Prophet, Pilgrim, and Priest – Part Two

Pilgrim Before Priest (Internal)

The man who can articulate the movements of his inner life, who can give names to his varied experiences … is able slowly and consistently to remove the obstacles that prevent the spirit from entering. This articulation, I believe, is the basis for spiritual leadership of the future, because only he who is able to articulate his own experience can offer himself to others as a source of clarification.

Henri Nouwen, The Wounded Healer

The path of our own life journey, our own pilgrimage, defines what we have experienced. Look at the pilgrimages of the patriarchs. Their lives are marked on maps. The places they found themselves in carry the weight of stone monuments and memorials. These relics come to life with names that tell other pilgrims the nature of the place. From the past the pilgrim follows with half of a map freshly sketched, and half yet to be written.
So we take the journey, survive the seasons, and blaze trails into an unknown that once seemed impenetrable. We mark the map with language and memorials that are ours. We become men and women with a past. We have walked a trail that has shaped our days. Time will tell what we take from the journey. It always does. Time is a snitch.

The Pilgrim and POV – Build it for Yourself

We have to know the text to be men and women who speak with the prophetic voice, the voice of Truth in the din of the mundane and the profane. We have to personalize the text to become pilgrims. In other words, don’t yet worry about what it means for someone else. Build it for yourself first. It is the mantra of Ezra. Once we know the Word, we must live the Word, understand it, keep the statutes and face the brokenness where we do not. We have to be subdued by conviction and wrestle our confessions. We must “work out our own salvation with fear and trembling” as the Lord works magnificently to enfold us into His story before we are the people to teach it to others.

In the space of our story, we are unique. No one has lived in the same places, at the same moments and experienced exactly what we have. Yet the course of our stories is more universal than unique. In literature classes we are taught there are only a few story lines ever written. Man struggles against himself, either individually or against the collective mankind of society, and its technological byproducts. Man struggles against nature. Man struggles against God. In this way, we are part of a greater common fabric. We, with individual pilgrimage, history, and point of view, are more universal than we are unique.

When you read the bible, you enter the text through your story, and yet find the common pieces of every one’s experience. The story of great pain, joy, or endurance draws us all in.

As you spend time in the text, keeping it before your eyes, steeping your soul in the passage, ask some questions from your pilgrim point of view (POV).

What points in my story connect to this text?

What characters are like me? How?

Where do I find myself stirred to empathize or judge a person in the story?

The Pilgrim as Poet – The Art is in the Arrangement

There are 88 keys on the piano. Those notes and their combined sounds as chords are what can be played. Every composer who has worked from the keys has had the same tools. And yet, what made the music of Mozart, Beethoven, or Art Tatum unique was the mix of the medium and the man. The choices of time signatures, progressions and melody are what make the music take shape. While each composer starts with the same instrument and the same keys, the art is in the arrangement.

It is like that with those who share the Christian message, whether from a classroom, living room, or pulpit. There is a level of personal choice that makes an art of the presentation.

When I studied writing, there was always the discussion of one’s “own voice” being developed over time. The voice was not meant to be novel, as it necessarily combined elements of other writers. It is not possible to ignore those who influenced us, on whose shoulders we stand. We have to find a place where the influence is present, but where we are freed from more slavish forms of imitation. Imitation can be the limitation to inspiration. For a preacher, finding his own voice means taking what we have learned, regularly crediting and speaking well of those who shaped us, engaging the quiet and constant thoughts of our soul, and speaking words marked with the narrative of our journey and ornamented with language that brought to us the blush of beauty.

When I was instructed on how to teach the bible in the early-to-mid 1990’s, there was a more monochromatic field of homiletical views than there is now. The preachers were careful, biblical, and spoke with the savvy and practiced pointedness of CEO’s and politicians. The care and precision was obvious. The formula of an hour of preparation for every two minutes of speaking, touted by one of the most noteworthy preachers at the time, made sense when I listened to these men. I admired their craft, but something did not connect with me.

While they had precision, they lacked passion. Or at least what I took as passion. I wanted to hear their hearts. I wanted to know that their stories as part of this spiritual presentation. I longed for the poet preachers who could use language, image and emotion to show me the spiritual world through which they had walked. I looked for a pilgrim to explain the way, like a spiritual sherpa who had climbed the paths which lay unknown ahead of me.

The Ordination of the Pilgrim – Pilgrims Turned to Priests

The mystic must hear from the Lord. The pilgrim must live with the call of following the Lord. The priest must minister to others out of that combined experience of hearing and following.

Be a pilgrim before you are a priest. That is the best advice I have for younger pastors or lay leaders. Next week, the series continues with the role of the priest: the spiritual sherpa of the pilgrim path.