Tuesday, January 29, 2019

A Curmudgeonly Word to New Clergy, Seminarians, and Divinity School Students

I've just read some of your essays.  I was looking forward to it, as I've sat at meetings and listened to you explain the church and the world to me, and wanted to see the rational, historical basis for your observations rendered thoughtfully on paper an electronic screen.

Yeah, well I hope for a lot of things.

Some advice that you will ignore:

1.  Stop quoting C.S. Lewis.  He was a fine apologist for our particular branch of faith, but he also belonged to that tweedy world that you, sometimes in the same breath, ridicule as being "pale, male, and stale".  Besides, those of us who are older have not only quoted him ourselves, excessively, but have actually read the books from which the quotations come.  We don't need a primer in Lewis.

2.  Speaking of which, in popular fiction, read something in addition to the Harry Potter series.  It's juvenile and too clever by half and also represents that tweedy world.  I think, for all of your talk about intersectionality, you actually want to be a mid-century Oxford don or English public [what we call "private" in the U.S.] school student.  I've never been an Oxbridge don, but I have some equivalent experience in the Ivy League, and I did attend a British public school, and the image conjured by that privileged Rowling woman and the production staff of Masterpiece Theatre is fantasy.

3.  Find a used copy, or even the latest edition, of The Elements of Style by Strunk and White.  You should like it as it's ancient and tweedy.  You will spend a remarkable time in your clergy career writing all sorts of things in all sorts of media.  It would be best if you knew how to punctuate, build a sentence, and shape a paragraph.  I appreciate that your teachers probably didn't know how to do these things, either, and were busy teaching how to be "a good person" according their personal standard of good, but you will find it invaluable.

4.  Please don't use vulgarity or street language to punctuate your points.  It doesn't work.  Also, if you do so in a parish newsletter or, God forbid, from the pulpit, you will lose your audience.  And your job.

5.  Before you spend valuable essay time and space explaining to your reader who Henri Nouwen was, consider that, while you may feel that you have "discovered" him, with so many of his books still in print, that probably isn't the case.  Also, it's possible that your reader was a contemporary of Nouwen's, knew him, and was on a first name basis with him.  You just wasted 200 words and I-don't-know how many essay minutes telling the reader something he already knows more intimately than you.

Look, I applaud your courage in choosing this as a career [sorry, but it is rarely a calling], especially as the job market, and the job, is in the process of evaporation.  However, if you wish to realize your self-image as a liberator of the church, one whose ideas are of an original and sublime nature, you're going to have to prove it with something other than attitude and feelings.  You'll also have to display some serious and pragmatic thinking.  The sacred orders have enough poseurs.