Harvard Divinity Bulletin - Stephanie Paulsell - Pastoral Agility and Intellectual Work

Stephanie Paulsell, HDS's new associate dean for ministerial studies, gave this lecture to a conference of theological educators at Yale Divinity School in April 2003.

Nearly 700 years ago, a young Sienese woman named Catherine, the 24th child of a local wool dyer and his wife, wrote a book about her call to ministry. Her call is difficult to categorize in the usual ways—it does not, for instance, fit the famous typology of pastoral call offered by H. Richard Niebuhr in The Purpose of the Church and Its Ministry. It is more than a call to faith. It bears some resemblance to Niebuhr's notion of secret call, but it is more than inner experience alone. It is not a providential call, although she had pastoral gifts to spare. And it most certainly is not an ecclesiastical call, although the day would come when the church would ask for her leadership. Catherine's call came instead in the form of a dialogue, an ongoing conversation with God that would last for the rest of her life.

In the course of this dialogue, God invited her to consider God's own intention for the church. "My house," God says to Catherine, "ought to be a house of prayer. There the pearl of justice ought to shine, and the light of learning joined with holy and honorable living. There one should find the fragrance of truth."

It is hard to imagine a more challenging vision of the church than one in which prayer and justice, learning, and living are inseparable. The pastoral leadership such a vision would call forth is also challenging, especially for those of us whose work it is to educate those leaders. But it is a vision of the church that reflects the pastoral agility that Catherine of Siena cultivated in her own short life, the agility that allowed her to move between what she called the "cell of selfknowledge" and the knowledge of God, between the silence of her room and the body of her suffering neighbor, between Rome and Avignon.

It is typical of pastoral agility in all its forms, this ability to hold prayer and justice, learning and living together in one house, one life, one ministry. It is the kind of agility the apostle Paul demonstrated when he preached to the Athenians, using the language of their own poets to preach about the God in whom we live and move and have our being, the God human beings search for and grope after.

It is the agility of the preacher in South Carolina who listens as the woman who owns him reads a passage of scripture and then proceeds to preach until an enslaved child, who is present for this sermon and later records the memory, hears God's desire for human freedom so clearly that his soul begins to sing.

It is the agility of the pastor in our own day and time, who moves between the sanctuary and the hospital, between city hall and the cemetery, between the homes of the sick, the grieving, and the violated and the desk piled high with books and commentaries.

No wonder Gregory of Nazianzus and Gregory the Great after him called pastoral ministry "the art of arts." Nothing human is alien to the pastor; all of life is her business, whether it is manifest or hidden, public or private, external or interior. "No one ventures to teach any art unless he has learned it after deep thought," Gregory the Great wrote in his Pastoral Rule. I find Gregory so unnerving to read, because this is the question for us as theological teachers: Can such a complex art be taught? Can pastoral agility be passed on from one person to another? Is it a capacity you either have or do not have, or can it be acquired in school?

The history of pastoral agility can certainly be taught—and it should be, just as rigorously as we teach New Testament or systematic theology. Students can study Paul, and the call narratives of enslaved ministers, and the works of Catherine of Siena. They can study the contemporary forms such pastoral agility takes, both in the classroom and in the field. But can we teach students to be as agile as those they study? We can pass on certain tools of agility, certain skills. But how do we teach our students to move with these skills between prayer and justice, learning and living? How do we help our students cultivate the agility that is the mark of excellent ministry in all its forms?

There are many answers to this question, and we've heard some good ones at this conference. I will focus on two interrelated intellectual practices that we ask all our students to engage, practices that have the potential to help shape agile ministers. The first is reading —the the ordinary, daily work of students and teachers. The second is the practice of seeing the world through the lens of our academic disciplines.

These are the practices that, for some of our students, are the most distant from the pastoral ministry to which they feel called. Indeed, they are the practices about which our students often feel most anxious—not just because they are difficult, but also because they are at least potentially pleasurable. Many of our students, especially in these grave and troubled days, fear that these years in school are years in an ivory tower, far from the people and experiences that first awakened their call to ministry. If we as theological teachers and scholars do not practice our vocation with care, if we fail to offer an invitation to intellectual work that is saturated with love of the world, these students may despair of the distance between the world and their studies. As a student said to me a few days after September 11: "Well, I'm going home now to read my Kierkegaard. As if reading my Kierkegaard's going to do any good."

I first found a theoretical articulation of the relationship I felt between intellectual work and pastoral formation when I read Simone Weil's essay "On the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God." A friend gave me a copy of that essay when I was a graduate student learning Latin for the first time while my friend studied Sanskrit. We read it to console ourselves that, even if we weren't getting the right translations—and we weren't—that our effort was not wasted because we were cultivating the capacity to pay attention to what is undeniably other than ourselves without turning it into ourselves. That little essay did more than make me feel better about the long road of language study, though. It shapes the way I studied, and I try to let it shape the way I teach. I still do not know of any better theoretical statement about the relationship of intellectual work to pastoral life: that academic study has the potential to cultivate the capacity for attention required by prayer and the ability to be present to our suffering neighbor. Whether we are studying theology, languages, mathematics, or philosophy, intellectual work is a pearl of great price, Weil says, worthy of the sacrifice it requires because it bears fruit in our life with God and our life with others.

