How to Grow a Minister, Part 2

I’m Not Alone by Aly Halpert

It would be impossible for me to count how many Catholic priests I have known in my lifetime. There are priests in my family and priests who are family friends, parish priests and diocesan bishops, retired priests and former priests. They’ve been every age and nationality, some kind and some stern, a few super creepy, and some trying to recover from past creepiness. I’ve even gotten high with a priest in his kitchen rectory, right next to the church where I was attending a retreat in high school. He insisted my friends and I call him Padre.

But I’ve never met a Catholic priest who wasn’t desperately lonely. Not one. A few were open enough to admit it, but most you could tell by looking at them. It was their cross to bear. And the solid ones, the steady priests who found meaning in their calling to the priesthood, carried their loneliness as a holy burden. They took it to God and laid it at His feet. And they tried to wear the cross nobly, if not entirely secretly.

This loneliness was supposed to have been solved by the Protestants when Reformation priest Martin Luther married ex-nun Catherine von Bora. Martin and Catherine believed that marriage was a sacrament that would protect the lonely priest from self-destructive remedies (such as getting high with a group of high schoolers.) But the plague of loneliness in clergy can’t be erased by sacraments, however sacred and holy. It is the nature of ministry that isolates. Even a spouse’s love can’t save a minister who has been called and set apart, and who sets themselves apart. And for women who have been socialized to be the caretaker at home as well as at their church, being married and having children only adds to the isolation.

Early on in my sobriety I was introduced to the concepts of ego and self esteem. The beautiful drunks who mentored me often pointed out that my ego was massive—a giant hot air balloon—and my self esteem was almost nil—a teeny tiny pea inside the ballon. I needed to bring these two parts of myself into alignment. No judgment on ego, it is the force that drives our wants and desires and it serves a purpose. But it can be easily inflated and deflated by external factors. Self esteem, on the other hand, is an internal reality that grows slowly, with time, experience, attention and care. It comes from within.

In my experience, the formation process of becoming a minister is an ego machine. It inflates and deflates and creates ego addicts who fly high and crash. Building self esteem is up to the minister to do in their own time. A good deal of ministers don’t tend to this part of themselves, or don’t have the time with all their other responsibilities. And this hurts everyone. The more driven by the highs and lows of ego, the more isolated and lonely, the more prone to burn out and self-destruction.

And congregations don’t help. Many people who find themselves in church are there because they are also isolated and lonely. And it is difficult to trust a minister who is clearly ego-driven and can’t be honest about their struggles. It is difficult to trust when so many ministers have abused their congregations. A minister is supposed to be enlightened, in possession of esoteric knowledge, closer to the Holy, a preacher, teacher, spiritual guru, counselor and unnaturally calm. It’s called “ministerial presence”. And most of the time you have to fake it to make it. But when you fake it, all you do is fool yourself. Everyone else wonders what the heck is actually going on in there. Who is this minister, really?

As a parish minister, I fought against my ego and tried to remember who I was underneath the title. But the models I had of ministry were the lonely Catholic priests of my childhood. My savior complex raged out of control. I was going to do it all, save everyone, and it drove me until I dropped. And the entire time, I didn’t want anyone to know. Certainly not my congregation. I couldn’t even admit it to myself.

Part of being a lonely priest is existing in a hierarchy, where the minister sits on top as the wise one and everyone else is in service to the priest’s vision. To keep control, the priest stays isolated. And he is in service to someone who is in service to someone until you get to the Pope. This is how the hierarchy works.

In progressive religion, most congregations work to undo this hierarchy by participating in shared ministry. The minister holds the spiritual center of the congregation but the process of making decisions is a democratic one. The minister practices “good boundaries” by keeping their personal life separate, so as to serve their congregation’s shared vision most effectively. But still, ministers are often expected to work six days and 60 hours a week, nights and weekends. While operating in a self-imposed cloud of isolation, many ministers have no personal life at all.

“To be a minister, you have to have boundaries of steel,” a mentor once told me. I began to question my call to ministry right then. Boundaries of steel? I didn’t want any part of me to be made of steel. This didn’t resonate with my relationship to the Holy at all. I was much more interested in practicing an authentic ministry, where I could be real and honest. But there were no models for this, only stories of how it had been tried in the past and failed.

Last year the US Surgeon General declared an epidemic of loneliness. In Unitarian Universalism, there is also a parish minister shortage. I can tell you these two things are related. Ministry has always been subject to an epidemic of loneliness. This is the sort of loneliness that takes up residence in one’s heart and constricts from the inside. It hurts and consumes and drains, and the worst part is after a while the minister doesn’t even notice it.

How can congregations nurture a minister? How can ministers nurture themselves? Tend to the loneliness by seeking and offering real connection. Begin with assuming that loneliness comes as part of the call to ministry and do everything you can to connect in a real way, minister to congregation, minister to family and friends, minister to the Holy. If the minister’s job is to remind the congregation that they are not alone, the minister needs to know this is true, too, down to their bones.

But here’s the deal: I don’t think that loneliness is an unavoidable part of the call to ministry. In progressive religion, we don’t serve a God who sits like a judge and doles out punishment from the aloof heavens. We live in the Holy and witness to it alive and pulsing within and around us, nurtured in relationship and cared for in community. We all have a ministry, a calling, whether we are ordained or not. And none of us deserve to be isolated and set apart. So like Martin Luther, I’m proposing a reformation. If you’re still with me in this series, I hope you’ll join me next week where I share a vision of what ministry could be.