All Saints Day

I wonder if there's not just a bit of irony that, seemingly with the whole world blogging away, I finally decide to do this on All Saints Day. I chose the name Pastor in the Raw because, first of all I'm a pastor. I've no doubt that, as I pursue this endeavor, I'll spend a lot of time reflecting about what that means, but for the moment, the memory of the impact of the movie A Man Called Peter had on my adolescent psyche floods my mind.

The story recounts the memories of a wife (Catherine Marshall) about her husband, Peter Marshall. The movie was made in 1955, which ought to tell you something about how any subject is romanticized, and it certainly did romanticize pastoral ministry. Peter Marshall was the pastor of the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church in Washington, D. C. and also served as chaplain of the United States Senate just after World War II. And, the Marshall family had a summer home--some place like Cape Cod--I don't remember exactly. As a kid growing up in a decidedly Southern Baptist family, feeling like our religious beliefs put us on the fringe of society, the movie was a breath of fresh air to me. I think that there has always been something within me that pulled me toward pastoral ministry, and in that movie--in my adolescent naivite--I believed that it was possible to become a pastor and be respected and enjoy all the perks of the corporate world. Wrong!

But, more than all the material things that Peter Marshall's story seemed to promise, I totally bought into the vision of the "perfect pastor" that only a widow could contrive. I am not Peter Marshall. In fact, I have great doubt that Peter Marshall was the Peter Marshall that his widow remembered. And yet, me and a large part of the rest of Christendom has, somewhere down deep in our psyches, this idea that all pastors ought to be the mythical Peter Marshall.

And so, with that totally unrealistic expectation of pastoral ministry, I need a forum where I can be in the raw. To write, explore, vent, contemplate, rage, celebrate, confess who I am as a pastor.

I began talking about the irony of this being All Saints Day. The irony for me is that, when I think about All Saints Day, I don't think about its historical context coming out of the Roman Catholic Church. I think about what the writer of Hebrews calls a "great crowd of witnesses." All those people who, like the Apostle Paul have "fought the good fight, ...finished the race, ...kept the faith." All those people who finally got to meet God in the raw--all the pretenses of this earthly existence laid bare. And I think about all the energy I put into pretense and the freedom that great cloud of witnesses enjoys. Maybe I'll get a little bit more of that freedom doing this.