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By Root 486 0

despising me, I got the distinct impression that it was not about me at all. I reminded them of someone else who was no longer around but who had made such a large dent in their lives that they were still trying to work it out. In a church where male clergy are often referred to as Father, I should not have been surprised that some people thought of me as Mother, especially since I had already recognized that dynamic from my side. What did surprise me was the depth of feeling I could evoke in people by doing a small kindness on the one hand or botching a small detail on the other. Once, when I sent a card to a new church member without remembering that she used her maiden name instead of her husband’s, I received such a hostile telephone call from her that I felt stunned for the better part of an hour.

The real problem with transference for clergy without the skills to deal with it is that it feeds our sense that we are more powerful than we really are. While I was still trying to find someone who could teach me these skills, I had a hard time saying no to those who believed I had the power to help them, even when what they wanted me to do seemed futile to me. When they asked me to call on unchurched friends of theirs in the hospital, I went although I knew that those poor people had no interest in seeing me. When they asked me to talk to their rebellious teenagers, I did so even when I believed that the rebellion was in order. I even prayed for one couple to find water on the property where they hoped to build a house, although I did not believe that God was in the well-drilling business. When another couple came out of church one Sunday morning and asked me if I could arrange good weather for a family picnic that afternoon, I drew the line. “Sorry, but I don’t do weather,” I said. “I’m a priest, not a witch.”

When they came out of church the following Sunday and thanked me for arranging the good weather, I had fresh occasion to wonder whether my priesthood was mine to define at all. It was not “my” priesthood, of course. It was Christ’s priesthood, in which the church allowed me to participate, but there were days when I wondered what Jesus would have done if he had been called upon to recognize graduating seniors in church, prepare an annual report for the bishop, or speak for fifteen minutes over chicken-fried steak to the Rotary Club. In his absence, I was called upon to do so many things that seemed to have nothing to do with the worship of God that I began to envy specialists like my father the psychotherapist, who could say things such as, “I’m sorry, but our time is up now,” or “I wish I could help you, but my client load is full.”

On my worst nights I lay in bed feeling like a single parent, unable to sleep because I knew I did not have enough love in me to go around. God was the boundless lover, but for many people God was the parent who had left. They still read about him in the Bible and sang about him in hymns. They still believed in his reality, which made it even harder to accept his apparent lack of interest in them. They waited for messages from him that did not arrive. They prepared their hearts for meetings that never happened. They listened to other Christians speak as if God showed up every night for supper, leaving them to wonder what they had done wrong to make God go off and start another family.

I suppose I could have helped them see how their life histories deepened their distress or given them some more grownup ways of conceiving of God, but few were interested in that. We were engaged in a more ancient drama, wrestling far more primitive fears. Because I was wedded to the One who was gone, I stood in for him. I took many of the blows intended for him and received much of the adulation. I kept the old stories about him alive and told some new ones as proof of his ongoing vitality. I blessed, fed, and forgave the children in his name, reassuring them that their fears were ungrounded and their hopes well placed. The unspoken deal, I think, was that as long as I did this, no one would openly