Five Smooth Stones for Pastoral Work (Peterson)--Pastoral Work of Prayer-Directing: Song of Songs

Here were my quotes from the first chapter of Peterson's book. Again, I'm sorry I am unable to give page numbers since I'm reading this one on a kindle, but I have left the footnote numbers in to the quotes be gives so you can trace them in his book. This is from the first chapter only:

Pastoral Work of Prayer-Directing: Song of Songs

Pastoral work refuses to specialize in earthly or heavenly, human or divine. The pastor is given a catholic cosmos to work in, not a sectarian back-forty.

Pastoral work, in large part, deals with the difficulty everyone one has in staying alert to the magnificence of salvation. When we first encounter God's saving love, it may well overwhelm us. But over a period of years it becomes a familiar part of the landscape, one religious item among many others. The vocabulary of salvation becomes hackneyed, reduced to the level of valentine-card verse. The mannerisms of the saved become predictable. Whenever we are associated with greatness over a long period of time, there is a tendency in us to become stale.

The pastor, working in the midst of the symbols and artifacts of transcendence, is faced, both in himself or herself and among the faithful, with this dangerous drift towards the shoals of nonchalance. Praying, the most personal aspect of life, becomes riddled with cliches, a sure indication that it has ceased being personal. Devotional life diminishes while a step-up in public and external activities (church work, defending the faith, witnessing and preaching, moral formalisms) covers up the loss.

Pastoral work is a commitment to the everyday: it is an act of faith that the great truths of salvation are workable in the "ordinary universe."

The movement from the Song of Moses that celebrates God's act of salvation to the Song of Solomon that explores the subjective experience of that salvation (which corresponds to the transition from pastoral preaching to pastoral prayer-conversation) is abrupt: the first word in the Song (in Hebrew) is "Kiss me!" (yissageni) -a direct, and passionate, appeal for intimacy. This person does not want to talk about theology, does not want to gossip about love, does not want to get on a committee to do something for God. There is no time for cultural "platonic" conversation, no use for that which in the theological world goes under the label of "apologetics." The lonely isolation of the solitary person must be invaded. Life, to be meaningful, must be joined: intimacy is a requirement of wholeness.

And so pastoral work is a concentration on names. After the Bible, the church roll is the most important book in a pastor's study. We work in communities that are composed of names.

It is not the pastor's job to simplify the spiritual life, to devise common-denominator formulas, to smooth out the path of discipleship. Some difficulties are inherent in the way of spiritual growth -to deny them, to minimize them, or to offer shortcuts is to divert the person from true growth. It is the pastor's task, rather, to be companion to persons who are in the midst of difficulty, to acknowledge the difficulty and thereby give it significance, and to converse and pray with them through the time so that the loneliness is lightened, somewhat, and hope is maintained, somehow.

Pastoral work is a ministry for taking seriously the details that differentiate us from each other and from God, and then praising them, for "`In separateness only does love learn definition."'33 By listening attentively to a person's dreams, desires, and longings, and by sharing passionately a person's struggles, painful frustrations, and difficulties, significance is given to them. The differences become thereby not neurotic annoyances but items in the experience of salvation. By immersing himself or herself in the relational details of a people, the pastor makes an index of prayers for them. Sherwood Anderson speaks someplace place of "the terrible importance of the flesh in human relations."34 The actual details of intimate needs and relational realities become the stuff of prayer. Desires are shaped into adoration and difficulties are formed into petitions.

But we must pray for everyone we meet. Before, after, and during conversations prayer must be made, for how else will a pastor work at the center as intercessor before God on behalf of the deep desires and the persistent difficulties that concentrate their force in each person?

A sense of hurry in pastoral work disqualifies one for the work of conversation and prayer that develops relationships that meet personal needs. There are heavy demands put upon pastoral work, true; there is difficult work to be engaged in, yes. But the pastor must not be "busy." Busyness is an illness of spirit, a rush from one thing to another because there is no ballast of vocational integrity and no confidence in the primacy of grace.

Without the solitude of heart, our relationships with others easily become needy and greedy, sticky and clinging, dependent and sentimental, exploitative and parasitic, because without the solitude of heart we cannot experience the others as different from ourselves but only as people who can be used for the fulfillment of our own, often hidden, needs. Henri Nouwen

Thomas Aquinas held that the meaning of all pastoral care was "to prepare the Christian people for the celebration of the Eucharist."37 But pastoral work is just as much a derivation from the Eucharist as preparation for it, for it helps those who have received into their bodies and spirits the life of Christ to realize that love in every detail of every relationship.

In this regard the most important thing a pastor can do for a person is to be grateful to God for that particular person; celebrate with joy the sheer existence of this particular instance of God's creation without regard to moral quality or spiritual maturity. Prayer that is conceived by the Spirit via the Song will have this happy character because it will see the person in the environment of the covenant, and therefore in the way of salvation. The practice of such prayer will also prevent what Bonhoeffer sternly warns against, that "A pastor should not complain about his congregation, certainly never to other people, but also not to God. A congregation has not been entrusted to him in order that he should become its accuser before God and men."40