Sermons by Bishop Paul V. Marshall
Sermon at the Chrism Mass
By Bishop Paul V. Marshall
April 1, 2004Fellow Fooles: One of the most important lessons of our recent clergy retreat is that there is among us a priceless depth of collegiality. Mutual affection can, I suppose, be feigned in a 90-minute Bible study, but it is almost impossible to fake over several days in a monastery, and I am proud of how the vast majority of clergy of this diocese have stayed connected to each other despite our variety of circumstance and opinion.
I am heartened that most of us have honored St. Paul’s injunction never to say, “I have no need of you.” Beyond that, I am moved by how many of you have taken this a level deeper and have not given in to the darker, subtler, temptation to say, “You have no need of me,” for to give in to that temptation may in fact do more damage. Most of us know that we are not free to take our ecclesial marbles and go home because they aren’t our marbles and it isn’t our home; ordained ministry, even more than the real estate, is something we hold in trust. So thank you, as the saying goes, for being you. With all my heart.
Some members of our community are recovering from sickness or surgery, and need our prayers. Some cannot attend today because of acute illness. I also ask you to remember Frank and Connie Sefchick especially, as Connie’s recovery from surgery is being quite complicated. On the other side, it is also a rare joy to know that in the last few months two colleagues, David Jones and Joe D’Acetis, have each celebrated fifty years of ordained ministry, and continue to be blessings to God’s people. With you, I congratulate them and thank God for them.
To our task: Parish clergy are often large screens onto whom people in churches project their personal stuff. Bishops are widescreens onto which people project the stuff that won’t fit on the local clergy’s screen, and the clergy sometimes avail themselves of the opportunity to do a little projecting onto the bishop, too—or so I am told. Deacon, priest, or bishop, it is draining to be the person on whom other people put their life’s issues, especially when those underlying facts very seldom will be the topic of conversion, as you know. This somewhat daily drain underscores the importance of gatherings like this one to keep us connected with each other and to help keep us focused on the sacredness and possibility of our call.
This came into sharp relief earlier this week when someone I visited in the hospital asked me, “if you had known what this bishop job would really be like, would you have taken it?” I make bold that you have been asked that too about your ministry, and perhaps you have even asked yourself just that question about your work and life.
Now there is a mystery here. On the one hand, my answer to the question, if you had known what it would be like would you have taken up this work, is a clear, concise, and simple: “No,” for all sorts of reasons, a few of them even respectable. But the mystery enters because at the same time, my answer is also, “That is why I am glad I did not know what it would really be like—after all, courting rituals are a matter of both attraction and deception, but the result is nonetheless valuable if the species is to survive.” So the bottom line for me is, “No, and I’m glad I didn’t know, or I would not be doing something that I find to be important and useful.” We who do this ministry are, aren’t we, all caught up in something that is beyond the ordinary borders of pain and pleasure? The dollars are not there, the prestige is very long gone, a lot of people don’t think we work, and mistrust abounds. Nonetheless, we can affirm that there still is the real though quiet pleasure of doing one’s duty, the subtle pleasure of being of use to God’s people, the refined pleasure of doing what is right because it is right, and the secret pleasure of learning to hear the occasional reactivity of others as a kind of applause.
Pleasure and satisfaction; satisfaction and pleasure: whether you lean towards Freud or not, most of us will agree that we are motivated or energized to some extent by satisfaction or pleasure. I have come to realize though, that there are some quiet pleasures of which everyone needs to be suspicious. This realization came to me at a meeting where Bishop Griswold used a phrase somewhat in passing that convicted me so thoroughly and instantaneously, that I’m not sure what else he had to say (a good gets you to think). The expression was, “certain dark pleasures,” which I immediately heard as a kind of P.D. James title, “Certain dark pleasures of the soul.” I hated his naming that—so much that I warned him that I will now originate the phrase. He responded by saying ok, and he would henceforth quote me.
I will originate the expression “certain dark pleasures of the soul” now because I became in that instant utterly convinced that those who strive for a virtuous and useful life, as we do here, are by the nature of what we do for a living always tempted to certain dark pleasures, some ungodly attitudes that have a slight thrill or a warming comfort to them in a job where other pleasures are not abundantly available.
Some of the dark pleasures are easy to name: Why did the priest cross the road? The bishop told him not to. But let’s go a bit deeper today.
