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My name is Alan Cole. I serve as academic dean and professor of pastoral care here at Austin Seminary and it's my privilege to introduce this year's Westervelt lecturer . The EC Westervelt lectures were established in 1949 by

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mr and mrs Edwin Flatow of Corpus Christi in honor of Mrs Flatow's parents and were later increased by a gift from mr franklin. Flateau. Edwin flack does son this year's lecturer. The reverend dr M.

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Craig Barnes is a distinguished pastor and scholar who's wise voice and steady leadership in both the church and in theological education has never been more needed. Dr Barnes serves as senior pastor of the shady Side Presbyterian Church

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in Pittsburgh pennsylvania and also as the robert. McNeely , Professor of leadership and ministry at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary , he's a member of the board of trustees of Princeton Theological Seminary, Editor at large for the christian

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century, and he serves on the board of advisors for the Holy Land christian ecumenical Foundation. Dr Barnes holds the Bachelor of Arts in History from the King's College, the master of divinity from Princeton Theological Seminary

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and the PhD in history of Christianity from the University of Chicago, where he studied under the supervision of the great martin E. Marty raised on Long Island in 1981. He was ordained in the presbyterian Church

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usa and he has served congregations in colorado, Wisconsin Washington, D. C. And now pennsylvania, a prolific writer. Dr Barnes is the author of several books and articles that center on the struggle of

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contemporary people making sense of God's grace. His published books include yearning when God interrupts, hustling God sacred thirst, extravagant mercy Searching for home, which was named book of the year by Christianity today in 2003

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and most recently the pastor as minor poet. He is married to Dawn Hess Barnes. They have three Children and two grandsons. I have learned from craig Barnes for many years and I have no doubt that

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all of us will learn from him in these lectures Craig, Welcome to Austin Seminary and thank you for being with us. Yeah, thank you for the invitation to be a part of this distinguished a series

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of lectures. It's a great honor and my life to get to be uh with you with this wonderful seminary um with tom and Lillian sharing the podium with them at home, we have a cleaning lady named

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Grace. I can't tell you how much fun I've had with this over the years. Grace will take care of it. I keep saying this morning, I got a text from my wife saying that she

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didn't have time to chat on the phone because Grace was coming and she was hustling around getting ready for her arrival. I test texted her back that it's theologically inconsistent to hustle to get ready for grace.

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She then texted me back, asking what the greek is for european in the butt. So it's good to be in Austin today, knowing that Grace is abounding at home right now. This morning, we

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were all treated to a brilliant survey of the changes that have occurred in the presbyterian church and the mainline denomination by by tom wonderfully insightful. I want to focus on one of those changes which is in pastoral

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identity and to make some suggestions as to how pastors might speak into much of the despair that is lying around out there these days. We um Willimon has noted that the pastor's identity comes from above and below

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. He writes about this eloquently in his wonderful book called Pastor. The Pastors Identity comes from above and below. What he means by this is that the call of the reigning christ must be echoed by the

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congregation that lives in communion with christ that goes down so well. It sounds so right because it ought to be right. However, it assumes that the members of the church are all paying attention to the

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call of Heaven themselves. He assumes that the members of the church want nothing less than for their pastor to help them understand their mystical union. And christ assumes a lot. It is precisely because people do

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not get this high calling to their lives that they need to be in church and that we have pastors . If everybody understood their union and christ, frankly , a lot of us would be out of work

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. However, I find that when people Come to the hospital of church with their sin six souls, they bring with them many other agendas that pull them away from the reigning christ. Every day. Today

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, the pastor confronts a congregation that is steeped in a consumerist culture, which has never taught them to question the values of being a consumer, but only to question if they are a good consumer, which

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means getting what you want when you want for your dollar, and when it comes to church, it's often literally a dollar. The pastor, they assume has no higher calling than to create happy, satisfied

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customers. Even the various agendas that parishioners have for pastoral identity that appears spiritual on the surface when added together, create a rather complicated job description for the pastor today. Some want their pastor to be an

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extrovert who loves to hang out in the halls of the church and has a gift for the chat. Others want an introvert who is not intimidated by spending long hours writing profound sermons. Others want a pastor

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who is at ease with Children. Still others a pastor who loves to hang out in the nursing homes . Some want pastor to climb up in the pulpit because they're dying to hear about justice. They're sitting

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right next to somebody who's hoping that the pastor will speak about being the beloved of God, someone a pastor who really knows how to run a church. Others want a pastor who knows all about empowering lay

