One of our greatest challenges as pastoral ministers is our familiarity and close contact with the things of God. We prepare religious lessons, plan funerals, select hymns, support various ministries, and answer a seemingly endless stream of questions related to the faith ranging from the profound to the perfunct. We live and breathe the things of God, and as the saying goes, familiarity can breed contempt, or at least a creeping indifference if we are not careful. We must be ever mindful not to allow the things of God to take the place of the God of all things in our hearts.
Our efforts are truly important. The parish is the local instantiation of the Church, and our efforts make the parish function. It is the place where the People of God encounter the living God in the sacraments and catechesis, in Christian community and works of charity. Our work, which is ministry, can certainly be a prayer, and we ought to strive for the Benedictine principle of ora et labora, prayer and work. But we must resist that creeping temptation to let our work alone become the totality of our prayer.
St. Anselm famously defined God as that than which a greater cannot be thought. Put more simply though less elegantly, God is the greatest possible being. He is even greater than the multifaceted things of God that we can allow to occupy his rightful place in our lives. Important as they are, the tasks of ministry are a poor substitute for the real Supreme Being to whom they are directed. And so parish ministers have a great need for a vibrant personal spiritual life that at once supersedes and underlies our ministry. We have to be in regular, personal, intimate contact with the God of all things.
Jesus put it best when he said we can do nothing without him, like branches disconnected from the vine (John 15:5). Even from behind our desks, parish ministers are missionaries in the lives of those whom we serve, and as St. John Paul II wrote, “Unless the missionary is a contemplative, he cannot proclaim Christ in a credible way” (Redemptoris Missio, sec. 91). We must live the faith that we attempt to pass on and facilitate in others. We must know it intimately from the inside out, not just as a subject to be known or a job to be done but as a lived reality that continues to bear fruit in our lives.
What might the spirituality of a pastoral minister look like? Two sources, the Vatican’s Guide for Catechists and James Pauley’s book An Evangelizing Catechesis: Teaching from Your Encounter with Christ, offer us several practical suggestions.
Section twenty-two of the Guide offers a list of key elements in the prayer life of a catechist which are applicable to any pastoral ministry. These include many practices with which we all are familiar and some that may be new to us: regular and even daily reception of the Eucharist, liturgical living in the home, praying the Divine Office (especially its hinges, Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer), daily meditation with Scripture, personal prayer that pays special attention to Marian prayer (the Angelus, the Rosary, the Sub Tuum Praesidium, etc.), frequent reception of the Sacrament of Penance, and going on retreats regularly. This may seem like a lot to take on at once, and it can be. I encourage you to spend some time with this list and discern one of these key elements that you are not already doing that you can begin today.
As you begin this new prayer practice or recommit to an old one, the second chapter of Pauley’s An Evangelizing Catechesis offers three fundamental dispositions to make it more fruitful. First, we must expect prayer to be a real encounter with God. We do not simply “say our prayers;” we converse with a personal Being who wants to interact with us. Second, we must be prepared to give and to receive in prayer. We give God more than just our time, attention, and pious words. We must intentionally give him our very selves in prayer, and we must learn how to be receptive. Third, we must expect to be changed. The more time we spend in intimate, personal communion with the Lord, the more we will be conformed to Him. When we approach prayer as a real encounter with God and one in which we both give and receive, we should expect real transformation.
We also can keep the God of all things at the center of the things of God by intentionally inviting him into them. Nearly every menial task at the parish can be an opportunity to pray for individual parishioners by offering up our tasks in intercession for them. Verifying baptismal information for Confirmation, recording sacraments in registries, assembling mailings, preparing resources for a catechist or core team, registering new parishioners, and updating someone’s clearances are all opportunities to ask the Lord to bless the individual person at the heart of the task and an opportunity for us to grow closer to the God of all things.
As you go about your work, your ministry, this week, try to remember that the God of all things who is greater than you can imagine waits to meet you in the menial tasks you do to serve him and his people. When you encounter him regularly in your own personal prayer, you can more easily encounter him more deeply in the things of God that occupy much of your work day.