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Open Secrets: A Spiritual
Journey Through a Country Church
By Richard Lischer. Doubleday, 2001. 239 pages, $22.95.
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It was the moment the young pastor had been anticipating for nearly
half of his life. As he wound his way through the faded corn and soybean
fields of southern Illinois, he was on the lookout for Cana Lutheran
Church, where he would soon begin his first pastorate. He drove through
the small town nearest the church without even slowing down. Surveying
the countryside around it, he began to grow uneasy as he thought of
an Ingmar Bergman film: “Swedish winterlight exposing rot and
depression in rural Lutherans.”
Trying not to think about his newly acquired Ph.D. in
theology and its apparent irrelevance to this place, the young man
soon reached the door of his church. It was his moment of truth, “like
the first glimpse of a spouse in an arranged marriage.” There
he encountered a brick building topped by a steeple with a copper
cross from which one arm was missing. Next door was a nondescript
parsonage that needed paint, soon to become home for the pastor, his
pregnant wife, and young child. He couldn’t help feeling a crushing
sense of disappointment. “So this is what has been prepared for
me.”
Thus the reader of Richard Lischer’s memoir Open
Secrets: A Spiritual Journey Through a Country Church is swept up
into a candid account of the Duke Divinity professor’s first
three years of parish ministry. In a story that reveals the inner
workings of both parish and pastor, we learn about the joys, the sorrows,
and the dilemmas of ministry in this “church of the one-armed
cross.” He employs a sharp eye and a keen wit to weave an engaging
narrative about the transformation of innocence into wisdom that is
often poignant, at times hilarious, and always compassionate. So penetrating
are its lessons about theology and life that the book seems destined
to become a classic, akin to George Bernanos’s Diary of a Country
Priest.
I was fascinated by the author’s description of his
years of preparation for ministry. As an adolescent, he left home
to attend one of his denomination’s prep schools for aspiring
clergy, and there he encountered a strange new world. He and his teenage
classmates were trained in Lutheran orthodoxy, a complex set of rules
that imparted “the safe spirituality of structure but not of
passion or abandonment.” Likening it at times to a penal colony
where the boys rebelled by drinking beer and playing “epic poker
games,” he encountered a nihilism beyond anything he would ever
experience again. The young Lutherans marched through their education
in lockstep fashion, putting “one foot ahead of another as if
following snowprints through a Wisconsin woods, but with no horizon
in view.” As a clergywoman trained only a few years after the
author, I found this to be an entirely new perspective on seminary.
In the absence of any footprints to follow, I and my female colleagues
would have likened our experience to that of skydivers parachuting
over uncharted territory.
As the new pastor began his ministry with the people of
Cana (for privacy reasons, Lischer obscures the real name of the church),
he struggled with disillusionment. He wondered: Would he simply remain
a “misshelved book” waiting for someone to discover him?
Nevertheless, he immersed himself in his work, and soon realized that
he still had a few things to learn.
With disarming honesty, Lischer endears himself to the
reader by confessing his frequent mistakes. Regarding his preaching,
the man destined to become a homiletics professor, Duke’s James
T. and Alice Mead Cleland Professor of Preaching, explains that “in
those days the gospel lived or died by my personal performance. My
preaching was a small cloud of glory that followed me around and hung
like a canopy over the pulpit whenever I occupied it.” Mercifully,
he got over this deadly preoccupation with himself, a potential pitfall
for any preacher.
Over the course of his three-year ministry at Cana, the
novice pastor was introduced to the most demanding, the most rewarding,
and the most mundane tasks of ministry. He was called to celebrate
marriages, baptize dying infants, counsel broken families, and hear
confessions. He fearlessly intervened in an attempted suicide, befriended
a pregnant teenager, and confronted a greedy mortician. He even maneuvered
a wife abuser into his office, where he had him arrested, and then
fretted over all the ways the man could retaliate after his release.
Best of all, the sophisticated suburbanite sought simply
to be with his rural parishioners, in places as unappealing as a hog-killing
in a church member’s backyard or the dingy cafeteria of the local
steel mill. Even though his pride seemed to prevent him from ever
perfecting this aspect of pastoral care, his efforts were a sign of
his genuine affection and regard for his flock and their community.
As Pastor Lischer grew into a seasoned minister, his best
teachers proved to be the parishioners themselves. They were exemplified
by such faithful disciples as the thirteen-year-old girl stricken
with cerebral palsy and those who cared for her, the cemetery committee
determined to preserve the dignity of the bereaved, and all those
who responded to the needs of an unwed mother. With the help of many
others, they offered their pastor a crash course in the practices
of their faith—praying, trusting, serving, healing, caring, forgiving,
rebuking but still reconciling. Through a determined but sometimes
faltering effort to live by these premises of Christianity, pastor
and parish together learned to bring the gospel to bear on their imperfect
world and formed a community saved not by virtue but by grace.
The story comes to a gracious close as the one-armed cross
is repaired in time for the church’s 125th anniversary celebration
and the Lischers’ farewell. With an eye to the future, the people
of Cana inserted a time capsule in the cornerstone of the church,
confident that their faith community would be sustained for generations
to come. Another pastor had come and gone, but neither he nor they
would ever be the same.
-Nancy Ferree-Clark
Ferree-Clark '75 is minister to the congregation
of Duke Chapel.
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