Recovering our pastoral vocation

Every year, just before Easter, I'm drawn back to a particular passage in Eugene Peterson’s book - `Under the Unpredictable Plant’. It's a way of remembering my own pastoral vocation - something easily lost in the demands of regional ministry!

The passage I’m thinking of relates to “Holy Saturday” – i.e. the time between Good Friday and Easter Day - which Peterson recognised did not feature prominently in his upbringing. For his family, who owned a butcher’s shop, it was busy day – serving all the customers who came in for their Easter joints. And many of the customers also belonged to their church.

“I would have been very surprised, and somewhat unbelieving, to have known that in the very town in which I worked furiously all those unholy Saturdays, there were people [Catholics] who ... were not working at all, and not spending either, but remembering – entering into the emptiness of death by deliberately emptying the self of illusion and indulgence and self-importance. Keeping vigil for Easter. Watching for the dawn."

(By the way, all Peterson's books on pastoral ministry are excellent in my view and this one, a reflective study on the book of Jonah, is no exception.)

This year I made a point of going to Glasshampton Monastery to join the Franciscan brothers on Holy Saturday as they waited on God in this time between times. It helped me enormously!

Jonah in the belly of the fish. Jesus in the tomb. The seed growing secretly. Ourselves – unable to make things happen or (more accurately) make things happen more quickly by our activity. May God grant us the patience that produces character and the hope that does not disappoint us (Rom. 5.5) as we ponder the time-between-times and wait for that new beginning - whatever the creative Spirit of God surprises us with.

Keith Judson, Regional Minister