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leaders, which frequently means running the church and then making it look like lay leaders are doing the proliferation of professional literature that it's my job in part to keep up on about pastoral ministry. All offer competing

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identities as well for the pastor today and it's only served to exacerbate the contemporary confusion so exactly what the pastor is supposed to be doing. Some authors assume that the pastor is at heart, a therapist or

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family systems specialist. Others assume that the pastor is a religious entrepreneur dying to build a megachurch In her community that has 800 citizens. By contrast, others speak of the pastor as a mystic wannabe, all

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of whose problems will vanish if they just check in for the monastery for a day. Despite the fact that you can't actually be a monk for a day , others think of the pastor as a community organizer

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, others as the ceo of a non profit organization and the list goes on and on recently, some pastors have been writing to each other as if we are all a pathological danger, a scandal waiting to

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happen, the legacy of which is to make pastors afraid of their congregations and themselves confronted with all of these competing identities. We understand what Stanley how Abbas means when he calls the contemporary pastor a quivering mass

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of availability. When we dig into the deeper historic traditions that we have, we find far more helpful and enduring models for the identity of pastor. Some of you who are here, who are pastors will

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draw from the biblical image of being a shepherd who has sacrificed his or her alternative plans for life in order to devote the rest of your years to carrying for the Lord's sheep. Others may be drawn more

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to the great commission image being a witness to the work of the holy spirit in the congregation. Those who strongly affirm our union in christ will call the pastor a profit or priest only of course, to

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the degree that we participate in the life of christ , the true priest and prophet. And of course all pastors are centered and the identity of being ministers of word and sacrament. These pastoral identities are ordained

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, their enduring, they're healthy. They're certainly redemptive . I want to offer yet another image for pastoral identity that I've been working on for a number of years now and that is the pastor as the poet

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. To be clear, I'm presenting this not as a normative or even a preferred image. Don't put this on your business cards or anything like that, just trying to get at what pastors do. And

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it is another historic and biblical description, the calling of those who have been blessed with the vision that allows them to see the truth that always lies beneath the reality of things like a poet. Pastors see

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the despair and the heartache as well as the beauty and the miracle that lies just beneath the very thin veneer of what we dare to call ordinary and like poets, pastors described this in ways that are recognized

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not only in the mind, but far more importantly in the soul. I think that to be called into pastoral ministry necessarily means to be given this poetic vision. It's just part of the gift package that

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spirit gives us. Some have cultivated the vision more than others, but all pastors had this gift. The biblical poets inspired by the Holy Spirit, have expressed the fundamental struggles of all human life. May

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describe this differently. I would say alienation from God and the desperate search for redemption. Walter Brueggemann has demonstrated how the profits took on the role of being national poets, and they carried on both sides of

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the conversation between the alienated people and the God who yearned for them. In the new testament, the Apostle paul provides the most hopeful stands of the Gospel Son. It presenting jesus christ as the restoration of

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our alienated communion with God in him, we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our sins according to the riches of the grace that he lavished upon us. So we have these biblical poets who

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have written words of eternal worth, that We can spend our entire lives trying to execute and make sense of for particular people in particular places. But in addition to the poetry of scripture, the church also

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has 2000 years of historic theological poets who have drawn from this fundamental biblical drama, confessional insights about what life looks like with and without God. For example , at Tunisia's the early church father reminded us that

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God created all things out of nothing, even the dust of the ground that God used to create humanity was created by God, which means that all of our life and all of our being is derived from

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God. So, Athanasiou says to seek to derive an identity from a source different from God actually results not in becoming different, but only in returning to nothingness. Because apart from God, that's all that's

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out there nothingness. When I left seminary and began my minister, I assume that people would come and fill the pews of church because they were caught up with the great existential questions of life and we're not

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in not about it. And we're looking for the word of God to unravel those knots. It took me a while, a short while to figure out that's not what they're thinking about in the pews After

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doing this now for 30 years, I can tell you what they're thinking about nothing. You're thinking about how much laundry they have waiting for them at home . You're thinking about what they're gonna wear to the

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party. They're thinking about that, they can get the report done. That's due monday morning. They're thinking about what was that woman thinking about? two pews up when she bought that dress? Nothing.

