Practicing the Present

Dear Gardening Pianists:

I became a pastor just as mainline Protestantism was on the decline. I’ve never served a congregation that didn’t have members with fond memories of having significantly more members, larger programs and ever-expanding budgets; but that’s okay. My call to and preparation for ministry occurred in the 1980s, not the 1950s, so any wistful notion that I could have been a better pastor if I had started before I was born strikes me as silly. We are called to work, serve, pray and plan in the time we find ourselves; it is the only time in which God is present.  C. S. Lewis noted that the one prayer God almost never grants is “encore.” Lewis wrote that our nostalgia for “golden moments in the past” can be nourishing and sustaining only if we see them for what they are—memories, not blueprints. “Properly bedded down in a past which we do not miserably try to conjure back, they will send up exquisite growths,” Lewis wrote. “Leave the bulbs alone, and the new flowers will come up. Grub them up and hope, by fondling and sniffing, to get last year’s blooms, and you will get nothing.” (Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer, 1964)

Perhaps because it is Annual Meeting time, I’m thinking about our past. It’s so tempting to fill in the trend lines and conclude we’re not anything like we used to be, but such observation tends to cloud the evidence that we happen to be where God has placed us; any other conclusion doubts God’s sovereignty. If we’re looking for the presence of God, the only place we can search is in the present. All other times are inaccessible and, as such, beyond the discernable reach of divine revelation. If we begin to teach how God was more accessible, freer to work, more greatly discerned in days gone by, we are through wistful memory hamstringing God’s current and active revelation.

We’re always more comfortable with the past—we know we survived it. The present, on the other hand, is a foreign land. The future, too, can be a scary place, because we do not yet know how to get there. The tools we’ll need to navigate what’s to come have not yet been invented, and much of what we think is useful will be rendered obsolete; that’s just how it works.

In nearly every congregation I’ve served, I’ve been blessed to work with gifted musicians. While my parents spent a fortune on piano lessons, I never came close to being a pianist. I was always fixated on playing whole pieces, loving the grand dramatic parts, with little attention to the notes in between. But having spent many years listening while real musicians rehearse, I’ve come to realize how music requires deep attention to the notes being played in each moment. A stumbled fingering requires slow repeated articulation, gradually accelerated into mastery. In many ways, the true musician allows the larger work to take care of itself. A previous error or upcoming complexity cannot distract from the present phrase any more than last year’s reviews should distract from today’s practice. The larger masterpiece is always constructed from a series of intimate and immediate interpretations; to avoid that focus is to destroy the experience.

We’ve finished 2024, and our Annual Report grants a review of our performance; we’ll never be on that stage again. There are notes and phrases that need our attention today, a present Spirit that helps us attend to our immediate work. Or to mix my metaphor back to C.S. Lewis, 2024’s harvest has passed; we’ve soil to tend for 2025, so no point dredging up last year’s blooms.

Learning why I’m bad at both piano and gardening, I remain,

With Love,
Jonathan Krogh
Your Pastor