I just got back from a pre-Lenten retreat for presbyters of the Diocese of Atlanta.  The theme was about pastoring in anxious times, and the format was organized around five meditations with free time for reflection or rest.  It was a great experience and had me thinking from the moment we arrived.

To be fair, I’m not usually one that wants to wander off and think about what I’ve just heard, I want to engage it with other people or with action.  I either want to go with some friends to a bar to talk or write a blog post or do a charcoal response as if I were in Godly Play for adults.  This is how I prefer to respond to new thinking.

It was in this environment that I was becoming more obsessed with what connects the people in the room.  What is it that we as presbyters (priests) are?  The base and easy response to this is rehearsed and practiced so readily.  Every one of us had to give a defense of our aspirations at some point prior to ordination.  But what I kept wondering about was not a ‘what do we do in anxious times’ or even a ‘who are we when the times get anxious’, but a presupposition that we are anxious people in an anxious community and what does it mean to be leader in that system.

So then I though back to the previous Thursday, and Fresh Start.  We watched the video about leadership in anxious times by Edwin Friedman—a video I had seen four or five times before—but the synchronicity of these concepts was swimming around my head.  And today I watched this video of Peter Rollins interviewed by Spencer Burke:

And as I was watching, I was profoundly affected by Rollins’ depiction of Paul and his ministry: that we should be people of the Resurrection and that the Resurrection is about “dying, being reborn, transformed”; that our lives lived must be different.  And what all of these things are telling me and pushing me to understand is something I can’t say that I understood before: we must allow ourselves to be transformed.

I know this isn’t rocket science, but living transformed is different than assenting to the principle that we are transformed by sacramental rituals, such as baptism and ordination.  I always got that I had to live differently as a Christian, and I do.  I always got that I had to live differently as a priest, and I do.  And yet, what is always at tension for me as a Christian and as a priest is that the world no longer trusts that difference, nor responds to that difference with reverence or deference.  So that difference has become so codified and defined that it is not truly different, or understood as different, but as an ‘alternative lifestyle’.  And in some ways, an alternative lifestyle that is increasingly uncomfortable with letting go of being the dominant lifestyle.

So I lived with this tension and this difference and adjusted to what seems like a domesticated Gospel so as to live the same domesticated lifestyle that is expected of clergy serving a domesticated congregation in a domesticated church.  And I have seen myself as being restricted by all of this domestication and wanting and dreaming and internally screaming for the people to become wild for the gospel and to unleash it to transform our lives and to open the windows for the Spirit to descend upon us like a dove.  And the reality is that I thought that anyone who is born is able to grow wild and that, in baptism, I was given my invitation to grow wild, and that all of the people everywhere can grow wild—but when I put that collar around my neck, the Inherited Church had me, bound and domesticated.  My eyes would blur as the wild outdoors were living without me.  But there is no leash.  The yard is not fenced.  I’m sitting in the front yard because I’m afraid of the wildness and the domesticated life is secure.

Perhaps Paul does serve as the wise guide of wildness.  His ministry was clearly unrestrained.  His emotive style was occasionally disconcerting but always engaging and reverent to the people and place that he was at.  He embodied rebelliousness and even today represents the radical and the servant at their best and most authentic.  This is the wild.