Failing, Fathering, and Falling Toward Maturity

By LeRoy Lawson

 

The Damnation of Theron Ware
Harold Frederic
Various editions; first published in 1896

Gilead
Marilynne Robinson
New York: Picador, 2004

Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life
Richard Rohr
San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2011

Pastoral ministry can be among the hardest jobs there are””or the easiest. Since pastors are granted freedom to set their own schedules and priorities, the conscientious minister tends to work too hard and the indolent one finds every excuse to take it easy.

What this means is ministry attracts””or creates””the finest of characters or the worst. I”m exaggerating of course, but not by much. This fact hasn”t escaped the attention of novelists. You can find the whole range of pastoral types in fiction, but the best and worst dominate””especially the worst.

Take Harold Frederic”s The Damnation of Theron Ware, for example. This book, considered Frederic”s masterpiece, first appeared in 1896 and is still in print. And it still dismays. The Reverend Mr. Ware, a small-town minister in a pastorate he persuades himself is far beneath him, enters his calling quite convinced of his many virtues. His precipitous fall is inevitable. With each ill-considered decision he unwittingly reveals more of his theological naiveté, his social snobbery, his worship of the dollar, his shallow education””and his susceptibility to the charms of strong women.

I quickly learned to dislike Rev. Ware. He represents too much that”s wrong with counterfeits in the ministry, and too much of what”s wrong with the rest of us. I kept reading, though, hoping he”d see the light. He did.

 

Memoir for the Sake of a Son

With relief I turned from Theron Ware to John Ames, the exemplary minister in Marilynne Robinson”s Gilead. It”s surprising to learn in this secular era that a novel about a pastor could win””and so deserve winning””the Pulitzer Prize for Literature.

This treasure must be read slowly. There”s much wisdom here. You want to savor old Pastor Ames”s humble reflections on life, love (and yes, hate), friendship, grace, and God. Widowed as a young man, Ames soldiers on for long, lonely years, serving without complaint or recognition his unexceptional congregation in the little Iowa community of Gilead. It”s his home church. His pacifist father had preached there before him, as did his grandfather, who had “preached men into the Civil War.” Relationships between fathers and sons are seldom easy. They aren”t in Gilead, either.

It”s for the sake of his son, though, that Pastor Ames writes his “autobiography.” In his late 70s, he is gradually succumbing to his final illness. After nearly a lifetime alone, he married an unadorned young woman who showed up in church one Sunday and kept coming back. She was in her late 30s and he in his late 60s when they married. It was not too late to father a son.

It”s to him these reflections are written, the father”s memoir to a boy too young to grasp it now but who, the father hopes, will read it after his father”s death and then know and understand the man who sired him, who loved him as much as life itself, and so much regretted he wouldn”t be around to see him grow into manhood.

I”ve made it sound too sentimental, but it is after all a love story: of a man for his younger wife, of an old father for his very young son, of a pastor for his flock, of a believer for his God. As an old reader myself, I am especially touched by his lifelong friendship with the Presbyterian minister in town and the grace required to accept that friend”s troubled, troubling son, the antithesis of what Ames hopes his own son will become. And as an old pastor who has just learned that a lifelong friend has been diagnosed with Alzheimer”s, I identified too painfully with Ames”s love for the friend whose illness is gradually, inexorably robbing him of everything that defines him.

Gilead is a wonderful, simple place. You”ll like it here.

 

Insights for the Second Half

When several friends independently send me their order, “Lawson, you gotta read this one,” I read it. This time it”s Richard Rohr”s Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life.

They were right, my friends, to send me my orders. Rohr is a Franciscan priest, well into the second half of life, who has finished with chasing things. He wants no more to do with propping up a sagging ego or building bigger barns to store his accumulated stuff. He has become impatient with sideshows. He wants the real thing. He wants life.

Ask the typical first-half persons for their vision of the second half and you”ll get pictures of grumpy, drooling, shaky, graying used-to-be”s with bad breath, killing time until time betrays them. Again I exaggerate. But again, not by much. First-halfers can”t imagine the second half Rohr has in mind for us.

But the rich maturity he pictures doesn”t follow automatically at a certain age; in fact, many people never get there. It”s not about chronology, this thing called maturity. He has known some very young second-halfers, like a certain 11-year-old cancer patient, who have already found life. You only rise upward, you see, not by existing for so many years but by falling first, which means hurting, suffering, failing, sinning. That”s the paradox of life, so similar to Jesus” “he who would save his life must lose it.”

Rohr says it is in the first half of life we create the container. Then, in the second half, we fill it.

Falling Upward is chock full of ponderables. Here are some samples:

“¢ “Before the truth “˜sets you free,” it tends to make you miserable.”

“¢ “Wisdom comes when we discard our usual either/or thinking in favor of more seasoned both/and.” That doesn”t happen, Rohr insists, “without much prayer, self-doubt, study, and conversation.”

“¢ “The Eight Beatitudes speak to you much more than the Ten Commandments now.”

“¢ “At this stage, I no longer have to prove that I or my group is the best, that my ethnicity is superior, that my religion is the only one that God loves, or that my role and place in society deserve superior treatment. I am not preoccupied with collecting more goods and services; quite simply, my desire and effort””every day””is to pay back, to give back to the world a bit of what I have received. . . . I try now, as Elizabeth Seton said, to “˜live simply so that others can simply live.””

“¢ “Ironically, we are more than ever before in a position to change people””but we do not need to””and that makes all the difference.”

“¢ “We should not be surprised that most older people do not choose loud music, needless diversions, or large crowds. We move toward understimulations, if we are on the schedule of soul. Life has stimulated us enough, and now we have to process it and integrate it, however unconsciously.”

Those friends who insisted I read this book? They”re not young, as you probably guessed. I do have some first-half friends, though, I hope will read it””to get ready for a richer second half.

 

LeRoy Lawson is international consultant with CMF International and professor of Christian ministries at Emmanuel Christian Semi-nary. He also serves as a CHRISTIAN STANDARD contributing editor and member of Standard Publishing”s Publishing Committee.