Unfinished Proposal
A cursor pulses in a word document, already filled with words that aren’t my own, but that serve as questions and clarifiers for a book proposal. The pulsing is asking, why won’t you finish this and send it off?
It’s a good question from an inanimate cursor.
I spent six years on doctoral work and seventeen years as a pastor to write this academic dissertation and yet, I am apathetic about it reaching a future audience. Perhaps it is the lingering pain of rejection from a publisher, perhaps it is my overall frustration with Christian leaders, and perhaps I’ve given up on the viability of pastoring and church all together.
To be fair, to me, I’ve been busy in a way that is foreign to my past self and still seems foreign to my present self. Standing on a ridgetop with a shovel in hand, or an impact driver in hand, or a splinter in hand as the ravens tussle in the sky is a quick way to forget that people might be interested in learning how a trinitarian vision for shared leadership could inspire their pastoral approach to hospitality. And still, I have veered from the academic and transferred my theology into the dirt. Every rock wrestled from the latest trench I’ve dug is as diverse and bewildering as any future I could imagine as a pulpit preacher or community organizer.
Most days all I want to do is walk to the overlook with my wife and dog, say “Hi Rio,” and then head home to our renovated Airstream as strings of words fall into my brain, and eventually my heart, like the time I wrote:
In my failure of nerve to navigate the Christian publishing world, I find myself living out a Carl Jung quote which has stitched itself into my skin so I can’t help but carry it with me everywhere I go. I don’t know much about Jung as a person, and have only encountered him in extended quotes, but in this case he was speaking to me. He said, “My pilgrim’s progress has been to climb down a thousand ladders until I could finally reach out a hand of friendship to the little clod of earth that I am.”
My dissertation seems to be situated high atop those thousand ladders, and while that might be a lie, it is how it can feel when a lofty academic treatise lingers so far from the clods of earth I’m holding and the one I am befriending.
Chris, I get it. Let me provide another perspective. I never wanted a PhD. My wife talked me into it because of the access argument, "you will have access to people and places to speak the truth to power. It's a good argument and it was 100 percent true. If you are like me, and you want to change the world, or at least what of it you can, it's worth it. "Shalom and the Community of Creation" is what became of my dissertation. I used the perspective more than any data, and it served me well. Most bad books are written from good dissertations (if there is such a thing), but they give us the perspective to write what is on our hearts. Academia is a world that is a million miles away from my heart and where I live. I never wanted to teach in that setting, but it was what provided a living for my family at the time. Besides, without that degree, I could have never met wonderful people like you! Just something to consider.