Not Burnout, You're Burning It Up!

 Dear sisters and brothers in ministry, I saw yet another article about us, and I wanted to take a few moments to say to all of us: You’re not burned out, you’re burning it up.  I know in my heart that the authors of the current abundance of articles on clergy burnout have underestimated you severely.

Just consider the following:

You became a televangelist within a week or less back in March. For some of you, that meant consultation with your tech team on how to create the highest-quality worship experience possible. For others, you are your own tech team, and you worked technological wonders that you never thought possible. Way to go, you’re burning it up!

You have made and continue to make difficult choices about which programs need to pause for a time. Your creativity has enabled you to do some programming in new ways. You’ve learned to rely more on your staff. You’ve learned how to lean into clergy FB groups and online resources, knowing that we are one of God’s best gifts to each other. Way to go, you’re burning it up!

You’ve figured out how to do pastoral care without being able to see people face-to-face, not an easy task. You’re facing the frustrations of not being able to be alongside someone in those holy, final moments of life and being unable to offer a funeral service that speaks into a hope that is deeper than any grave. And, perhaps hardest of all, your church members are unable to offer the Sacrament of the Funeral Meal. Yet, you’re finding ways to embody the steadfast love of Christ with your people as much as possible. Way to go, you’re burning it up!

You are doing outstanding things in ministry, even while you’re bearing your own burdens. Not only do you want to prevent the name of your church from being linked with the newly-minted word “superspreader,” you’re worrying about your own health. Every little symptom that is typical for the advent of cold weather brings a shock of concern. The same losses which you are shepherding your congregation through so compassionately are piling up in your own life. You miss your family, you miss the camaraderie of being with church people, and now you’re anticipating the absence of your congregation singing the candlelit hymns of Christmas Eve. So many of the life-giving aspects of ministry have been lost in a cloud of virus particles. And yet you’re still showing up (even virtually) to serve your church in the name of Christ. Way to go, you’re burning it up!

What you’re experiencing in these times may indeed be burnout, and I don’t want to discount the validity of your feelings. I do, however, want to offer you another option to consider. Take a breath and look around at all that you’ve done already. All of those things going on in your head, heart, soul and body? Perhaps the message that they’re sending you is that you’re doing an amazing job, but that everything is so different that your senses simply don’t have the tools to interpret what they’re feeling. And so before you trot out the term “burnout,” look tenderly upon yourself, and observe all the ways that you’re burning it up. You really are, even if your weary innards might not recognize it for what it is.

And then, as you’ve learned to do in every season, trust God that what you are doing is enough. And that you are enough, even now. Especially now.

Way to go, you’re burning it up!

 

What to do when every time you think things couldn’t sink any lower politically, they do? What to do when the pandemic continues to ravage unabated, yet we’ve collectively reached the end of our patience with the restrictions that might make it go away? What to do when it appears that bringing racism into the light has only sped its growth?

Today, I chose to plant bulbs.

Digging into the soil in the fleeting warmth of an ever-shortening autumn day, I thought about when the crocus flowers would emerge next Spring. There is so much about that springtime world that I cannot yet know. Who will be president? Will the election and attendant transfer (or retention) of power have gone smoothly? Will the grip of COVID on our world have begun to loosen? Will there be a vaccine readily available, and will people be willing to take it? Will the racism that parades so publicly in our streets in these days have scurried back into the depths from which it came by the time the crocus blooms?

I don’t know the answers, and so I plant bulbs. During the chill of the looming winter, these bulbs will be gathering themselves, allowing dormancy to create the first blossoms of springtime.

I remember the words of a poet who described watching his terminally ill wife plant bulbs one autumn, bulbs that both of them knew she would not live to see bloom. He described her as “quietly plotting the resurrection,” although the invisibility of that phrase on Google makes me think that my memory has altered the precise wording. No matter the imprecision of my memory, the promise of those words echoed in my heart as I planted my bulbs this afternoon.

The nature of the world that these crocus will be born into is unknown. Yet the purple flowers themselves will sing to me of the gift of new life that weathers the coldest nights. This one hope will be unchanged no matter what will come. 

And so, today I plant bulbs.

The Enemy Is COVID, Not Each Other

Have you noticed how we talk about this pandemic? The language of war has come to dominate our news coverage and conversations. Scientists and healthcare professionals at every level are engaged in viral warfare. Persons who are infected battle for their lives.  COVID-19 is the enemy, and we are deploying every weapon in our arsenal at it in an all-out barrage to neutralize this enemy. Should COVID-19 launch a counteroffensive of viral proliferation, we will bring in reinforcements until the virus surrenders and a total victory is won.

Like everyone else, I hope that scientists win their war against this disease by coming up with a cure. Doctors and nurses help patients in their fight for life every day, and I cheer them on in their very real war. Yes, we are in a war against the virus itself. 

