The Sound and the Silence and the Colors of Transition

"So do you miss it?" someone recently asked again.  By "it" the questioner was referring to life as a congregational pastor.  I get that question a lot.  I've not been into this new life very long, after all.  And almost from the beginning my answer has been that I don't miss the organizational work -- the meetings and the handwringing over budgets; responding to water leaks and boiler repairs and brick-and-mortar malfunctions of almost infinite variation. But I miss the people and the almost routine conversations about matters of ultimate significance.  I miss lighting the sanctuary candles with a child each week, and I miss making music with other instrumentalists.  I miss collegial  interactions with staff and, though not the inevitable complication of an already crowded calendar, I miss preparing funerals with grief-rocked families groping for meaning and comfort and memory and some new center of gravity.  I miss precious and pregnant moments like these.

But somehow yesterday it struck me that I miss something else.  I miss the sound work of preaching.  To be sure, I am still very involved with words.  I am rolling them around in my head even now, and clattering them onto the screen.  But at least since my high school endeavors in tournament speech I have been intrigued with the realization that there is an aural quality to words and the sentences they develop elusive in written form -- that third dimension beyond the almost mathematical formulation of subject/verb/predicate.  Poets have always understood what the more prosaic of us struggle to discern:  that words have colors as well as meanings, and colors are as auditory as they are visual.  Good writers can capture that subtlety, but the rest of us struggle to evoke the taste and smell and smooth or scratchy feel of words that are really thoughts and ideas and emotional expressions.  The voice can convey what the letters of a word cannot except in the most linguistically deft of hands.  Oral expression understands that words are not merely the straightest and shortest distance between ignorance and understanding -- or boredom and entertainment --  as if language were merely the human form of digital's vocabulary of zeros and ones. 

Writing for preaching is different from simply writing -- the former intended for hearing and the latter essentially for seeing.   And I miss that playfulness with sound.  It isn't the narcissistic sound of my own voice that I miss; rather it is the sound of the words themselves -- shaping them; stretching or compressing them; stacking them in lasagna layers of rich excess, or parceling them out one by one by one in the dramatic austerity of...
     ...barely...
          ...interrupted...
                  ...silence.

And I miss the occasional lump in the throat that is my own particular symptom that something larger than information has been conveyed -- one of those awe-filling, unspeakable moments ineffably merging speaker and listener, transcending those different roles and the space between pulpit and pew. 

I love the feel of the earth and I look forward to entrusting to it the seeds I have carefully selected, and tending the tendrils that emerge.  I love the space and the time and sense that this, too, is holy vocation.  I don't look back and I have no regret.  I am awed by the opportunity and the obligation of this new vocation.

But it is not adulterous to confess, alongside this love for the feel of the earth, my enduring affection for the sound of the words.  It simply confirms what a wise person counseled me as I prepared for this change of life:  that it would not be purchased without price. 

Maybe that means Tir, our one-year-old Welsh Corgi, will have to get used to being not just a playmate around the house, but a congregation of one.  We'll see if he can learn to laugh at the right times, and maybe even bark out an encouraging "amen."