So…I have decided to start being honest. Not that I am not already shockingly honest already however, I haven’t completely been vocal about my struggle with chronic pain ever since my car wreck from the spring 08. The court trail from the wreck is finally over almost four years later and many things have happen in the last four years, and for some reason I now feel compelled to try to share this part of my journey with the world. I’m entitling this series, “Ministering In The Midst Of Pain.” I know I am not the only one who suffers from various types of pain and actively ministers through the good and bad; this is why I have asked my friend Naomi King to submit the first post of the series. If you are interested in possibly submitting a post as well please let me know!

Clergy With Chronic Pain

By Naomi King

I live with chronic pain. I have lived with more pain-filled nights and days now than I have experienced low-pain or pain-free days and nights in my life, which I consider a milestone of sorts: the pain hasn’t conquered me yet, though I have my moments of wondering. With God’s grace, spiritual disciplines, and supportive faithful friends and family, I have endured.

Living with chronic pain has forced me to wrestle with expectations of ministry that separate ministry from being human. Sometimes we expect the clergy not to be people who particularly are called to serve God in certain ways but to be a little more than human, a little more godly than regular people. Clergy are just as likely as anyone else to have such expectations of ourselves and each other – to have a nearly endless ability to say a few more good words, to rally to when we’re needed, to not get tired – or at least not to have tiredness affect how we are with people. Self-care, exhaustion, and suffering are largely supposed to happen outside of the view of the faith community, maybe with a few trusted colleagues and a small support network. How many faith communities, when they’re seeking spiritual leadership, assert, “wow, we really could use the wisdom of someone who lives with chronic pain and can change our work expectations to meet that person’s strengths”?

It is weird. It is weird to want professional religious leaders to lead without being part of a faith community, for being truly part of a faith community means mutuality of care, acceptance of each other’s limitations, and encouragement in faithful service as we are each separately gifted and endowed. The expectation that professional religious leadership quietly cares for themselves apart from the faith community perpetuates a consumer approach to religious leaders. We are not vending machines for wisdom, ritual, and intercessory prayers, refilled and restocked from some external source that hopefully involves the Holy but draws minimally or not at all upon the communities we serve. My faith community is how I know the Beloved’s presence, right here alongside, just like other members of the faith community.

Who am I – or we – to say chronic pain is not a spiritual gift? My gifts include pie-baking and preaching and also life with chronic pain. I certainly wrestle the chronic pain and have learned a lot of spiritual wisdom from that wrestling, found blessings in being able to understand limitations, the things we do when we’re exhausted that we wouldn’t do when we’re refreshed, the way pain frays a person’s temper and patience, and many, many coping skills including spiritual disciplines that help us endure. I can pick up my mat and trust my sins are forgiven, but I still belong to the ill and infirm. We are the Holy’s people, too, just as we are.

Some things I have learned and continue to learn from life and ministry with chronic pain:
 When my expectations and my limitations collide, it is funny, and also a an opportunity for spiritual learning
 I cannot do everything I would like to do, let alone the vending ministry expanding list of tasks tailored to consumer tastes
 I will do lots of things with less skill than I think optimal and far short of perfection
 Saying no is a spiritual practice as much as saying yes
 If I am going to be awake in the middle of the night, I can at least spend the time focusing on the Holy and tending my prayer lists.
 Every pain is a chance for prayer, every breath a chance to praise.
 There are reasons for thanksgiving in every day. Really. Truly. Every day.

Lately, I’ve been having vocal troubles. I’ve been attached to my voice proud of the work I’ve done in learning how to use this gift. Now I’m learning non-attachment, and how to handle shame and pity and rejection all over again. I would not wish the experience on anyone, but like other challenging experiences, there are blessings to wrest from the misery. Part of my growing faith is from meeting the Beloved every day, down by this riverside, in thanks, in laughter, and in the Beloved’s encouragement while I wrestle for the next blessing.

Bio: Naomi King is a Unitarian Universalist Christian minister, who primarily ministers via social media and digital devices. She has lived with chronic illness her entire life and chronic pain since her teens. She loves to read, knit, cook, hunt fossils, and garden. She is often found praying, wondering, and working from bed, trusting in the Beloved.

Bo is a long time friend and prolific writer. I asked Bo a few weeks back if he would be willing to write a guest post for The Whiskey Preacher and this is what he sent me! You can checkout some of Bo’s other musing at his blog Voodo Heart or follow him on twitter by clicking here! As always we would love your feedback!

