A pastor – at best -
is a spiritual friend. He (or she) has many more roles, of course. A pastor is
a general practitioner of all things ecclesiastical, the religious equivalent
of a primary care physician. (Although sometimes it feels more like an
emergency room physician.) The pastor’s most important role is to accompany
people along their spiritual journey and give guidance when needed.
Some call it spiritual direction or being a spiritual advisor.
To that end in the 1990’s I received training as a spiritual director by the
Shalem Institute for Spiritual Formation in Washington, DC. But every pastor
does this job, for better or worse. A pastor is supposed to help people connect
with God.
As I see it, the first step in helping people walk with God is
to get people to stop running away from God. This idea is opposed to the conventional
wisdom of American spirituality, which says that people are spiritual seekers. The
“seeker-friendly” megachurch movement is based on the premise that people are on
a spiritual quest.
The assumption is that people are spiritually searching. They
are inwardly driven to look for purpose, truth, and meaning. They search
inwardly and outwardly, in religion and spirituality, in Eastern Religion,
Western Religion and no religion. They search in material things and in
relationships for the wholeness that comes only from God.
That is not my experience. I think that people are running
from God. As Francis Thompson’s described his own life in The Hound of Heaven:
I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
I fled Him,
down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears
I hid from
Him….
People run from God, and they run from themselves. They are
afraid to see who they really are and who God really is. That is why we construct
religions and philosophies – to protect us from God and ourselves.
People intuitively know that if they discovered their own
true nature, they would come face to face with the image of God. It is a short
step from there to God. So like Adam and Eve in Eden, we hide from God, from
one another, and from ourselves. So I encourage people to stop playing
hide-and-seek.
Have the courage to be present with the omnipresent God. Forsake
all pretenses, take off all masks, and let down all psychological defenses. Take
off the disguise. We aren’t really fooling anyone anyway, least of all ourselves.
Certainly not God.
Stop and be silent. Let us ignore the inner chatter which
tries to distract us from our goal, and simply wait upon God. That is all it
takes. All it takes is a sincere heart and an open mind. If one is honest
enough, open enough, and persistent enough, the self-delusions fall away, and God
appears … as Friend.
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