The problem with war language arises when it bleeds into other arenas of our shared existence. Once we get above a cellular level, the usefulness of this language diminishes.

I understand the allure of trying to keep a warlike attitude on a community level. We read about WW2 and how united our nation was against the common enemy, and sentimentality makes us long to get back to those days of unity. If we can all just unite against this common enemy, then we will win.  Warfare language begins to be used for our national response to COVID. What could go wrong with that?

The problem is that the common enemy becomes no longer just the virus, it becomes us.

When we use the language of war to talk about our response to the virus rather than simply the virus itself, we are throwing kerosene onto the fire of our already existing divisions. Rather than fighting the disease, the focus of our hostility becomes each other. COVID-deniers versus COVID-accepters. Mask-wearers versus mask-refusers. Stay-at-home versus back-to-work. The battle lines of this war fall too easily into our old political and cultural patterns. We settle back into the unending trench warfare that characterized WW1, where front lines never budged even as hundreds of thousands of lives were lost. 

As a result, our forays into hunting and gathering (my terminology for what I used to call “shopping” in a more innocent time) become incursions into dangerous territory. We worry about the enemy in the form of the invisible virus, but we have to worry also about the visible enemy in our fellow shoppers. Will other people wear masks? Will they follow the directional arrows? Will they stay 6 feet away while standing in the checkout line?

Even the most mundane experience becomes another skirmish in this war.

On Mother’s Day, Andy and I made an (unsuccessful, but that’s another story) attempt to pick up a meal from an area restaurant. As we sat in our car for over 30 minutes waiting for our pre-ordered and pre-paid meal to emerge from the restaurant (which it never did, but that’s another story), we watched one worker bring meals to cars while wearing a mask and gloves. The other worker wore neither as he leaned into the cars to hand over the bags of food. We hoped that our order would be brought out by the mask-wearing person. When I called the restaurant the next day to request a refund for our non-meal (which appears unlikely to happen, and perhaps that is part of the story), the man to whom I spoke happened to be the non-mask-wearing person. After he agreed to look into my paid-for-but-nonexistent order of food, I told him, civilly, that we had been troubled that he hadn’t been wearing a mask. His response? “Well, that’s not gonna happen.” When I told him, civilly, that we wouldn’t be back as a result, his level of caring was equal to the likelihood of him refunding my $34.72. He is fighting a war in which lost business and possible spread of contagion are acceptable casualties. And for us, a formerly-favorite restaurant sits smack dab in the middle of enemy territory.

I feel like I’m a soldier, conscripted into a war which I didn’t sign up for. And yet here I am fighting in it with the best of them. Like everyone else, I am combat weary already.

Is there a way for us to reimagine our national and community response to one another as something other than warfare? I’m thinking of the image of a highway, where we’re all traveling to different destinations in different vehicles, yet our journey is shared for a time as we travel along the same highway. On that highway, there are rules of the road that are designed to keep everyone safe. Speed limits, passing lanes, turn signals, tailgating laws are all things which we’ve agreed to as a society to govern our use of the highways. While there will always be that person who tailgates or drives at excessive speeds or engages in road rage, the rules of the road keep most of us behaving as decent human beings. Our common enemy is highway deaths, and we try to work together to diminish those deaths. 

In this time of pandemic, we are traveling an uncertain road together. We don’t know what’s around the next curve, or even how sharp the curve itself will be, so we drive at a cautious speed. We don’t know how long this road will be, so we make sure we’re taking necessary rest stops. We try not to sideswipe or tailgate others, knowing that we would all sustain damage in an accident. Like the busiest highway, lives are at stake every day, especially the first responders and health care workers who put themselves at risk by tending to us. Shouldn’t we travel with care along this road?

So by all means, scientists and medical professionals, fight COVID with all-out warfare, using every weapon in your arsenal. Obliterate it, send it into retreat, claim full victory. For the rest of us, let’s remember that it’s the virus that’s the enemy, not each other. The rest of us are just trying to travel this road together, so that we can all get to our destination. 

As the signs along the highway say, “Drive Safely. Arrive Alive.”

Communion in an Age of Coronavirus

“I read that churches might not be allowed to serve communion before too long.” This information isn’t from some breathless internet rumor, but from my husband, who practices law in the area of employee benefits and health care. He’s been staying on top of the most recent coronavirus news to be able to advise his clients, although the data changes so rapidly that any advice is a moving target. Suffice it to say, though, that the information above is as reliable as anything else these days.

Since this morning is a communion Sunday, I’ve revised our practices already, as I’ll describe below. My motivation isn’t primarily epidemiological, but is born of compassion and theology.

