I'm Not Going Back into Ministry

I'm Moving FORWARD with It.

Pema Chödrön teaches the Buddhist meditation practice tonglen, or “taking and sending.”

In tonglen, one first opens the mind and body for a time and beneath time to a deeper abiding, primarily through silence, breath and posture. Eventually one turns awareness to the pain and suffering of an individual or group and breathes in that hurt. Envision sucking it out of them, their situation or surroundings, like a spiritual hazmat vacuum.

One takes into one’s own being the dark, jagged suffering from another. Deeply. Fervently. Completely. When full of this harsh injurious air, we allow an inner conversion, and release back to our intended the ruah of compassion, peace, healing and whatever else might be needed.

Lather. Rinse. Repeat, expanding the circle around the intended to include accidentally or intentionally adjacent beings, and the surrounding environs...as far as you wish to take it.

I am incorporating tonglen practice now in preparation for an anticipated call to move to the leadership center of a particularly marvelous faith community.

Tonglen feels like a direct metaphor for pastoral ministry.

The call was always ringing. I finally picked it up.

I’ve been out of parish ministry for about two years.

Oh, how I’ve changed. And when I write that, what I really mean is oh how I’ve become more myself.

I’m pretty sure pastoring is not something one does, but something one is. My initial call to ministry didn’t come as a sudden shocking message. Rather, I’ve described it as “a persistent tug I finally could no longer ignore.”

I believe we are all born with seeds wishing to grow; raw potential longing to manifest through us. A calling.

I had my first inklings of a call at age 17. I had just rolled my mother’s poor little Ford Maverick off an embankment and through a cornfield. I can still close my eyes and feel the sensation of churning semi-weightlessness as I bounced between the seat and the collapsing roof. No, I wasn’t wearing my seatbelt - the last time that ever happened.

At some point after the car came to rest right-side-up, I woke up staring sidelong at the underside of the dashboard. I balled myself up, twisted and crawled out through the blown-out driver’s side window, then stumbled to a nearby house for help. The fog of shock didn’t begin to lift until I was sitting in the passenger seat of the responding sheriff’s deputy’s car. He was shining his spotlight on the wreckage.

“You WALKED away from THAT?!? Son, you’re lucky to be alive!”

We’re all lucky to be alive. That moment was when I first realized it, and I changed forever. I mean, I was still a snotty little jackass punk, but I became a well-meaning snotty little jackass punk. I became more respectful and intentional toward my long-time girlfriend. I started telling my folks I loved them. I began to spend more in-depth time with people and things I enjoyed, less concerned with the typical surface clique pressures of high school.

I had an inkling, rising from a glimpse of my own mortality and the preciousness of this one wild life.

Those of you who knew me in high school, college and/or my young adult years might scratch your heads at this, but I became a pastor that day. I just didn’t know or accept it yet. And that is the entire point!

I’ve come to see that all of my time in previous parish ministries has been about helping others to seek and call forth what is already contained within them, usually rising closest to the surface and within reach in times of upheaval. Pastors are often present at such crisis moments or immediately after them, and we can be such useful fire jumpers. We also become shellshocked. Haunted. Dissembled.

Lather. Rinse. Repeat yourself right out of the ministry.

I did this to myself a few years ago. The isolated grind of parish ministry during the pandemic, a deep longing for new depths and a few horrific experiences too many led me to jump ship to the amazing Haden Institute, becoming its executive director for a time. Over the past six months I’ve come to realize I was really serving as its pastor.

You can take the snotty little jackass punk out of the pulpit, but…

So now I am again stepping into parish ministry. With any spiritual matter you don’t step into the same container twice. Neither is the stepper ever on complete rerun. We are all becoming. I have spent the past two years processing what was (lately with the help of an excellent EMDR practitioner), and discerning what is, that I might better welcome what will be.

For those of you who know me from West Bloomfield UCC, please know I love you and what you are becoming. Thank you for 28 years of puzzling through together.

For those who know me from the Haden Institute, please know I love you and what you are becoming. Thank you for nine years of puzzling through together.

For those of you from Mountain Rise UCC, I have admired you for decades. Thank you for opening your circle to me. I’ll see you August 1st and 2nd, and we’ll puzzle through together.

For those of you who don’t know me at all, I’m so glad you stopped by. How is it with your soul?

Rev. Corey Keyes is a UCC hippie-pastor about to cease wandering, a spiritual director and dream worker in private practice, and has generally begun to catch on.