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Which is why we don't just stand up and start giving the word we have call to worship. We have prayers of confession. We've had to remind them of the crisis there in before we can speak into

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it. Well, in contrast to our biblical poets , in contrast to the historic poets like a tenacious , the pastor poet has the unique calling of trying to make sense of these holy words in light of

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the dust and grit of parish life. And unlike those whom society has traditionally revered as poets, whose vision of deep mysteries are nurtured through quiet if not complete isolation. The pastor poet lives with a noisy

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and crowded soul. I think that's central to what it means to be ordained is to open the doors of one soul to the complexities, the pathos dreams , even the sense of the those that the pastor

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has vowed to serve and vowed to love by the way, always been striking to me that in the Presbyterian church you can join it without vowing to love it, but you can't be a pastor without vowing

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to love it. It's just in the package of valves because we love it. We take all of it in and we carried around in our own souls . At the same time, we struggle to be

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even more attentive to the presence of God. That is not always apparent. This means that the pastor's soul becomes a crucible in which sacred visions that we gather from our study of scripture, from our devotional

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life, from our prayer life. These sacred visions are mixed together with the common and at times even profane experiences of the congregation and it's out of that sacred mix. The pastors find their deep poetry not

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just for the pulpit but also for making holy sense out of the confusion and the ordinary routines of the congregation. Pastors days are filled with committee meetings that go on and on forever and accomplished little. You

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get frustrated with that and decide you're gonna go back to being a pastor. So you leave the church building, you jump in your car, you drive to the other side of town to make a hospital

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visit, only to discover that this person er was just checked out, which means you're not getting credit for this one. You then go back driving back to the church trying to in your mind work through

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the confirmation class. You have that night knowing that the kids in the confirmation class cannot look cool unless they look bored, which does not bode well for your lesson on the trinity, you have counseling sessions

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with people who come to see you to tell you how much they dislike their job, that they have to keep because they needed to afford a lifestyle that they don't really like either. And you're the only

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one who seems this as being odd. People who come to you wanting you to tell them what the will of God is. So you pray with them , they come back. They ask you again,

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what is the will of God? You pray with them some more. Finally, they figure out why pastoral counseling is free. Mm mhm. Because you're not a sage, we have funerals where we do

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all that we can to fight back our grief. Congregations often miss this. That near the end of a person's life, the pastor probably spends more time with that person than anyone else in the church.

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And we are missing this person while presiding over the funeral. We're fighting back the grief. We have weddings where well, mostly we're fighting back the photographer , we have conflicts with people who just won't leave

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the church. Mhm. They keep threatening to leave , but they don't they're not going to leave. And then we have the relentless return of Sundays and throughout all, the Attentive Pastor is constantly spinning the

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poetry, helping the congregation to see that there is a sacred subtext to their lives. There is more than nothingness now to be very, very clear. I'm not suggesting that we write sermons that rhyme,

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which is just irritating to the congregation by the way , or in talking about the pastor's poet. I'm not saying that we try to end the meeting of the Board of trustees by whipping out a few lyrical

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lines to make sense of the budget. What I'm saying is simply that with poetic vision, we peer beneath the presenting issue, which is seldom the real issue. Just speaking of poetry, anna logically,

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the pastors know that were never really talking about what we talk about. So we're trying to push to the deeper issues where the gospel is at work. The woman who stops by the door following worship and

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ask you to pray that she makes partner and her law firm because they're voting on that this week. There's someone that you probably know because you've been this woman's pastor for years and you know that she's never

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going to be satisfied even when she becomes partner. And so the pastor starts to pray, she might come to know her real identity in christ, jesus . What would it mean to be anxious about what

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it means to be, not a partner in the firm, but to be anxious about being a christian . It's up to you as the pastor to know the man who comes to come to you to complain

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about the youth group going to Haiti Because he's worried about his 17 year old daughter being in a place that's unsafe and he's talked to the youth director about this and he's still gonna go take the youth group

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to Haiti. It's your job to know that. It doesn't matter. Even if you follow this man's advice and fire the youth director Or if you were to hire a battalion of marines to go with the

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youth group to Haiti, you're not going to resolve this man's issues because he's not really worried about his girl going to Haiti. He's worried about losing this daughter who's 17. And you've watched this happen over

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the years that you've been there as a pastor. You've been worried about this. But he's supposed to lose her. She's supposed to leave home. That's the way it works. It's unnecessary loss. But

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both of these people need the lawyer, the anxious father. There's a pastor, preacher, poet who knows how to do more than just service their fears or respond to their complaints. They need a poet

