Prophetic and Pastoral: The Yin and Yang of Western Religion
I made reference in yesterday’s article about church ecology to prophets and the visionary gap that exists between them and their followers (disciples)… how those who come after usually struggle (often unsuccessfully) to see what the prophet sees and do what the prophet would have done. I’ve also made reference in my article about who my audience is, to my own calling toward the prophetic. An article that digs deeper into the tensions and the relationship between prophetic voice and pastoral care is something that’s been on my mind.
I think there’s an oversimplified version where we can say that there is a Ven diagram with a bubble for prophetic voice on the left and a bubble for pastoral care on the right, with an overlap in the middle. And we could talk about how the pastoral without the prophetic tends to keep people soothed and cared for (or more harshly — sedated). While the prophetic without the pastoral tends to alienate and injure (a leader with a vision but no followers). We could say that the middle of the Ven diagram is where both talents meet, people are cared for enough to take the risks demanded by the prophetic vision, strengthening both the bonds of community and the sense of destiny and purpose and progress… None of this is wrong, or bad analysis, or untrue in important ways. And. I want to go deeper. I want to recomplicate instead of oversimplify. I want to turn a straightforward and shallow answer into a deeper question that deserves and demands more struggle — from the concepts and from us.
Let’s begin this way: hold in your minds eye that Ven diagram we pictured above, big area on the left, big area on the right, modest overlapping space in the middle… Instead of labeling the spaces — what if the heart, the bullseye in the middle of the overlap space, is the true and single-point intersection of prophetic vision and pastoral care? What if all the other areas are near-enemies of varying intensity? What if prophetic vision devoid of pastoral care isn’t even a prophetic vision worthy of the name — what if it is a near-enemy of prophecy itself, a false and falsified prophetic-style thought. What if it is a mental projection of what we think a prophecy should be — an idea we can boast about and promote and argue about, but still just an idea. A limited, ego-based, human idea. As I like to tell my son, the first step on the path to wisdom is realizing that your mind is a thought-generating machine — you are not your thoughts, you are the awareness that is aware of the thought, and furthermore, not every thought you think is true — discernment (telling the difference between true and untrue) is the job of your awareness (which is different than having even more analytical thoughts about the first thought). Okay, maybe that was more like the first 5 steps to the first landing on the pathway to wisdom — brevity ain’t my thing.
Anyway, back to our Ven diagram — what if the big area on the left is now labeled ‘ideas and mental projections about prophecy’ or ‘things that are wrong with me or with the world that need to get fixed’ or any other version of ‘things that I know are not right/okay with how things are.” As Elder** Tolle rightly points out, all of these are egoic patterns — when we define something as ‘wrong’ then we get to be ‘right’, this is a major mechanism for ego self-maintenance. To reference an earlier psychological article, it keeps us WEIRD+ (i.e. stuck in an immature stage of development). And what if all that space outside the intersection on the right, what if that’s not even true pastoral care? What if it is caretaking in that near enemy way that promotes unhealthy dependency, that lulls people into complacency, that numbs the pressures, provocations, and stimuli that the person needs to grow and change and evolve — to become most fully themselves, ‘freed from all enchantments’. What if the central intersecting space is a Yin and Yang of the prophetic and pastoral energies locked in eternal, swirling flux as they invite us to struggle with this simple truth: A true prophecy tugs at the heartstrings of a people, compelling them to struggle to realize, together, the better dreams conjured by the better angels of their nature. It is not an invitation to ease or comfort — it is an invitation to struggle. It is not an individual dream, it is a collective dream — although it so often appears clearly to only a few — when those few put the dream on their lips, when they whisper it into the ears of their flock, the hearer knows that it has uncovered a truth that had already resided within them. Not an idea or an ideal or a projection or a comfort, but a truth. A truth native to their own soul. To borrow the words of Elder Martin Shaw, the true (pastoral) prophet ‘Sings old songs you’ve waited your whole life to hear.’
** I use Elder as a signifier of respect for people whom I see as Elders from whom I am/have learned and wish to acknowledge. When the reference is confusing I’ll try to use First and Last name — so I won’t leave you hanging wandering who Elder Smith is… this one is for Eckhart Tolle. The single last name is adequate (to me) when a Google search of that single name puts the person I mean right at the top.
