On the Front Line

I had an interesting conversation the other day with a person I have only recently met. I first met him about 10 days ago and in the conversation it was mentioned that I had been a parish pastor for many years and shifted about five years ago into being an alcohol and drug counselor. That was the extent of the conversation about that. We moved on. He left.

Then about 5 days ago, five days after I first talked to him we were in another conversation. As we were talking he said to me, completely out of the blue and in many ways a non sequiter that I was now on the front lines of helping people. "That church thing," he said, "is all about ritual and stuff. What you're doing now," he added, "is the real thing."

Coming as it did, out of the blue and unrelated to what we were talking about, I was briefly taken aback. Here were my own words, or at least some of them, being echoed back to me with some different added interpretations and force. Here was a way of seeing things that I was unaware could be so easily seen.

As such it was an affirmation of what I have been feeling even more strongly as I have moved over these last five years from parish pastor in church ministry to secular ministry that has no direct connections to the institution other than that I am ordained by that institution. What I do now I need no ordination to do. I need training, of course, and a license by the state, which would put it outside of "ministry." But it is not.

The front lines. Where people are hurting and know it. Even in their denial they know that something in their life is going wrong. And they look for help to have the bonds of their oppression broken. The front lines.

Oh. He also added at the end. "Man, you have a calling!"

Can you say that outside the church?

Addendum:
After writing the above I got the following quote in my Inward/Outward RSS feed from Thomas Merton that I think applies:

Our vocation is not simply to be, but to work together with God in the creation of our own life, our own identity, our own destiny…. This means to say that we should not passively exist, but actively participate in God’s creative freedom, in our own lives, and in the lives of others, by choosing the truth. To put it better, we are even called to share with God the work of creating the truth of our identity. We can evade this responsibility by playing with masks, and this pleases us because it can appear at times to be a free and creative way of living. It is quite easy, it seems, to please everyone. But in the long run the cost and the sorrow come very high. To work out our own identity in God, which the Bible calls ‘working out our salvation,’ is a labor that requires sacrifice and anguish, risk and many tears. It demands close attention to reality at every moment, and great fidelity to God as God is revealed, obscurely, in the mystery of each new situation.

Source: Seeds of Contemplation, 1949