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who can see beneath the surface to discover the soul that God is afraid of losing. T. S . Eliot has said that every culture needs both major and minor poets. The major poets who Elliot says

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, are few and far between express the great and eternal truths by which humanity live. Elliott says, you don't want to be a major poet. These people do not live balanced lives. They're not easy

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to live around. however, they are consumed by a few lines of poetry that last for eternity. By contrast, minor poets, Elliot says, implicate the truth of major poetry, two particular people in

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particular places. So a major poet in our tradition would include Elijah on Mount Carmel, who screams down through the centuries. How long will you go limping between two opinions that the Lord be God follow him

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or Saint Augustine? Who reminds us that the hearts are restless? Do they come to rest in the oh God, the doctor martin Luther, King Jr , who left behind us? This extraordinary great dream

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of a color blind society. Those are major poets . None of them lived to see their world fully manifested in the souls to which they spoke. It is the major poetry that's eternal. Not the poets

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again. By contrast, pastors are minor poets who's humble calling is to spend their lives making sense of these major lines that come out of our tradition, major poetry that we have learned that has formed us

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and shaped us and molded us lines of poetry that have been a part of our calling. So to be clear, we don't go out and search for the major poetry that we will devote our lives to

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. Whether it's the poetry that searches for us claims our lives. And again, it's part of our discernment of call. You each can right now think about the major lines of biblical and historic poetry that

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have shaped you, molded you. These are part of the lines that make their way into sermons. Over and over again. They help form your sense of message that you're part of the kingdom that you

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hold up. You agree that there are other lines of poetry. But you know these lines, you are a part of them. If you had Billy Graham speaking to you right now and he didn't give

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you the just as I am sermon. Wouldn't you be worried about him? That's his sermon. That's his line of poetry. How many thousands and thousands and thousands of people have been shaped and entered the

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kingdom of God because he was faithful to his line of poetry. But if you had, let's see Jim Wallis speaking to you, you don't want Wallace to give you the justice. I am sermon.

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No, you want him to talk about social justice and and the political engagement. That's his message. But it was Richard Foster who was speaking to you and he didn't speak about prayer. You'd think he

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was in trouble with God. I mean, that's that's what Foster does. And similarly, you have lines of poetry that have shaped you molded you again . You don't shop for them. They come shopping

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for you when I was a lost, abandoned And very frightened 17 year old kid living by myself and facing the dark night of the soul too early in life. I heard poetry that saved my life if

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you're not for I have redeemed you, I've called you by name and you are mine. When you pass through the waters, I will be with you and the rivers will not overwhelm you. You walk

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through the fire, you will not be burned. The flame will not consume you because you are precious and honored in my sight. And I love you At 17. I didn't know what I would do

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with those words, but I knew that I was going to spend the rest of my life with them . And I have, I can't tell you how many times I've used those words at the graveside or

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a hospital bed pulpit and counseling those words just implanted themselves in me and grew and grew. You have a very similar story. It's one of the reasons you're here today. In order for pastor preachers to

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refine their skills at speaking into the deep issues of the soul today, I think it's important that we learned not only from the major poets of bible and our theological tradition, but we also learn from literary

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artist novelist, Those who construct sentences as carefully as the painter applies oil to the canvas. In a society today where words are now plentiful and used recklessly to manipulate to spin facts to pedal things. No

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one really needs were words are now called Spam. The pastor is one of the few persons left in the parishioners life who will still treat the combination of words as if it is the fusion of atoms.

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Pastors believe that put together carefully. Words can do a world of good and when words are not handled with care, they can wreak more havoc than can ever be repaired. No one ever gets over hearing

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. For example, you're not the smart one, You're not the pretty one that's good enough for you . You'll spend the rest of your life trying to get rid of those words haunting them from childhood.

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Words are never cheap to the poet who's very economy of them Depicts the power of each one. On any typical day, a pastor could be in conversation with a couple whose marriage is unraveling or a young

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woman who just realized that the baby she's carrying has down syndrome are several angry elders who are upset with the music director or the leader of the Women's Association who wants to know why the young women won't join

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their circles and they've done the math and have figured out that they're going to outlive the Women's Association and they are heartbroken. All of these conversations call forth the most carefully handled words the pastor has to offer

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. This means that it's actually now a prophetic ministry for the pastor to love words while living in a changing social setting. That values words mostly just as captions beneath far more compelling visual images. Take,