I think of the dark pleasure of primarily identifying self as wounded. We are all wounded, and most of us have spent money and time working on the various issues of our childhood and early life. Those wounds will many of them never go away, so we can work to contain them and manage them, or we can give our lives over to them. We might even ask others to define us in terms of our wounds. Whenever we are challenged, we can point to our wounds as though they were holy stigmata, and the payoff is that we can just excuse ourselves from some responsible adult things we’d rather not do.
Similarly, there is a certain dark pleasure in holding on to the perception that one has been wronged. An indescribable sweetness comes when one senses being for once totally in the right and unjustly treated that is hard to repel. It feels seductively good to be in the right this time, to be unmistakably the victim, not to have to admit ambiguities, and thus to be in position where rage or utter repudiation are no longer frightening and seem to have a justified target—a target who may, after all, remind us of someone else in our lives if we think about it.
There is a certain dark pleasure in not forgiving, in being estranged, isn’t there, but the pleasure again is just endorphins that are meant to help us survive pain, not true righteousness. There is a pleasure in cherishing resentments that is primal, and hard to overcome. It worked in the primordial forest, but now it is a vestigial place where demagogues and cranks get their start—for them the higher function of perspective has vanished.
The darkest pleasure of all is the pleasure of failure, although some degree of failure is a part of every life. That pleasure of failure sometimes appears as the sense that one is unfit or awash in what is after all, undoable; the sense that the distractions outweigh the ministry. The sense that one is not, after all, the kind of spiritual guide that one’s various certificates suggest can be the beginning of a kind a succulent remorse. Jude the Obscure meets Sisyphus. Like all the dark pleasures, this has a payoff, and here it is a payoff of excusing, perhaps even justifying, withdrawal and inaction.
I name these pleasures in the hopes that having been named they will be exposed and never feel quite so good again, but do so more in the belief that there is something that can be done, a place of bright joy to turn to when we decide to walk away from the dark pleasures.
At the same time, if there is a troubled child sobbing—or screaming—somewhere inside us, it makes some sense at a Chrism mass to ask what healing oil, or even what oil of gladness, there is for our adult selves to apply to that child.
If there were ever a person torn between the realities of our existence and the highness of our calling, it was pious George Herbert. Many of his poems reflect on the tension between who he was called to be and who he felt himself actually to be, not a surprising thing in a parish priest. In the poem called “Aaron” after the great and glorious high priest of Israel, Herbert reminds us of the alternative to the dark pleasures of ministry. He imagines himself vesting for the liturgy, knowing that soon he will say, “Let thy ministers be clothed with righteousness.” He starts with the high goal every recent ordinand knows.
Holiness on the head,
Light and perfections on the breast,
Harmonious bells below, raising the dead
To lead them unto life and rest.
Thus are true Aarons drest.[...there is immediate contrast with Aaron’s head and heart…]
Profaneness in my head,
Defects and darkness in my breast,
A noise of passions ringing me for dead
Unto a place where is no rest.
Poor priest thus am I drest.[…so a third head and heart are introduced…]
Only another head
I have, another heart and breast,
Another music, making live not dead
Without whom I could have no rest:
In him I am well drest.Christ is my only head,
My alone only heart and breast,
My only music, striking me ev'n dead;
That to the old man I may rest,
And be in him new drest.[…All three persons blend in the resolution where who he is and who he is not a mystically blended and accepted, which is salvation…]
So holy in my head,
Perfect and light in my dear breast,
My doctrine tun'd by Christ, (who is not dead,
But lives in me while I do rest)
Come people; Aaron's drest.We dare to renew ordination vows today because we have another head in whom we rest. Like all other Christians, our basic haberdashery move is to put on Christ, who makes us alive and makes us sing. Herbert calls us to rest in that, and allow ourselves to feel like, not tragic existential heroes, but musical instruments whom Christ tunes (what a rich way to describe the spiritual life), musical instruments on whom just one theme is played in many variations. Herbert’s call is to remember that to the extent that we think our ministry is about us, we will be frustrated and often in deep pain. To the extent that we can relax into the foolishness letting it be about Christ there is offered a passage from dark pleasure to bright joy, and Aaron appears in finery that Wippels could never imagine, and the instruments all play together in wonderful collusion.
There is however, an element of choice about this.
[silence for reflection]
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