This is such a beautiful theory. But is it enough to make ministers agile enough for the art of arts? Gregory the Great sounds a word of caution. "There are some," he writes, "who investigate spiritual precepts with shrewd diligence, but in the life they live trample on what they have penetrated by their understanding. They hasten to teach what they have learned, not by practice, but by study, and belie in their conduct what they teach by words. Hence it is that when the pastor walks through steep places, the flock following him comes to a precipice."

I told you he was unnerving.

Like any practice, intellectual work can be done well or badly, can form or deform. Say "learned minister," and for many people, the image of George Eliot's Mr. Casaubon rises unbidden in the mind: alone in his study, barricaded from human relationships by his manuscripts, wholly consumed by a scholarly project that will never bear fruit in the world. And Mr. Casaubon is not the only bad example. In a less withered mode, there is the "gentleman" John Henry Newman described in The Idea of the University, who is cultured but not changed by his studies. It is, of course, possible to practice intellectual work like either of these figures, as a way of holding the world at arm's length.

But it is also possible to practice intellectual work as Simone Weil commends. Led by desire, as she says we must be, it is possible to practice intellectual work as formation in a way of life marked by rigorous and loving attention, a life that turns toward the world and its sorrow bearing the best resources it knows how to gather, a life that eagerly embraces the creativity that faith demands and embodies the agility required by pastoral ministry.

So, a few words about the intellectual practices we ask of our students. First, reading, that source of both deep pleasure and guilty feelings. For aren't we always behind in our reading? Aren't there always more books on any given topic than we can possibly read? And, in order to keep up with all that we "should" be reading, haven't we speeded up our reading to such an extent that we are unable to linger over a book, or a sentence, or an image. Sometimes I feel that I have forgotten how to read, "how to leave aside our search for subtlety and originality," as the historian of ancient philosophy Pierre Hadot puts it, "in order to meditate calmly, ruminate, and let the texts speak to us."

Augustine offers an image of the Christian as reader in his Confessions, when he reads the firmament stretched out between earth and heaven as referring to scripture. This firmament helps us draw near to God, but it also divides earth from heaven. We—its human readers—are like the stars in the firmament, clinging to the strange, old words of scripture with both our hands, trying to catch a glimpse of God through its veil. To be a human being, for Augustine, is to be a reader.

The angels are also readers, he says, but they read the very face of God. Their reading, unlike ours, "is perpetual, and what they read never passes away." For Augustine, words, both spoken and written, are reminders of our distance from God because they are temporal and will not last. They strike the air, and then are gone. But they also hold open a place in time in which the eternal can break in; they are reminders of our life in time, a life sustained by God, a life in which we can change, be converted, and turn toward God. As temporal and imperfect as words are, there is something holy about attending to them. They are somehow grounded in the Word spoken by God at the beginning and reverberating still at the heart of all life.

Several years ago, I was working in my office when a first-year MDiv student named Santiago Pinon came to tell me of his excitement over a class he was taking on negative theology with Jean-Luc Marion and David Tracy. He held in his hands a copy of Professor Marion's book God Without Being. As he paged through it, looking for his favorite passages, I could see that Santiago had marked up the book in at least three colors of ink. "The first time I read this book," Santiago said, "I must have read every sentence three times, just trying to figure out what Professor Marion was saying. Now, I am reading it again, trying to figure out what the idea of a God without being might have to say to the homeless ex-convicts I work with. I think there is something here for them."

He was reading it again, not just through his own eyes, but through the eyes of formerly incarcerated, badly wounded men. And he expected to find something for them there.

For those of us who are wondering why we should keep reading when the world is falling apart, this is one important answer. This is a way of reading on behalf of the world. This is reading like a minister. Faced with a reading assignment of the most esoteric sort, Santiago didn't waste time complaining that the theology he was being called upon to read and study was too abstract, too theoretical to have anything to do with real life. Instead, he was willing to receive it as an alternative account of real life, albeit an unfamiliar one, and set about reading it with an eye toward the homeless ex-convicts with whom he ministered. Like practitioners of lectio divina who make themselves available to God through their reading, Santiago made himself available to others as he did the hard work of reading and rereading, outlining and underlining that the text required.