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for example, Nike's wildly successful ad campaigns that presents a variety of very attractive athletes appearing to effortlessly excel at their sport and always at the bottom of these very alluring advertisements, one finds the exact same words

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. Just do it. Not exactly poetry of the soul, not even close to the charismatic message of the gospel, but extremely powerful in shaping the identities of young people who are now bombarded by the message

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of stop thinking and just do just buy the shoes . Will you don't think about it? Don't think at all. Just do think about how much trouble your parishioners get into, because they're not thinking,

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think about it. All of us are very familiar with Carl Bart's middle of the 20th century prescription for pastors to approach their pulpits with the bible in one hand and the newspaper and the other today. However

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, let us remember that people don't read newspapers. So the pastor must know this world created by popular forms of the media. Even again, if it's held only in one hand, even if it's held

00:32:57.970 - 00:33:07.800

at arm's length, you have to know that world , you know that you have to know how to do exit jesus of that world, just as you have to know how to do extra jesus of the

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biblical text and how to make the world of the bible speak to this society that we live in now that is so filled with images that come from a world foreign to scripture. For example, New york

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times essay is Michiko Kakutani has recently called our attention to the new designer despair and media images. She's referring to the popularity of Quentin Tarantino's cool cat killers of Marilyn Manson's adolescent rage of jerry springer, which

00:33:46.360 - 00:34:08.740

she calls South Park with real people. Mhm mm . She's also very worried about the models and the J crew catalog who revealed that sadness is now cool enough to sell blue jeans. When I was a

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kid, we had the Sears and Roebuck catalog. You would open that catalogs. There always be some guy there with selling a flannel shirt look like this . You have a big smile on and they were

00:34:20.540 - 00:34:35.780

goofy. But the point was by the shirt and be happy like me. Now the messages I know you're said, I'm said all the cool people are sad by the genes and be cool too. Oh

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my gosh! What happened? Anyone who's raised a teenager knows that these images are not value neutral. They make powerful e deep idea statements that dare not be assimilated just under the guise of being cool or

00:34:51.460 - 00:35:07.470

entertaining or stylish. These are ideas that are powerful . When my daughter was in high school, we had an assembly of parents and the head of the school trying just to affirm the creativity of the school

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. Said to the parents here at our school, we tell our students there's no such thing as a bad idea now that went down smoothly at first and then I got to be thinking about it. And

00:35:22.170 - 00:35:38.470

then I became really bothered by that and I looked around and realized nobody else was really interested in going into cardiac arrest. Just me. There are no bad ideas. There are some terrible ideas out there

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. And one of the worst ideas I know of is telling my daughter that there are no bad ideas in his book Modern Times. Paul johnson, the historian, has demonstrated how the killing fields of cambodia

00:36:00.130 - 00:36:14.630

began with just a few ideas being tossed around by a small group of grad students at a Parisian cafe . They had been reading Nici and didn't think he went far enough. They took his ideas to an

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extreme and then went back to cambodia, seized power and the genocide unfolded. For many parishioners, the church is the last place and their lives that have the audacity to make judgments between good ideas and bad

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ideas. It falls to the preacher poets to use their biblical theological tradition to make these judgments, including the bad ideas that have emanated from the church. Let us at least be able to all say that

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despair is a bad idea, We dare not swallow it just because it's in style today. The challenge , I think, is for pastors to make these judgments without becoming angry and frightened defenders of the faith

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, Even the most cursory reading of church history reveals if ever there is an institution that does not deserve to persevere to the 21st century, it is ours . But it has by the gracious intervention of God

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who is the only effective defender of the faith. This protects pastors from Messianic illusions, which is just another false identity, that we are tempted to assume . It frees us to fulfill our true mission,

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which is to just speak the inherited truth. But truth never needs to be coerced. It's the truth and as the truth, it's buoyant. You can hold it down for a while, but eventually it

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makes it's way to the surface. So when pastors speak the eternal truth as poets, they are then free to stand and back of the words out of the way, allowing the words themselves to do the

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convicting poetry only appears to be defenseless. Its power resides not in the poet nor in the orthodoxy of the arrangement of the verse, but in the inspired word, word that has the ability to untangle the

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distorted image of God within the human soul. As minor poets hone their craft as I said before, we must learn to do exegesis not only of the sacred text but of the culture around us. I

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think particularly today as culture is inculcating this despair and despair that forces people to turn deaf ears to any poetry that's expressing the way the truth and the life . Every contemporary pastor poet, minor poet now discovers