I remember the early days of the AIDS crisis, when a positive diagnosis was a virtual death sentence. Avenues of contagion were still being discussed with some degree of uncertainty. Could you catch it from a public restroom? What about a doorknob? (No and no, of course, but these questions were being asked in those early days.) I noticed that several people in my church stopped taking communion. As I held the communion cup one day, I looked out into the congregation and saw a young man remaining in the pew, with his eyes filled with tears. I spoke to him after the service, and he told me why he remained seated. He had been diagnosed HIV/AIDS, and he didn’t want to risk infecting others. I realized immediately his commonality with the others who weren’t coming forward. 

My heart broke for him. Not only was he facing a terribly uncertain future, but he was staying away from the gift of the sacrament of communion. The fear of contagion prevented him from receiving a wonderful soul gift of Christ.

If anyone reading these words rolls their eyes that anyone would be so ill-informed about the transmission of HIV/AIDS, then be grateful that you never had to know those days. Fear is our default response to the unknown, and an unknown, potentially fatal virus creates its own class of fear. As we are experiencing now.

I never want anyone to not be able to receive Christ’s gift of holy communion as a result of fear. That sacrament is exactly what we need in the face of fear, to strengthen and fill us for the days ahead. And so, in order that the Lord’s Table may be open to all of us with all of our fears and hopes and needs, we will be sharing in communion in this manner today and in coming weeks:

Rather than a common cup, we’ll be using the small individual cups. (I will stop referring to them as “shot glasses,” after one of my communion assistants wondered if we needed to provide salt and lime wedges also.) We had given away our trays that hold those little cups and had to purchase more on Friday. Worth it. 

We will serve bread by having the communion servers observe the Sacrament of Purell. Then they will tear off pieces of the bread and drop them into person’s hand. The dropping of the bread is a new thing. Previously, we would have handed the bread more directly to a person, but we are working to eliminate any touching that might transmit germs. By the way, we had considered going to individual wafers, but people rummage around in the wafers a bit with their fingers because it’s hard to pick one up without touching any other wafers. 

In addition to our usual plate of gluten-free wafers, we will also have a few gluten-full wafers, in case anyone truly wants their own wafer. 

We will do whatever it takes so that no one feels excluded from the Lord’s Table, even in this time of potential pandemic. We aren’t acting this way out of germophobia, but out of deep and abiding love for God’s people, and for the power contained within the sacrament of communion. Now more than ever, we need this gift of Christ, and we need each other.

See you at the Lord’s Table!

Ashes, Interviews, and the UMC

Over my years of ministry, I have learned that Ash Wednesday is one of the holiest and most profound holidays for a pastor. The very act of smudging ashes on a person creates moments of great humanity. There are the practical aspects of the act, such as navigating glasses, hairstyles, and the way a little bit of ash can go a really long way on a human face. These details pale in comparison to the real power of the ashes, which has everything to do with the people themselves.

Speaking the words “remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return” to people whose burdens you know well is hugely affecting. Speaking those same words to persons about whom you haven’t got a clue reminds a pastor that God’s grace isn’t reliant on the pastor at all.

Tell your own child as you smudge ashes on them, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return,” and you’ll be unable to parent in the same way again. (At least through dinnertime.) Ditto for spouses. You will see the people you love most with new eyes when the ashes on your thumb match the ashprint on their foreheads.

More than once, I have looked into the eyes of a parishioner while saying those words, and both of us have known with certainty that before the year is out I’ll be saying “ashes to ashes, dust to dust” over them in a cemetery. The raw, aching honesty of those moments remains a part of me.

The ashes are only the first stop. Directly behind me and my bowl of ashes is the Lord’s table, where the body and blood of Christ await. After all, Christ himself knew all about ashes and death. The deepest ash heap is nothing compared to the grace and hope found in Christ, and we cannot receive the ashes without receiving the gift of bread and cup and hope.

I can't help but look at my last week through the lens of Ash Wednesday. Some of you may be aware that I’ve been endorsed as a candidate for a different position come July.  As part of that process, I was blessed to participate in a wide variety of conversations (okay, well, "interviews") last week with a whole bunch of people who are working diligently for the future of the UMC.

I am deeply appreciative of all of their hard work, because we’ve got to get this crucial moment in the life of our denomination right. But on this Ash Wednesday, I’ll have the responsibility and privilege of speaking to my people about the realities of their souls. When they come forward for the ashes, their main concern in those moments will not be on the future of the UMC. Their focus this night will be inevitably on weightier issues of mortality, faith, and hope. Their gaze will be over my shoulder to the life-giving communion elements awaiting them.

“Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”  Once you’ve heard that, nothing else matters more than the words, “The body and blood of Christ, given for you.” For all of us working towards a renewed UMC, my hope and prayer this Ash Wednesday is simply that the body of the UMC may continue to be the body of Christ, broken yet life-giving, for an ash-smudged, hurting world.