The Blackbird Whistling . . . Or Just After
As a result of our SPE conversations the past three years, I have learned that pastoral excellence is not about a particular set of “good” behaviors or “stronger” programs that pastors are supposed to employ, however important those might be. Instead, pastoral excellence is about something deeper — a way of being.
Too often, I have watched clergy do ministry “right,” practicing the recommended behaviors and launching great new programs, but somehow it all goes wrong. Other times, I have seen clergy do virtually everything “wrong,” failing to use the specific techniques they’ve been told to use or using them poorly at best, but their ministry goes right.
What accounts for the difference? One key variable may be the leader’s way of the heart or way of being. When pastors focus only on behaviors and programs, they tend to fixate on correcting what’s wrong, on addressing the negative or pathological in the system. They work on looking “good,” on working harder with more intensity. But in the process, they can neglect their own way of being, inadvertently causing their ministries to lose the very excellence they had sought. If we focus first on our way of being, excellence can happen more naturally and easily. In the poem, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” Wallace Stevens writes:
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.
Maybe pastoral excellence is“The blackbird whistling/Or just after.” That is, maybe pastoral excellence lies in the deeper soul “stuff” that our conversations always miss.
So what is at the heart of pastoral excellence, this deeper way of being, this way of the heart? To me, it goes back to Martin Buber’s concept of “I/Thou,” which fundamentally captures the two ways we have of being in relation to ourselves, the world and others. When I stand in that place of “I/Thou,” I see people as people. I respond to their reality —their concerns, their hopes, their dreams, their needs and their fears. When I am in an “I/Thou” relationship with others, they know it. They sense it. They intuit it. Trust is cultivated and, usually, they will respond in kind. As a result, possibilities for excellence emerge.
But when my relationship to the world is “I/It,” I see others, if at all, as objects. I see them as less than I am — less relevant, less important, less real. They are obstacles, vehicles, or altogether irrelevant. Here too, when this is my way of being in relationship, others know it and sense it. Resistance increases, trust disappears, perceptions become skewed and the “I/It” behavior is reciprocated, feeding on itself. As a result, the possibility for excellence of any kind is slight.
Excellence, then, is this deeper way of being with self and others, this way of living in an “I/Thou” relationship. It is living and organic, a way of being, not a state or way of doing. It is the innuendoes, the inflections. As much as we must try to understand, cultivate, nurture, practice and describe any kind of excellence — especially pastoral excellence — we can never “get it all.” We only see in part.
As the poet Mary Oliver wrote, “I believe we will never quite know./Though we play at the edges of knowing,/truly we know/our part is not knowing.” We can point towards pastoral excellence like we would a flock of wild geese flying overhead. We can observe and experience it with awe when we see it happening. Hopefully, through God’s grace, we can sometimes be the ones through whom it surfaces. But we can never completely describe the experience. In those moments, we mostly stand still and learn to be astonished, whispering, “That’s it!”
Like the blackbird whistling or just after.
Dr. W. Craig Gilliam is director of The Center for Pastoral Effectiveness for the Louisiana Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church.
