Dear John – 21 February 2016

Dear John,

I’m glad you got your fence repaired. I’m glad you and your neighbor had the opportunity to move along the fence line shoulder to shoulder and feel the gratification of shared work. Some days I crave these tasks that require something specific of you (line up the posts, set the panels), work with an explicit goal and a clear conclusion. So much of my life feels elusive or at least never-concluding. Though some folks opt for a vision of the pastor as something like an ecclesial project manager (set budget goals and growth metrics, chart the course, and then track your progress to completion), I can’t comprehend such a thing. To walk with people in grief and joy and boredom, to point toward God amid our confusions and our shenanigans, to try to help us all be faithful to one another and to what is true – there’s no clear end point to this. But then again, I’m a middling pastor so what do I know?

A few years ago, we were finishing our basement and needed to install insulation in the walls and ceiling. A friend came over to help. We wore our long-sleeve shirts and our goggles, loaded up our staple guns. That itchy stuff was no joke, but we experienced a kind of pleasure to work down the rows, firing away, and then to look back when we were done and see what we’d accomplished. I’m sure some of my friends and neighbors will read this and I’ll be getting calls pronto to come over and help with projects. I can hear it now: “Well, Rev, I hear your struggles. I got just the thing…” 

You mentioned the Stegner Fellowship at Stanford and those two decades of amazing classmates. One of my favorite things Stegner wrote was a letter he penned to Berry, some 30 years after Berry had been his student. I love the letter for many reasons, but one reason is because of the unabashed affection Stegner showed, though Stegner admitted how “it embarrasses my post-Protestant sensibilities to tell a man to his face that I admire him.” Stegner told Berry that “from the first time when you first appeared as a Fellow in the writing program in 1958, I recognized you as one who knew where he was from and who he was.” Stegner went on to recount how he’d tried to talk Berry away from his Kentucky farm and back to Stanford, though Berry was disinterested and how Berry was offered some opportunity that Stegner insisted most writers would sell their soul to have – again, disinterested. Stegner reminded Berry of the dire warnings so many laid on him: “that you were burying yourself,” Stegner wrote, “that you couldn’t come into the literary world with manure on your barn boots and expect to be welcomed…”

But Berry paid the small minds no mind. And I am so glad. I too, in my own way, want to be a writer who gets manure on his boots. Maybe that’s part of what pastoring does for me these days (there’s a metaphor that could go wrong easily). I know you understand what I mean, letting our words emerge from the real things of this life like putting up fences and getting braces on the kids and spending time out in the woods, things like loving and dying, like laughing and grieving, praying with someone who’s got the world on their shoulders. 

I’d like to think that’s some of what you and I are doing, keeping our boots dirty. I think we are.

Your friend,
Winn