Christmas Eve was my busiest night of the year. And then it wasn't.

On getting used to not being a pastor

(for the audio version, click above)

Church-work is cyclical. As a pastor, you mark time by the coming and going and coming again of the liturgical seasons. Even a pastor having a crisis of faith knows that Advent, Christmas, Lent, Easter, Pentecost and their less-glamorous but sensible-shoed-sibling, Ordinary Time, will forever be followed by…Advent, Christmas, Lent, Easter…

For 21 years these were the touchstones of my work schedule. And having circled that same track so many times, I wasn’t sure I would ever know how to walk in a straight line again.

So this past May, when I said good-bye to being the co-pastor of Montview Boulevard Presbyterian Church in Denver, I wondered how I would deal with my newfound lack of ecclesiastic structure. At first, to be honest, I hardly noticed it. It was summer, after all, and I could just as easily have been on sabbatical.

When September arrived and it did not even occur to me that Kick-Off Sunday (the annual marker of Fall programming) had come and gone, I thought maybe I was going to be fine. When Stewardship Season came and I had no urge to remind people to get their pledges in, I thought maybe this transition just wasn’t going to be that hard for me.

Then came the first Sunday of Advent; the beginning of the Christian Calendar and my favorite time of year. That’s when I felt it…a weird disorientation, like my body was telling me it wasn’t where it was supposed to be; not doing what it was supposed to do. I told myself what a gift it was not to be the one people hoped could explain the world’s issues and evils. I told myself I could focus more on my own issues and evils for a change (God knows they could use some attention). I told myself it was time to move on.

Then came Christmas Eve. Now you have to understand, Montview is a church that attracts almost 2,000 people to one of five services on Christmas Eve. The staff spend weeks planning for it, and if I can brag for a moment, I think Montview does Christmas about as well as anyone. But it’s quite a day behind the scenes. The first of two Children’s services (complete with live baby in the live nativity) starts at 2pm. And the day ends ten hours later with clergy and staff collapsing in a back room with a drink in their hand, toasting the newborn Jesus and thanking God it’s over.

But this year I was at home with my family, eating delicious chicken pozole my son made (a new tradition!) and opening stockings with the three people I love most. It was wonderful. Restful. Special.

Did I miss being at church? Well, I certainly didn’t miss waving good-bye to my family after lunch on Christmas Eve Day (knowing I wouldn’t see them until Christmas morning) so that I could help the four scripture readers (average age: 9) practice their lines before the 2pm children’s service.

But I did miss reminding the one reader who had the daunting task of saying the word ‘homage’ three times in seven verses not to pronounce the ‘h’ (only to have them, inevitably and adorably, pronounce the ‘h’ at least once).

I certainly didn’t miss the distracted squirming of some people in the pews who, to be fair to them, had been brought there against their will by family obligation or guilt or both, and who, it was clear to see, would rather be anywhere on earth than listening to me preach.

But I dearly missed the few souls who, almost every year, would tell us later they stumbled into church that night during a very hard time in their life and found something in a hymn, a sermon, or the Gospel story itself that gave them the strength to keep going.

I absolutely did not miss all those planning meetings, looking for typos in the bulletins, debating how many poinsettias to buy, and spending far too long on whether we had enough bobeches for the candlelight services. What’s a bobeche, you ask? Exactly.

But I missed with an ache in my heart the chance to look out at 500 people at the end of the service, as the lights are lowered and candles are raised (bobeches working perfectly) and together singing the last verse of Silent Night with lumps in our throats. You do that for 21 years and the year you don’t feels like you’re missing a limb (no matter how good the pozole is).

When something comes to an end that is deeply important to us – a career, a marriage, a chapter in our lives – we often have trouble feeling all of what we feel because we don’t think we’re allowed to feel two things that contradict one other. There’s only one of us, after all, so how can we have two completely different emotions at the same time? But we do.

I knew a woman who spent ten years caring for her sick husband. When he died, she missed him terribly, and she felt tremendous relief at no longer having her life consumed by caretaking. Then she felt ashamed, wondering if the sense of relief meant maybe she didn’t truly miss him. I’ve known people getting a divorce who feel overwhelmed by the loss of it one minute and a shot of excitement about the future the next. And then they feel so conflicted by this, they don’t let themselves fully feel either emotion.

We wrap ourselves in knots trying to decipher which feelings are the ‘right’ ones, so that we can stuff down the ‘wrong’ ones. But the truth is we are complicated, conflicted, contrary, cryptic beings that often can’t be reduced to one thing or another.

As Whitman put it:

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

Thinking of ourselves as containing ‘parts’ can be helpful here (from Internal Family Systems theory). We can learn to honor that one part of us can feel one way and one part feel another. And neither diminishes the trueness of the other.

Do I miss my old life at Montview? Honestly, no. I love having a slower pace, more time with my family, and the chance to focus on the parts of my work I enjoy most.

Do I miss my old life at Montview? Absolutely. It was such a special time in my life and sometimes I feel utterly lost without it.

Can I let both of these be true at the same time? Can I learn to sit in that paradox, resist the urge to reduce or resolve it, and even feel grateful that life is so beautifully complex and rich? You can bet your bobeche I’m trying.

Until next time,

Ian

[P.S. If you’re looking for a church, I hope you’ll consider trying Montview. I’m obviously biased, but I really do think it’s a special place, and not just for Christmas. And they do an incredible job of streaming services and classes, so you can join them from anywhere. Here’s a link to this year’s beautiful Christmas Eve Candlelight Service. Oh, and by the way, a bobeche is that little round thingie you slip over a candle to catch the wax.]