My pastor, during my adolescent years, came often to our home. After a brief and awkward interval, he always said, "And how are things in your SOUL today?" (He always pronounced "soul" in capital letters).
I never said much. I was too intimidated. The thoughts and experiences that filled my life in those years seemed small potatoes after that question. I knew, of course, that if I ever wanted to discuss matters of SOUL, I could go to him. But for everything else, I would probably do better with someone who wouldn't brush aside as worldly vanity what it felt like to get cut from the basketball varsity, someone who wouldn't pounce with scary intimations of hellfire on the thoughts I was having about Marnie Schmidt, the new girl from California.
Pastoral work, I learned later, is that aspect of Christian ministry that specializes in the ordinary. It is the nature of pastoral life to be attentive to, immersed in, and appreciative of the everyday texture of people's lives—the buying and selling, the visiting and meeting, the going and coming. There are also crisis events to be met: birth and death, conversion and commitment, baptism and Eucharist, despair and celebration. These also occur in people's lives and, therefore, in pastoral work. But not as everyday items.
Most people, most of the time, are not in crisis. If pastoral work is to represent the gospel and develop a life of faith in the actual circumstances of life, it must learn to be at home in what novelist William Golding has termed the "ordinary universe"—the everyday things in people's lives—getting kids off to school, deciding what to have for dinner, dealing with the daily droning complaints of work associates, watching the nightly news on TV, making small talk at coffee break.
Small talk. The way we talk when we aren't talking about anything in particular, when we don't have to think logically, or decide sensibly, or understand accurately. The reassuring conversational noises that make no demands, inflict no stress. The sounds that take the pressure off. The meandering talk that simply expresses what is going on at the time. My old pastor's refusal (or inability) to engage in that kind of talk implied, in effect, that most of my life was being lived at a subspiritual level. Vast tracts of my experience were "worldly," with occasional moments qualifying as "spiritual." I never questioned the practice until I became a pastor myself and found that such an approach left me uninvolved with most of what was happening in people's lives and without a conversational context for the actual undramatic work of living by faith in the fog and the drizzle.
Impatient with the ordinary
Given a choice between heated discussion on theories of the Atonement and casual banter over the prospects of the coming Little League season, I didn't hesitate. It was the Atonement every time. If someone ever raised questions of theology, I was immediately in the thick of the talk, but if conversation dipped to the sale on radial tires at the local dealer, my attention flagged. I substituted meaningless nods and grunts while looking for a way to disengage myself and get on to a more urgent and demanding meeting of souls. What time did I have for small talk when I was committed to the large message of salvation and eternity? What did I have to do with the desultory gossip of weather and politics when I had "fire in my mouth"?
I know I am not the only pastor who has been ill at ease and impatient with small talk. And I know I am not the only pastor who has rationalized impatience by claiming big-talk priorities of Sermons and Apologetics and Counsel.
The rationalization seems plausible. After spending so much time learning the subtleties of supralapsarianism, surely it is wasteful to talk of the Pittsburgh Pirates. "Redeem the time!" With warehouses of knowledge stored in our brain cells, what business do we have chatting about celebrities or the current TV series or upcoming movie? If we have any chance at all in setting the agenda for conversation, are we not obligated to make it something spiritually important? And if we can't set the agenda, isn't it our task to work the conversation around to what our calling and training have equipped us to bring home to people's hearts?
The practice of manipulating conversation was widely used among people I respected in my college and seminary years, and I was much influenced by them. Their conviction was that every conversation could be turned, if we were sharp enough, into witness. A casual conversation on an airplane could be turned into an eternity-fraught conversation on the soul. A brief interchange with a retail clerk could yield the opening for a "word for Christ."
Such approaches to conversation left no room for small talk. All small talk was manipulated into big talk: of Jesus, of salvation, of the soul's condition.
Small talk: a pastoral art
But however appropriate such verbal strategies are for certain instances of witness (and I think there are such instances), as habitual pastoral practice they are wrong. If we bully people into talking on our terms, if we manipulate them into responding to our agenda, we do not take them seriously where they are: in the ordinary and the everyday.
Nor are we likely to become aware of the tiny shoots of green grace that the Lord is allowing to grow in the back yards of their lives. If we avoid small talk, we abandon the very field in which we have been assigned to work. Most of people's lives is not spent in crisis, not lived at the cutting edge of crucial issues. Most of us, most of the time, are engaged in simple, routine tasks, and small talk is the natural language. If pastors belittle it, we belittle what most people are doing most of the time, and the gospel is misrepresented.
"Lord, how I loathe big issues!" is a sentence I copied from one of C.S. Lewis's letters and have kept as a reminder. He was reacting to pretentiousness that only sees significance in the headlines—in the noisy and the large. Lewis warned of the nose-in-the-air arrogance that is oblivious to the homely and the out-of-the-way, and therefore misses participating in most of the rich reality of existence.
Pastors especially, since we are frequently involved with large truths and are stewards of great mysteries, need to cultivate conversational humility. Humility means staying close to the ground (humus), to people, to everyday life, to what is happening with all its down-to-earthness.
I do not want to be misunderstood: pastoral conversation should not bound along on mindless cliches like gutter water. What I intend is that we simply be present and attentive to what is there conversationally, as respectful of the ordinary as we are of the critical. Some insights are only accessible while laughing. Others arrive only by indirection. Art is involved here. Art means that we give ourselves to the encounter, to the occasion, not condescendingly and not grudgingly but creatively. We're not trying to make something happen but to be part of what is happening—without being in control of it and without it being up to the dignity of our office.
Such art develops better when we are convinced that the Holy Spirit is "beforehand" in all our meetings and conversations. I don't think it is stretching things to see Jesus—who embraced little children, which so surprised and scandalized his followers—also embracing our little conversations.
We mount our Sinai pulpits week by week and proclaim the gospel in what we hope is the persuasive authority of "artful thunder" (Emerson's phrase). When we descend to the people on the plain, a different artfulness is required, the art of small talk.
Eugene H. Peterson was for 29 years pastor of Christ Our King Presbyterian Church in Bel Air, Maryland. He is the translator of The Message.
