All Hands Stand By to Repel Boarders
Tales from Life as a Lutheran Pastor
Cordell Strug
All Hands Stand By to Repel Boarders
Tales from Life as a Lutheran Pastor
Copyright © 2013 Cordell Strug. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.
Resource Publications
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199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3
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ISBN 13: 978-1-62564-163-2
EISBN 13: 978-1-62189-795-8
Manufactured in the U.S.A.
Scripture quotations, unless otherwise marked, are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, Copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
To the pastors of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America
I consider the days of old,
and remember the years of long ago.
I commune with my heart in the night;
I meditate and search my spirit . . .
—Psalm 77:5–6
All remembrance of things past is fiction . . .
—Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast (fragments)
. . . I dare say I am a much more annoying
person than I know.
—C. S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms
Acknowledgments
Several people deserve thanks for agreeing to look at parts of this writing as it was taking shape, and for offering comments and suggestions: Fred Gaiser, Peter Geisendorfer-Lindgren, Gary and Ruth Halverson, Arland Hultgren, Arland Jacobson, Harold Lohr, Ken Losch, Mary Preus, Carrie and Robert Smith, Mary Carol Strug, Gary Taylor. Paul Sponheim and Rick Hest provided extensive commentary on each part. Above all, I must thank Sylvia Ruud, who saw the first fragments of this and saw what they might be. She urged them towards clarity, organization, and completion. She saw the possibilities for illustration and chose the photographs. This book would not have taken shape as it has without her.
Prologue: Tacit Knowledge
When I attended seminary, most of my teachers were ordained, but my New Testament Greek teacher was a layperson, Mary Preus. She had that radiant blend of beauty, brilliance, erudition, humor, and generosity that could renew your faith in life and human possibility, until you met the next dozen or so people. Then you knew what a rare gift she was to anyone who met her. I liked her a lot.
Since I was ten years older than most of my classmates, I tended to stand out a little. But I stood out more for Mrs. Preus, as we always called her with great respect, because I had taken three years of Latin at a Roman Catholic high school. So I picked up the Greek grammar easily and, at least as important, I got all of her jokes. There’s a kind of humor, with a set of allusions, that flourishes among Latin students and Classics majors, which I despair of communicating to outsiders but which is instantly grasped within the fold.
It goes like this:
One year, I signed up for a seminar Mrs. Preus offered in Classical Greek. Obviously, only the highest of highflyers signed up for this. When she walked in and saw who we were, she smiled and said, “I should toss an apple on the table and say ‘This is for the smartest.’” Get it? You either know or don’t know that she’s referring to the beauty contest that started the Trojan war and, thus, you will think her remark is either hilarious and wickedly challenging or just a bit odd and maybe a little offensive.
Once I was talking with another student in a corridor lined by faculty offices. Mrs. Preus peeked out of her door and said, “You two have studied Latin. Come read this.”
She had taped an article from Punch on her door that told a love story about a Roman farmer and his beloved in the style, sentence structure, and limited vocabulary of the old beginning-Latin grammars. The three of us bent our heads together, read silently, giggled in unison, read, giggled, right down the page. It’s a tribute to the parodist that we sounded like we had practiced laughing on cue for weeks. But, without that shared background, both the humor and the presence of that article on a seminary faculty door would be beyond comprehension.
Another time, I was sitting next to Mrs. Preus at a lecture that must have been about the early church because somehow the Visigoths came up.
Mrs. Preus elbowed me and whispered, “The Visigoths weren’t the worst of the barbarians.”
I smiled, waiting.
She continued, “The Invisigoths were the worst.” Now she waited, eyes bright, smile tugging at her mouth, expectant.
I drove in the nail: “Because you couldn’t see them.”
A quick little nod, an almost silent chuckle, return to the lecture. If you don’t find encounters like this hilarious, I probably can’t help you.
When you are finally certified for ordination and there is a congregation that has issued you a call to serve as a pastor, then and only then are you ordained. For this ceremony, you also must have someone who is willing to present you as a candidate. I always found this an attractive part of church life, that so often there are occasions when our own voice is not enough and others must speak for us.
Most ordinands choose a pastor: someone they grew up with, a teacher they studied with. For reasons I can no longer recover, though my choice still seems natural and right, I asked Mrs. Preus to be my sponsor. Since I had a reputation as a fairly formal person, with a high view of liturgy and ministry, this might have surprised some people.
But as Mrs. Preus often said, someone who had grown up in a parsonage as she did, especially with a name like Preus, could not really be considered a layperson. (Let me add that Preus was her maiden name. She married another Preus, another pastor.)
Now, if you are a Lutheran of a certain age and background, you will already know what she meant. This is my second example of tacit knowledge. When I entered seminary and started picking up the cues and shorthand of Lutheran church politics, the name of Preus was something like the name of Daley in Chicago or that of Kennedy in Massachusetts: instantly recognizable, conjuring up long service, enduring presence, power both visible and silent, backroom deals, and a kind of royal privilege. The difference would be that there were more of them. It would be as though half the governors and mayors in the United States were all Kennedys, the most distant relation being third cousin.
Now to my point of prologue: I have been speaking of worlds I grew up in and worlds I lived in for years, somewhat closed worlds that can still be made accessible. But these reflections are necessary prologue to all that follows—the memories, stories, fictions of my years as a Lutheran pastor in rural Minnesota. That was a world I see as more closed than my examples, less open to the outsider.
Serving pastors socialize with very few people that aren’t pastors or the families of pastors. They may appear to. You may think I’m exaggerating. But they don’t really. Every pastor knows: one unguarded word to even your most trusted friend, and an entire community can turn against you. Instantly.
There’s an oddness to parsonage life, life in the fishbowl, the glass house. If I say I would much rather do a funeral than a wedding,