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On the other hand, however, as a leader in community, as
a follower of Jesus, as a freely choosing agent in the system, I was hardly a mere victim of circumstances beyond
my control. I chose how I would be in
the system, what I would say yes to, what I would say no to, what disciplines
of self-care I would or would not practice; and, while I couldn’t necessarily
choose how certain events or people might impact me emotionally, I could choose
how I would process those emotions, what space I would give them in my
life. In this regard, I was responsible for my burnout.
This distinction between fault and responsibility is
crucial for understanding and recovering from burnout. Fault is debilitating. It has at its root the idea of failure, and as such it’s a judgement of
incompetence. Responsibility, by contrast,
is empowering. It has at its root the
idea of “ability,” and as such presupposes one’s competence. It was only as I came to see my own agency in
the system—my “response-ability”—that I was able to see how I could, in fact, be differently in the system,
and heal.
Let me flesh this out in relation to one of the key
factors at play in any burnout: business.
I’ve shared in a previous post that business, in and of itself, is not
the reason people burnout. People can have
a lot to do without burning out, so
long as other crucial work-place conditions are in place (the 4 Rs, anyone?). So it’s not simply a matter of burning out because
one’s too busy.
At the same time, however, it is true that I was extremely
“busy”—busier than I’d ever been before—in the months leading up to my final crash. And
when I was finally able to look at things with the kind of clarity you can only get after a three month leave and some honest sessions with a trained counselor, I
came to see that being un-busy was actually
my responsibility. I was choosing
to be busy and I could, with much self-discipline and emotional-maturity,
choose not to be busy.
Don’t get me wrong.
I’m not saying that I was choosing
to have a lot to do at work. The demands
of the job were not necessarily my fault.
And I’m not saying that I could have neglected those demands with any
integrity. The system needed to change.
But when I looked at it objectively, I came to see that my
business was more a function of my inner life than it was a function of my
to-do list. Wanting to be certain things for
others so that I could feel good about myself, I emotionally “owned” every
crisis, every conflict, every project, every problem, basking in people’s
approval like a cold-blooded snake stretched out on the asphalt of the Inter-State. Having attached my emotional well-being to
the circumstances of my ministry, and having neglected the spiritual disciplines that by their very nature teach
us to attach our emotional well-being to God, I was as vulnerable to business, as
that snake is to the on-coming tires of a careening SUV.
Early on in my recovery time I read the chapter on “business”
in Eugene Peterson’s The Contempletive
Pastor, and it went down for me like a spoonful of Buckley’s: it tasted
terrible, but it worked. Peterson points
out how much of our busy-ness is really a function of our emotional insecurities
and immaturities. Because we fear the rejection and feed off the praise of others, we won’t say “no,” or “not now,” or “not
me,” when we should, choosing, in
effect, to be busy. And here comes the tough medicine: we are
busy, he says, either because A) we are too lazy to set our own schedule and it's easier to have others set it for us, or because B) we are too proud, and
believe that our business makes us look important; our complaints about being
busy are really, deep down at the core, boasts.
Peterson goes so far as to suggest that the busy pastor
is in dereliction of duty, because the
pastor’s primary job is to pastor— to
listen, pray, reflect on the scriptures, and to guide others in doing the same—and
these activities absolutely require
that we be un-busy to do them well.
Like I say, there was no spoonful of sugar to help his
medicine go down, but it helped me to see what was really going on for me. The pastor who is busy because he is too
proud to say things like “I can’t,” who believes, even if subconsciously, that
business is a sign of importance, who gets an emotional fix every time he hears
someone say, “that pastor so-and-so, he sacrifices so much for his flock,” and
so on, that pastor is a prime candidate for burnout. And responsible for it.
So how do we take back
our response-ability in
overloaded, maxed-out or demanding work conditions?
Two things come immediately to mind. It’s possible they may sound like so much
more Buckley’s to swallow, but they are things that have made, and are making
the difference for me, so let me offer them here.
The first is to
take responsibility for your inner life. If we’re saying “I can” when we should be
saying “I can’t” because somehow or other it meets an emotional need for us, if
we’re letting our insecurities dictate what gets added to or left off the to-do
list, if we’re emotionally owning the well-being of the system, these are all
signs of emotional immaturity and spiritual unhealth that we need to take
responsibility for. Honest introspection,
wise spiritual direction, trust-worthy accountability, disciplined prayer, ruthless
self-awareness, and some difficult but necessary conversations, all of these
things can help us mature in our spiritual lives. They are things that only we can do, and things the we must do, if we want to pursue a spiritually-mature, emotionally-centred,
un-busy way of being a pastor.
The second is—and I realize I risk sounding like a Sunday
School kid here—but the second is:
Jesus. In another place in Contemplative Pastor, Peterson points
out that many (maybe most) pastors are not especially good at getting people to
take their problems, questions, queries and requests to Jesus, because of their tendency to try to solve the problem, answer the
question, field the query and mee the request themselves instead. Peterson’s
still doling out the Buckley’s here, so he goes so far as to suggest that many
(maybe most) pastors suffer from an identity crisis, and we actually think it’s
our job to solve the problems or
answer the questions ourselves,
instead of getting people to take them to Jesus. Could it be, he wonders, with a grimace as
bitter as any 10-year-old swallowing cough syrup, could it be that we, as pastors,
do this, because really, deep down inside, we’d rather people came to us with their problems, than go to God
themselves?
I don’t know about that, but I do know that it was a major shift for me, to acknowledge that I am really only an under-shepherd, that Jesus himself is the Chief Shepherd, and that I haven’t really done my job until my people have actually gone to Him with their pastoral needs. It’s helped me find a different way of being a pastor, a way of choosing to have a lot to do, without being, necessarily, busy.
I don’t know about that, but I do know that it was a major shift for me, to acknowledge that I am really only an under-shepherd, that Jesus himself is the Chief Shepherd, and that I haven’t really done my job until my people have actually gone to Him with their pastoral needs. It’s helped me find a different way of being a pastor, a way of choosing to have a lot to do, without being, necessarily, busy.
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