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Merry Christmas!

In forty years of it, I found that a pastor could only credibly serve if s/he/I could truly identify-with from having same or similar life experiences, such that empathy is possible. Not that one is there, but that one has been there.

Not to wander too far from my thought this morning, but I realized in “candidating” for pulpits of parishes in Central Pennsylvania (before finding out that the Trinity, Apalachicola pulpit was vacant) that a yankee blue collar, anglo-catholic-affected parish near Harrisburg would not be a “good fit”, either for me or for them. Of outlook and life experiences, we had nothing in common. Clearly, the bishop recognized this too, as I realized when he asked me after my visit there, whether I thought it was “a good fit”, his words, and the sense of it became clear.

In that spring 1984 of “candidating” and visiting several churches, I received a call (which, falling back in love with Apalachicola and wanting to come home, I declined) from a different parish that would have been a good fit, and that other parish called a rough-hewn priest who fit beautifully and served there wonderfully for many years.

Why did I write that? Because for the past five or six years, in experiencing the hatreds and divisions in America, I have agonized uncomprehendingly that so many people around me see life so differently, even “a-hundred-‘n-eighty-out”, from the way I see things. Not so much religion, though that also to a degree, but politics and social issues.

Yesterday or the day before, I spotted an article in Haaretz, that I traced to Vox (Haaretz only lets me, a nonpaying guest, read a tempting taste before cutting me off, thinking they’ve hooked me into paying, but many things Haaretz prints can also be found elsewhere online free if I search), and read; and resolved to order a couple of books and read more deeply.

Because instead of avoiding or even contemning those whose views are to me so incomprehensibly opposite to mine, my world may be enlightened, and I may be better with and for both them and myself. We differ in so many ways, and because of where I have been in life these eighty-five years, I cannot join their world, nor they mine, but maybe I can learn to empathize, or at least better understand. It may help me close my side of divisive distances.

I hope so.

https://www.vox.com/2016/9/6/12803636/arlie-hochschild-strangers-land-louisiana-trump

https://www.wamc.org/post/sociologist-arlie-hochschild-discusses-2020-election