the language of information. As we grow, we find this marvelous world of things surrounding us, and everything has a name: rock, water, doll, bottle. Gradually, through the acquisition of language, we are oriented in a world of objects. Beyond the relational intimacy with persons with which we begin, we find our way in an objective environment of trees and fire engines and weather. Day after day words are added. Things named are no longer strange but familiar. We make friends with the world. We learn to speak in sentences, making connections. The world is wonderfully various and our language enables us to account for it, recognizing what is there and how it is put together. Language II is the major language used in schools.
Language III is the language of motivation. We discover early on that words have the power to make things happen, to bring something out of nothing, to move inert figures into purposive action. An infant wail brings food and a dry diaper. A parental command arrests a childish tantrum. No physical force is involved. No material causation is visible. Just a word: stop, go, shut up, speak up, eat everything on your plate. We are moved by language and use it to move others. Children acquire a surprising proficiency in this language, moving people much bigger and more intelligent than themselves to strenuous activity (and often against both the inclination and better judgment of these people). Language III is the predominant language of advertising and politics.
Languages II and III are, clearly, the ascendant languages of our culture. Informational language (II) and motivational language (III) dominate our society. We are well schooled in language that describes the world in which we live. We are well trained in language that moves people to buy and join and vote. Meanwhile Language I, the language of intimacy, the language that develops relationships of trust and hope and understanding, languishes. Once we are clear of the cradle, we find less and less occasion to use it. There are short-lived recoveries of Language I in adolescence when we fall in love and spend endless hours talking on the telephone using words that eavesdroppers would characterize as gibberish. In romantic love, we find that it is the only language adequate to the reality of our passions. When we are new parents, we relearn the basic language and use it for a while. A few people never quit using it a few lovers, some poets, the saints but most let it slide.
Converting Language
When I first started listening to language with these discriminations, I realized how thoroughly culture-conditioned I was. Talk about being conformed to this world! My use of language in the community of faith was a mirror image of the culture: a lot of information, a lot of publicity, not much intimacy. My ministry was voiced almost entirely in the language of description and of persuasion telling what was there, urging what could be. I was a great explainer. I was a pretty good exhorter. I was duplicating in the church what I had learned in my thoroughly secularized schools and sales-saturated society, but I wasn’t giving people much help in developing and using the language that was basic to both their humanity and their faith, the language of love and prayer.
But this is my basic work: on the one hand to proclaim the word of God that is personal God addressing us in love, inviting us into a life of trust in him; on the other hand to guide and encourage an answering word that is likewise personal to speak in the first person to the second person, I to Thou, and avoid third-person commentary as much as possible. This is my essential educational task: to develop and draw out into articulateness this personal word, to teach people to pray. Prayer is Language I. It is not language about God or the faith; it is not language in the service of God and the faith; it is language to and with God in faith.
I remembered a long-forgotten sentence by George Arthur Buttrick, a preacher under whom I sat for a year of Sunday morning sermons while in seminary: Pastors think people come to church to hear sermons. They don’t; they come to pray and to learn to pray. I remembered Anselm’s critical transition from talking about God to talking to God. He had written his Monologion, setting forth the proofs of God’s existence with great brilliance and power. It is one of the stellar theological achievements in the West. Then he realized that however many right things he had said about God, he had said them all in the wrong language. He re-wrote it all in a Proslogion, converting his Language II into Language I: first-person address, an answer to God, a personal conversation with the personal God. The Proslogion is theology as prayer.
If the primary preaching task of the pastor is the conversion of lives, the primary teaching task is the conversion of language. I haven’t quit using the languages of information and motivation, nor will I. Competency in all languages is necessary in this life of faith that draws all levels of existence into the service and glory of God. But I have determined that the language in which I must be most practiced and for which I have a primary responsibility for teaching proficiency in others is Language I, the language of relationship, the language of prayer to get as much language as possible into the speech of love and response and intimacy.
Abba! Father!
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