On Facebook Brother Bill called me out for missing the presbytery meeting today. But the Lord's work detained me! I was reading Gregory of Tours' History of the Franks.
There's a lot of blood and guts in The History of the Franks, and more than a few head-scratchers too. Today I read about a hapless young man admitted as a novice to a monastery renowned for its severe discipline. One day the monks left the novice in charge of the wheat harvest drying in the sun. Suddenly a thunderstorm blew up. What was our poor novice to do? His brothers were too far away to summon. So he did all that he could do. He prayed.
And a miracle happened! The rain fell in torrents everywhere except precisely over the precious stalks of wheat.
The monks with the abbot came running, and they saw the dry wheat and the novice prostrate in prayer. What did the abbot do? He smacked around the novice for being a show-off and threw him in solitary confinement for a week.
Damned if you do; damned if you don't.
If Christians believed in reincarnation I could totally see this abbot coming back to be a CPE supervisor. Because it never mattered which verbatim you turned in for review, did it? They could turn any material they had on you into a turd sculpture of your ministerial incompetence and heart of darkness.
If it was a visit that went badly and you wanted advice, they never gave you advice; they gave you a lot of observations about how your dysfunctional family and your own cluelessness rendered your ministerial dexterity right up there with a bull in a china shop. Or if you turned in a beautiful verbatim, they contemptuously and openly doubted your honesty or sneered at you for your desperate need to impress your supervisors and outshine your peers. By the end of the internship, even you had to admit that a Christian coming to you for pastoral care was like taking a sick pet to a taxidermist instead of a vet.
But we're the better for it, aren't we? It was like boot camp, but now we wounded healer Christian ministers are the Marine Corps of Christianity, aren't we?
Gregory of Tours certainly thought that the novice monk's experience was good for him. Gregory reports that the man is now so hard core that during Lent he only drinks a cup of barley water every third day. BTW, Gregory refuses to identify the monk lest he see his own name in print and get puffed up with pride--for he does have a problem with pride, doesn't he?
Shorter History of the Franks (for the non-insane, non-aspiring PhDs reading this): Gregory loves miracles, so long as the miracle worker is dead. Somebody like, say, Martin of Tours, whose bones are interred in Gregory's church. Dead miracle workers are no threat to a living bishop's authority!
Posted by: |