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this despair wearing a legion of faces. It is the demon that is most difficult to exercise from the congregation. It doesn't matter if it's a distressed rural parish gasping for its last breath and a dying community

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, if it's an urban congregation struggling to justify its continued receipts of redevelopment funds, or if it's a middle class congregation that appears to be thriving in the suburbs or used to thrive in the suburbs, they

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all have members, all of them have members who are just possessed by despair. And I'm telling you , it's not going to go away with a new strategic plan or a weekend officers retreat or a task

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force on despair, nothing less than Words of life from a minor poet will help If these last 30 years of ministry and serving parishes like these has taught me anything. Is that our greatest fear these days

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is that we're stuck with ourselves. A couple celebrating their 20th wedding anniversary, are afraid that they will never get the intimacy back in their marriage. A successful middle management professional feels like a failure because he

00:40:45.360 - 00:41:06.190

can't get his teenage son to talk to him. 50 year old, highly successful woman has just realized that she's hit a glass ceiling and since as far as she's ever going to go at work, so

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she decides she's just going to settle into being comfortable . It's the worst part of despair. It makes you settle for the way it is. Makes you bury your old dreams under layer and layers of strategies

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that help you cope with disappointments, coping with disappointment , That's what a consumer's culture makes possible, distracting ourselves. So is it any wonder that when the pastor then climbs into a pulpit like this and knocks

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herself out to motivate the congregation into authentic concern for the pathos of the world around them. Her words are unable to generate any passion. Passion is the last thing a congregation wants. If it's trying to

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avoid looking deep into its own soul, where all these old hurts and disappointments are still lying around. Instead, I'd rather self medicate on Children's sermons and brain numbing committee meetings. In the words of john

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Updike, westerners have lost whole octaves of passion. A third world woman can still make an inhuman, piercing grieving noise rise from the floor of her soul . But for us, he says, the music

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of life gets pretty thin without the higher and lower octaves loses interest. So it becomes dull and predictable . This is the great danger of living in a sophisticated society that assumes its technology and its wealth have

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taken away the vulnerability out of life. Most of our parishioners do not stay awake at night in their homes, fearful of being invaded by violence, fearful that there would be no food for the Children tomorrow

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. But the pastor knows that beneath the thin veneer of this decent and orderly nothingness is more drama than they may want to see. But eventually one of the lower octaves will break through. It's unavoidable,

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and this is when someone is ready to hear from minor poet. one day a woman is vacuuming her living room floor. She's lost in her thoughts about what it's going to take to make the next deal

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at work. She glances out the window into the backyard, She sees her five year old son clumsily throwing a ball up in the air trying to catch it. She stops vacuum and she just stares at

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him. She doesn't exactly know why, but she cannot stop crying. And she looks at this boy that she loves more than life. An exhausted man is driving home late one night Again. Late one

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night he's coming home from work, gets to a stoplight, cell phone begins to ring. He looks at the number on the phone and he knows immediately what this is about. He remembers that he forgot

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all about his little girl's piano recital. He opens the phone first words are where are you? He apologizes to his daughter. He promises to make it up to her. She seems to accept his apology

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. He hangs up the phone, he looks at himself in the rear view mirror. He's haunted by this question, Where are you? He wonders how he got so lost. Just trying to be a

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good provider. Another man flies into town on an airplane, gets out of the plane, catches a cab and goes to the hospital. He sits beside his dying father who is now in a coma.

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He stares long and hard into the tired old face , remembers how many times his dad asked him to come and see him. There was just never tied . Now he would give anything. I think you

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just tell us dad, you were always there for me. You're a good dad and I love you . But he knows his dad can't hear those words and he never will get to say them. So

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he curses himself and he tries to pray. My point is, these are the people who fill your pews on sunday morning. These are the people who rush into your board meetings on monday night to volunteer

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in vacation bible school in the youth group and to gather for a choir rehearsal on thursday night. If the busy church is just another nonprofit business, it's only contributing to the problem of despair. What these

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people need is a pastor, someone who who sees the subtext of what's going on, Who knows about these stories? They need a pastor. Even a minor poet will do someone aware of the major poetry

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of our sacred text and traditions, but also someone who can see the melancholy of comfortable lives, Someone who's not afraid of the higher and lower octaves of ordinary days, someone who has a vision for the

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penetrating grace of the Holy spirit, always at work just beneath the surface, and then someone who has