The Buoyancy of God

The idea that pastoral ministry involves a distinctive imagination and a subtle and complex intelligence can be bad news indeed—an intimidating and dispiriting "overwhelming"—if we think of them as demands or achievements that each of us on our own can and must individually attain. But the pastoral imagination is not something to be achieved or attained. It comes as a gift. At the very heart of pastoral ministry lies the good news of a power that is not our own, a labor that ultimately is not our work, a grace that is not of our own doing. The way is not so much one of earnest striving as it is, in Ford's words, "the 'active passivity' of letting ourselves be embraced, or letting ourselves be fed the food and drink that can energize us for" ministry.

Years ago, when I was a seminary student, I worked for a time at the local YMCA, teaching swimming lessons. My students were three- and four-year-olds. Each Saturday morning at 9:00, down the steps they would come from the locker rooms into the pool area. As their parents sat along the wall, watching warily, the little ones wandered over toward the shallow end of the pool, where I was waiting.

You know how little kids hold themselves when they are cold and at least a little bit nervous. They clutch up and shiver. They hold themselves tight and grit their teeth. Well, it is a law of nature that you cannot swim while cramping your body and gnashing your teeth. So what I would do is take one child at a time off the edge of the pool and into my arms. Holding them close, I would carry them gently into the water, As we went, we talked quietly. I tried to make them smile and ease them into relaxation. Along the way, I would dip down into the water, allowing them to feel the warmth of it and the flow of it across their skin. After a while—maybe on their third or fourth venture with me into the deep—I would sink them lower and let them feel the water buoying them up.

Eventually I could lay them on their backs and, holding my hands beneath them, get them to begin to relax their knees, let loose the muscles in their necks, and slowly draw air into their lungs, At first, of course, when I would remove my hands, they would panic a bit. They would clutch up again and start to sink. But sooner or later, they would finally get the feel of what it is like to float. And at that point, they could roll over and start to swim.

The first priority in teaching children to swim is to enable them to trust the water. Somehow or another they have to come to a specific kind of knowledge. In a deeply somatic, bodily way—and in a way that is in no small part existential, for it is a knowledge that must be strong enough to address their fears—they must come to know the buoyancy of the water. Buoyancy is not something you can teach children—or anyone else, for that matter—through a lesson in physics. Objective as it is, for the sake of swimming one has to come to know it personally.

So it is with the life of faith. At the heart of the Christian life there lies a deep, somatic, profoundly personal but very real knowledge. It is the knowledge of the buoyancy of God. It is the knowledge that in struggle and in joy, in conflict and in peace—indeed, in every possible circumstance and condition in life and in death—we are upheld by God's own everlasting arms. In his Institutes of the Christian Religion, John Calvin says, "We shall possess a right definition of faith if we call it a firm and certain knowledge of God's benevolence toward us, founded upon the truth of the freely given promise in Christ, both revealed to our minds and sealed upon our hearts through the Holy Spirit."

Faith for Calvin is not a blind leap into the utterly unknowable, much less mere speculation. No, it is knowledge. It is a deep, profound, existential knowledge that infuses not only our minds but also our hearts and even our bodies. It is knowledge that, as we come to know it more and more deeply over many years, will give form and substance to our entire imagination, to our whole way of being in the world, to our very existence. It is the knowledge of the overflowing abundance of the grace and mercy and love of God.

When pastors try to master ministry on their own, they are overwhelmed by the fearfulness of it. They can become frightened and defensive, clutch up, grit their teeth and sink. When ministry is received as a gift of God within a larger life of faith shared by pastors and people, an entirely different dynamic begins to take over. Instead of working frenetically and compulsively to harness their own powers and energies, pastors are somehow set free to receive, draw upon, release and share in the multiple energies and capacities of the people of their congregations and of the whole body of Christ.