Reading Up: The Pastor as Minor Poet by M. Craig Barnes

What a gentle, lovely, pastoral little book. So often, I feel jarred and unsteadied by the preaching task, but Barnes does a beautiful job in The Pastor as Minor Poet of making one feel like that pastoral role is one of gentleness and ease, of walking along a beach, conversing with people as they come. I know it's not really like that. I know he knows it's not like that. But with so many of the texts we have read and the speakers we have seen thus far with an air of desperation around then, it's nice to breath in Barnes' measured pace.

What I appreciate most about this book is that Barnes takes the preacher as a whole person--living a family life, being imperfect, having a relationship with God, and doing the daily work of the pastor. In his introductions to the chapters, he lovingly sketches the mundane in a way that you begin to see the subtext he is pointing out so readily. So much of my enjoyment of this book was about the pacing, about the lingering, and about the lingering it encourages pastors to do in order to be poets of subtext.

In some ways, I could see the connection between this work and the work in parables that ACF is doing: both require a keen sensibility to the unseen in the present moment. And perhaps Barnes' work serves as a bit more of a how-to, though it is not didactic. Rather that teaching us how to be a poet, Barnes just seems to open up the world of what it would look like to be a pastor-poet. He doesn't sugar-coat the preaching task--he acknowledges that some days are easier than others. But he does emphasize the persistence and patience required in the task...things I could really work on.

Here are a few quotes:

• "Poets see the despair and heartache as well as the beauty and miracle that lie just beneath the thin veneer of the ordinary, and they describe this in ways that are recognized not only in the mind, but more profoundly in the soul" (17).
• "What the congregation needs is not a strategist to help them form another plan for achieving a desired image of life, but a poet who looks beneath even the desperation to recover the mystery of what it means to be made in God's image" (18).
• "Poets are devote more to truth than to reality; they are not unaware of reality, but they never accept it at face value...This is why poets care about the text, what is said or done, but only in order to reveal the subtext, which reveals what it means" (19).
• "In contrast to the biblical and theological poets, the pastoral poet has the unique calling of making sense of their worlds in light of the dust and grit of daily life in a parish....the pastor poet lives with a crowded and noisy soul. Central to what it means to be ordained is to open the doors of one's soul to the complexities, pathos, longings, and even sins of those the pastor has vowed to serve" (22).
• But the creativity of the minor poet is found not in the discovery of new truth, or in speaking and writing for every other people. It's found in the fresh articulation of familiar old truths in a specific context. Clearly, that's what pastors do" (26).
• "We wrap ourselves in small talk about small things in order to hide from holiness" (30).
• "The secret to intimacy with another person is discovering the sufficiency of God's love without that person. It is the only way we are ever free to give love to another human being who can never meet the needs of our souls" (46).
• "Since their souls are a sacred meeting ground, it is critical that pastors know how to expose themselves to God. It is not enough that they have learned as minor poets how to peer into the subtexts of the Bible and the congregation. They also have to attend to the underlying holy space of their own lives" (108).