Comfortable with the Dessert Days

"I'm decades past my salad days, and even past the main course: maybe I'm in my cheese days -- sitting atop the lettuce leaves on the table for a while now with all the other cheese balls, but with much nutrition to offer, and still delicious. Or maybe I'm in my dessert days, the most delicious course. Whatever you call it, much of the stuff I used to worry about has subsided -- what other people think of me, and of how I am living my life. I give these things the big shrug. Mostly. Or at least eventually. It's a huge relief."

(Anne Lamott, Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith, p. 173)

I do not say this proudly. And yet there is no embarrassment, either. I have managed to be included in an internet listserv group of colleagues who are commendably passionate about their topic. They write -- continuously, it often seems -- and they pose questions; they recommend resources and they exude seriousness and devotion and faithful determination. Except for that crack about the volume of their posting, nothing said here is meant to imply criticism. I admire them. Indeed -- and here is the part that feels odd to say -- I remember when I was one of them.

I remember attending a conference several months after graduating from seminary and reconnecting with several of my classmates. Some months now out in the "real world," we reflected together on what we had experienced. Generally, we were happy and committed to what we were doing. But we had frustrations -- and some evaporation of what could have been the naive conscientiousness of beginning ministry.

Returning home and mentioning this gathering to a colleague, he asked what we had shared with each other. "We commiserated that we had spent all this time in seminary wrestling with, learning about, dreaming into some comprehension of what the church is called to be, and then we get out into the church and discover not only that the church isn't what it is called to be -- that part didn't surprise us -- but that no one in the church seems to care. That part has been hard." "Yes," my colleague responded, "how do we communicate that to the seminary?" I replied, "We were wondering how we communicate that to the church!"

But years have passed. And it's not that I no longer care -- I do, at least as passionately as I did in the midst of that conversation. It's just that having those conversations doesn't get me out of bed any longer. They are important discussions, and I am glad that my friends on the internet are having them. But I have yet to enter the fray. It just gives me no sizzle.

It may be because I am older, although I don't think that fully explains it. I could have become cynical, and there probably is something to that. I have given up on some of the idealisms I once tried to shove down the throat of this committee or that board. I have less optimism about the salvific effects of this strategy or that innovation. It could, I suppose, be burnout, but I don't feel burned out. I feel joyful, humbly grateful for the opportunity to stretch my soul in the direction of God's imagination.

Finally, I think I've simply relaxed in these dessert days of my life and life work. The manifold ways the church continues to disappoint doesn't distress me nearly as much as it used to, at least in part because I have gained a deeper appreciation for the ways the church, in subtler and less obtrusive ways -- in the person of countless and precious individuals I have the privilege of visiting in the hospital, attending as they die, celebrating with as they marry, gasping with as they emerge from baptismal waters, and arguing with at Board Meetings -- actually does thrive as a sign, a foretaste, and an instrument of God's coming reign.

Grateful. Humbled. Sometimes -- often even -- inspired. Imagine that.

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