Every minister needs to know how to do this, how to read and re-read on behalf of others. Tom Long says this is precisely the work of the preacher. In The Witness of Preaching, he says that the preacher goes to the text on behalf of the people. The reading and study that preaching requires is not preparation for ministry, he insists; it is ministry. Like those practicing lectio divina and thereby reading with a community of readers that stretches across time and place, those ministers, like Santiago, who read with others in mind never read alone. They read with and on behalf of those with whom they minister.

Not only do we ask our students to read, we also ask them to read in particular ways. We ask them to take on, at least for the length of a semester or a quarter, the methods and questions and texts of our particular academic discipline. If we are historians, we ask our students to receive the world like historians; if we are theologians, we ask them to think like theologians; if we are scholars of scripture, we ask them read holy texts like scholars of scripture; if we are theorists of religion, we ask them to become theorists of religion as well. Not because we want them to be us (that's the temptation of teaching doctoral students), but, hopefully, because we want them to be the ministers our world most needs.

Now, what does taking on the discipline of one's teacher have to do with the cultivation of pastoral agility? This inevitably raises the vexed question of what ministers need to know—which, for us, leads into deeply contested curricular issues. What is the place of religious studies in the preparation of ministers? What is the place of the social sciences? Ought students to learn about religions other than their own? Ought they to learn from religions other than their own? And if we ask all this of our students, will there be enough room in their schedule for all the theology and church history they need?

I am not going to try to answer these questions here. But what I want to say to the teachers among you, especially the new teachers is: Do not hesitate to invite your students into your discipline. Whatever curriculum you find yourself teaching in, whatever you teach, whether it be Hebrew or literary theory or New Testament or anthropology, invite your students to think with you, ask them to see the world, for a time, the way your discipline invites them to see it.

We need to be vigilant in our intellectual practices, but we also need to be fearless. If nothing human is alien to the pastor, then nothing human is alien to theological education. George Herbert, in his manual for pastors, says what the minister needs to know is everything. "It is an ill mason," Herbert writes, "that refuseth any stone." If you know something, your students need to know it too.

The parallel anxiety to our students' fears of being stranded in an ivory tower that we bring as teachers is that what we have to teach may not be of interest to someone preparing for ministry. We haven't, most of us, been asked in graduate school how our research and our discipline might be put in the service of the education of ministers. This anxiety may be compounded by the sense, still prevalent in theological education, that the individual research agenda of the seminary professor ought to be subordinated to the corporate mission of the school, that the "specialized research" of the new faculty member—the work that propelled her through the long years and hard work of graduate school, the work she loves—might impede her ability to be present to her community, might keep her eye fixed on her guild rather than the formation of ministers. Here's where it pays to be fearless. Stay close to what you love, and bring your students with you. Ask them to take on the intellectual disciplines of your field. Ask them to learn some new practices, practices that might cultivate their capacity for attention. Ask them to see the world in a new way.

Now, here's the vigilance part. Just as you ought not to hesitate to bring your students into the kind of work you do, you should not hold back from placing your work in their context, or from asking what your field of study might contribute to the cultivation of pastoral agility. This doesn't mean dumbing down your work. It doesn't even necessarily mean simplifying it. It means thinking new thoughts. It means bringing your own intellectual questions to the long history of pastoral ministry and asking what they might have to do with one another.

I'll give you an example. One of my colleagues, Robert Orsi, told this story to a class of new MDiv students in the fall, and, for me, it illustrates the spiritually formative dimension of our invitation to our students to enter fully into our disciplines for a time.

When Bob was teaching at Fordham University, he took his students to Spanish Harlem so that they could observe and participate in the festival of the Madonna of 115th Street, a festival he had studied closely over the years. This festival is a complex celebration, brought from Italy by immigrants to this country, transformed as Italian Harlem became Spanish Harlem, and influenced today by the Haitian immigrants who now participate in the festival, whose Catholicism contains elements of voodoo. Bob and his students came up out of the subway near 115th Street and found themselves in the middle of the celebration. They could hear several languages being spoken, they could smell peppers and sausages cooking on the outdoor grills, they could see dice being thrown and religious artifacts being sold. They could see the devotees of the Madonna, men and women alike, adorned in their festive clothing, and the Madonna herself, lifted up and moving through the streets. One of Bob's students, a young woman, looked around at all this and said, "What a wonderful opportunity to catechize!"

"Ah," Bob said, "but that is not the response of the historian." And he asked that young woman to take on the demands of his discipline. To watch and to listen. To smell and to taste. To talk to people, to find out what this celebration meant to them. He asked her not to rush to interpret, much less rush to catechize. He asked her to pause and offer her attention to something truly other than herself, as we do in prayer. Simone Weil would call it waiting, waiting in patience.

That young woman probably did not go on to become a professional historian. She probably went on to become a catechist! But because she had a teacher who believed that the practice of his discipline could not only help his student understand the festival of the Madonna of 115th Street, but also help her learn to attend to the world in all its complex detail, she was also invited to cultivate the kind of agility that every minister needs.

Harvard Divinity School