Shape Shifting: Thoughts for Preachers, Prophets and Travelers
Guest Post By Bo Liles

I had a thought the other day. What if everything we ever thought about ministry was wrong? What if the career aspirations and lines of succession and hopes for longevity were never the point for those who are called? What if, for a moment, we could free ourselves of the burden of being ministers, being preachers, being elders – and rather, just be followers of Jesus? Would the church universal collapse, as we seem to act as if it would under such a paradigm shift? Would Christ be less resurrected and represented if we laid down our personal crosses of titles and responsibilities to take up His cross of openness, love and denial of our personal motivations? For the truth is this: the Author of this Creation has shown that Redemption through Jesus was always going to be offered, no matter who or what stood to speak for the divine.

We are simply travelers. Born in a world and culture without a say in the matter, we come with a big (heart/soul) wall in which many things are written – by our parents (or lack thereof), family, friends, our own reactions to the emotions brought on by this foreign culture we find ourselves assimilating to as we grow up. We move through life as cultural travelers, taking in the sights and sounds of family and group dynamics, religion, pop culture, politics, love/loss, success/failure. Humanity, unlike a large number of the other species on Earth, has defined itself as travelers of life, in that our constant analysis and deconstruction of the weight of intellect and emotion in our lives never seems to allow us to settle comfortably into an existence of instinct and routine – like many of the other mammals who share the planet. Without risking sounding like a NatGeo documentary, we are simply aware that there is another part of us existing on a dimension that we are tethered to, but cannot always define and classify with the natural world tools of science and logic. We call this spiritual, of the soul. God-DNA, etc. And in this ache for connection to meaning in the mystery, humanity in all its restless traveling gave ourselves a construct: religion.

You and I can read libraries full of books on the history and development of religion, both ancient and post-modern. One could analyze, cross-reference and compare until our final breath passes – and I wonder if in our desire to have THE ANSWER if we missed the point. Pastoral ministry, and the very idea of leadership, was born out of some determination that humanity is always seeking to define itself by the individuality of its persons. Those either smart enough or power-hungry enough often rise to the forefront of those who wish to label and define those in their world and culture. And why do we resort to labels, and eventually, stereotypes? Simply put, we want to feel special. We want to be talented and gifted and accepted. So, it seems those who had the slightest proclivity towards the consideration of spiritual matters either labeled themselves, or were slapped with the label of preacher/prophet/rabbi/sage/minister.

And here we are today. And while our culture is vastly more diverse than just Judeo-Christian traditions, I would disclose that, as a Christian and with respect to the reader, that I would never attempt to write on those religious traditions that are foreign to my own journey. In that regard, we see that the Western world so dominated by Christianity is choked full of people who wear the label of minister, pastor, elder, counselor, therapist, advisor, writer, blogger, or media commentator. What makes any of us wearing these labels qualified to speak on and/or for God (although it seems that we spend most of our energy speaking on/about other people) is really a mystery to me, and possibly to God Him/Herself? The fact is that religion has courageously attempted to do the impossible, which is to speak of God and our connection to this force, this undercurrent within existence that we cannot seem to forcibly remove ourselves from as a species (with all apologies to my atheist/agnostic friends, the force of spirituality, and thus religion, in culture is too large, vocal and ever-changing to deny its impact and importance). We want to know what it all means, and religion became our chosen conduit.

The problem is this: when did it become fully accepted that a numbered few of us could stand and speak/question/answer for the whole of us? Can we unequivocally say that this is a set-in-stone commandment given from God? We have to admit that the source material was written down by the very people claiming to be “called” therefore our intellectual honesty must admit there is a bias to be considered. This is not to say that any of us are not called, because we trust in the words of Scripture in Matthew 22:14 that “many are called, but few are chosen” (NRS). But what exactly does this mean? That God calls many, but God prefers an inner circle of the Billy Grahams and Popes of the world? This also doesn’t make sense, as we see the need for Christianity to divorce itself from a theology that demands a schizophrenic God. Conversely, I prefer the connotation of The Message transliterated version: “Many get invited, but only a few make it” (MSG). Only a few make it.

Why is this? Why is it that increasing numbers of those ordained in Christian ministry are leaving their appointments and titles behind? Why does the spectrum of Christian faith traditions have less and less young people choosing traditional ministry paths? The answer is is the question, in the history of religion itself.

From the church legitimized by Constantine, to the medieval Popes, to the consolidated power of megachurch pastors and denominal conferences alike – the church universal mistakenly allowed ourselves to shape shift the role of minister from called servant to career vocation. And guess what? In a culture that feeds on reality-show worthiness and (at most) 30 minute attention spans, the conventional role of minister-as-purveyor-of-knowledge has been usurped by more voices than can be heard by any one person. So, why such an obsession for many of us to live up to any standard of religious vocation, whether orthodox or emergent? This is not to say that any of us should be denied making a living doing that which we love. I know I would