Theology of Pastoral Care

Priests and Pastoral Care Words are strange. They can make my skin crawl. They can excite me. They can cause hope or fear or confusion or the intense desire to run away and follow Jonah into the belly of a whale. Priest has always been such a word for me. I refuse to consider it or to wear it. If God called me to be a priest, I would gladly become fish food rather than to assume that calling. Worse, as a woman, it excludes me and priestess is meant for crazy pagans who love nature but don’t believe in God. Forget it all. I will never live a life described by the term priest. Or so has been my visceral reaction to that word in the past.

Words are also strange because their meaning can change when studied, when experienced, when we stop to take a new look at the word and at the world it lives in. Lately, I’ve seen priest in a new light and, suddenly, like Jonah who eventually went to Nineveh, I’m willing to be a priest or, more accurately, a priestess. A priest is the one who presides over the Eucharist. More specifically to the topic of pastoral care, the priest is one who lives a Eucharistic life with her people. The Eucharistic life reenacts the salvific drama of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The Eucharistic life is marked by reconciliation – of people to God, of people to each other, and of people to creation. It is dedicated to telling and living the story of redemption and is a marker of God’s crescendoing Kingdom. If this is priesthood, if this is the vocation of a priestess, I will gladly go to Nineveh.

Priests have many roles: They are agents of connectivity and reconciliation.¹ They administer worship and care for the temple.² They discern God’s vision for the world and for specific communities.³ Priests are teachers⁴ and healers.⁵ Finally, priests are keepers of the story. Priests tell and live the story in ways that lead and that reveal the crescendoing Kingdom. Their stories are tell history in liturgical form, uniting the rhythms of the past with the tumult of the present. To priests, the story is always one of Christ’s victory in our time. Finally, priests tell the story with the constant backdrop of the resurrection.⁶

Each of these priestly roles gives new light and life to the word priest. Of all these priestly roles, the connective/reconciliatory is the most pertinent for pastoral care and so will be the one that we explore. Over the next few pages, we will both academically and personally explore my life and ministry as a priest of Eucharist-life and tri-fold reconciliation.

The Eucharistic life of a priest is primarily reconciliatory. The Eastern Orthodox tradition views the ordained priest as a special relational entity.⁷ Christ, as a priest, was inseparably connected to God and to humanity. ⁸ I then, as a priestess, must be a relational entity: connected to God, fellow humanity, and to God’s creation. Gnuse writes, "Throughout the biblical text priests are defined not according to what they do but by what they are - people who live in the divine presence."⁹ Second, as a priest, I must be connected to community. Craddock writes that priesthood is "clearly community and not individual [designation]."¹⁰ Priests, then, live reflexively between God and humanity, bringing the two together. Herschel Hobbs depicts this as the primary definition of the priesthood: "A priest was one who stood between God and humans in order to bring them together."¹¹

A third realm of connective living for the priest is to God’s creation. This is not a designation of connectivity found in scripture. I believe this is because never before in history have we seen such enmity between humanity and creation. We have become separate and abusive to God’s world. God’s stewardship commandment in Genesis¹² is meant to be observed; it is, today, is a highly pertinent call. The term priest, today, can benefit from the connotation priestess held for me as a child. A priestess cares for, celebrates, and invites others to celebrate creation and to live in harmony and unity with God’s created world. When I recycle or ride the bus or take a hike in the Cascades or grow organic basil in my backyard, I do so as a priestly action. My life as a preist is not only rooted in my connection to God and to community, but in my connection and care for God’s world.

The priest, as a relational entity, does not only live in relationship to God, people and creation – she invites others into this holistic life of connection. As a priest, I listen to the hearts and stories of others. I listen to where they are connecting with God and where there is disconnection. As a relational entity, I am constantly looking and listening for ways to build bridges where there are caverns and to walk with people across these bridges.

Further, as a priest, my life and ministry invites reconciliation and connection between people. I become and expert in conflict management; I am willing to stand knee-deep in the mud and muck of human strife. I am like the word “and;” I stand between separated people, linking them together. For example, tonight I met some homeless people living under the I-5 over-pass, just a few blocks from my house. Knowing that my community wanted to celebrate Easter morning by blessing a homeless community, I invited them to Easter breakfast. This is a priestly, connective role. This is pastoral care.

This pastoral care of connection, in a global world, must stretch beyond the local sphere. Having my church watch Invisible Children and begin working with them for the healing and hope of children in Northern Uganda is a priestly act. Telling stories of specific people across the globe; uniting with other faith communities in the vastness of the world; knowing the state of the Iraq war and the plight of the Dalit in India – these are all priestly activities.

Another aspect of this connection that cannot be over-looked, though it often is, is connecting people to themselves. How is a person in division? How is she hating herself? How is he not seeing or hearing himself? How is she bifurcated between body, soul, mind, and spirit? These are also areas where a I, as a priest, must learn to bring reconciliation and connection.

The third type of connection is to the world. As a priest, my calling is to invite my community to plant trees. It is church to go for walks in the woods. Pastoral care is looking at the vastness of the starry summer sky. It is reconciliation to stand with our feet in the crashing tide. This, too, is the life of the Eucharistic life of the priest.

So you see, the word priest, that once meant separation and difference has come to mean dynamic connection and a life of reconciliation. As a priest serves Eucharist on a Sunday morning (or Sunday evening in my case) she is doing something more than one of her many tasks, she is presenting the symbol she lives into. As the priest walks in the woods with one of her community members or invites people to a time of body prayer or sits with a warring husband and wife, she is saying to them: “This is the body of Christ, broken for you; and this is the blood of Christ the cup of salvation. Eat and be made whole.” This is the priesthood I long to live.

Bibliography

Craddock, Fred B. First and Second Peter and Jude. Lousiville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 1995,

Dozeman, Thomas B. 2005. "The priestly vocation." Interpretation 59, no. 2: 117-128

Gnuse, Robert. 2005. "A royal priesthood: literary and intertextual perspectives on an image of Israel in Exodus 19.6." Catholic Biblical Quarterly 67, no. 3: 487-488

Hayward, C T R. 2004. "Priesthood in ancient Israel." Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 28, no. 5: 52-52, 52

Hobbs, Herschel H. You are Chosen: The priesthood of all believers. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1990

Karkkainen, Veli-Matti. An Introduction to Ecclesiology: Ecumenical, historical & global perspectives. Downers Grove, Ill, 2002

Manson, T W. Ministry and Priesthood: Christ's and ours. Richmond, Va.: John Knox Press, 1958, 58