Toward the end of his life, Napoleon is supposed to have said of Elba, "Able was I ere I saw Elba." Elba is the Mediterranean island to which Napoleon was exiled in 1814 after a life of achievement and conquest. Aside from the fact that this statement says the same thing, whether read from left to right or right to left, it is full of pathos. If indeed Napoleon said it, he was expressing in a few choice words his own sense of personal tragedy, loss, and decline. Although he ruled the island before moving into further exile on St. Helena, Elba marked the time and place of his personal and professional collapse.
The other day I heard a highly successful but disheartened pastor use Napoleon's sentence to describe the depletion he had been feeling since pastoring a church from which he had recently moved. (I use his story with his permission.) He had not sought his move, but he felt it had been a kind of redemption for him. He described scuffling with feelings of clinical depression and once or twice experiencing involuntary suicidal urges. In recounting his ongoing inner battle, he concluded with a wan smile, "Able was I ere I saw ..." and he named his former church.
I was surprised to hear such a confession from him, because he is too obviously productive and positive a person for anyone to suspect that such turmoil could twist about within him. It was evident that much of his set-in perception of reduction was due to a couple of high-profile interpersonal crises he had worked through with members of his former congregation. Along with these, he had been chronically entangled with one or two critical, difficult people, who had learned well just how to wield their verbal lashes and target their cunning probes.
As I thought about him, I could not help thinking that he is one of many pastors who in one way or another are walking about amid the flames of similar furnaces. Are you one of them?
I am not about to broadcast unfounded comfort throughout the ranks. But I know something, at least, must be said when I read that 80 percent of North American clergy believe ministry has affected their families negatively, 70 percent report a lower self-esteem now than when they began their ministry, 40 percent say they experience serious conflict with a parishioner at least once a month, and 70 percent confess to not having someone they consider a close friend. 1
Looking at such percentages and the quality of pain they imply, I think of the dramatic time when three Hebrew "worthies" found themselves in a Babylonian furnace where almost mysteriously they were personally accompanied by the fabulous, recognizable presence of a Fourth.
They were "ministers" trying to maintain their integrity, and in so doing they were indicted by the hostile politically and legally correct watchdogs of the day. Frightened and embarrassed, yet with their heads up, they were publicly hauled into a hostile court and angrily sentenced to a seven-times heated furnace. In that desperate moment, alive and looking about, they discovered Jesus Himself right there in it with them. Recognizing such a presence with them, the hostile authorities could do nothing but let them go. There is no need, is there, to say more to pastors, even disheartened ones? The trick is not to dismiss the reality so beautifully personified in this story as impractical or detached from the heat of your furnace or mine. The truth of the Presence in the fire lies at the heart of Christian faith.
But let's shift the metaphor from fire to ice. I have a love for the poetry of T. S. Eliot, especially that which flowed from his soul after he became a Christian. In his poem, The Waste Land, there is a magnificent, prosaic allusion probably to the desperately life-threatening Antarctic expedition of Ernest Shackleton:2
Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded.
I do not know whether a man or a woman
---But who is that on the other side of you?3
In the whiteout swirl of a deathly Antarctic iceland and the interminable plod to simply keep alive, is it just "you and I together," single file? No, as on that awfully terrible, awfully wonderful road to Emmaus, "there is always another one walking beside you."
"When I count" it's only you and me." But "when I look" there is always that Other. Look now, look long, and look carefully with me.
1 From results of a 1991 Survey of Pastors
conducted by Fuller Institute of Church
Growth. Referred to by H. B. London, Jr. and
Neil B. Wiseman, Pastors at Risk (Colorado
Springs, Colo.: Victor Books, 1993), 22.
2 From Notes on The Wasteland. Selected
Poems T. S. Eliot (San Diego: Harcourt and
Brace, 1964), 73.
3 Ibid., 65.
