Merton and the Shy Preacher

    Thomas Merton keeps helping me reimagine my preaching. I’m a shy introvert, although years ago I tested E instead of I on the Myers-Briggs. I was surprised, but pleased. I think I gave my wannabe, oughta-be answers. A pastor? You’ve got to be a people person, loving crowds, loving being up front – right? But I’d really rather stay home, or sit on the back row. What does it mean to bare open your heart, not only to God but to the people, when you’re fairly private about your inner, personal life?

   Do I preach to be effective? or even for them out there? I went into this, less for them, and more because back then I simply loved Jesus and hoped to run a few errands for him. Could I have been his errand-runner in a less public way?

   I am rethinking this in light of a journal entry from 1949, which reveals Merton reflecting on being a famous writer, dissonant in a way, as his real preference was to be alone, or at least alone with God:

   “It seems to be that writing has become one of the conditions on which my perfection will depend. If I am to be a saint – and there is nothing else that I can think of desiring to be – it seems that I must get there by writing books in a Trappist monastery. I must put down on paper what I have become… to put it down on paper, with complete simplicity and integrity, without exaggeration, repetition, useless emphasis. To be frank without being boring: it is a kind of crucifixion. A complete and holy transparency: losing myself entirely by becoming public property, just as Jesus is public property in the Mass. Perhaps this is my way to solitude. One of the strangest ways so far devised, but it is the way of the Word of God.”

   If I substitute “preaching” for “writing” in this passage, I have a path toward rethinking my calling. As a Methodist, we “go on to perfection,” and my way involves preaching. I do wish to be frank, not boring – and being frank, utterly transparent, can feel like a mini-crucifixion. I don’t like feeling like public property, but Jesus was and is just that. So if I am close to him, if I yearn to be a saint, the road is standing up front, and talking, as well as I can but never sufficiently, standing there as a target for criticism, repeatedly misunderstood – dare I say it? like Jesus was? It’s exhausting, but I get some peace, and energy, seeing my preaching as my holiest offering of me to be as close as possible to my Lord.

   What a strange way God has devised for me, and for others like me, who preach.