Top Highlights

• Exploring this territory and praying this prayer, I looked for a spirituality adequate to my vocation. Now, thirty years later, I am ready to give witness to the exploration and the prayer. I do it with considerable urgency, for I come across pastor after pastor standing bewildered before the same or a similar abyss.
• Sadly, many turn back, abandoning their ordained vocation for a religious job. I don’t want any of these men and women, whom I count my colleagues and friends, to turn back.
• What is essential for pastors is that we focus on our particular “pestilence that stalks at noonday.” In our eagerness to be sympathetic to others and meet their needs, to equip them with a spirituality adequate to their discipleship, we must not fail to take with full seriousness our straits, lest when we have saved others we ourselves should be c...
• Why do pastors have such a difficult time being pastors? Because we are awash in idolatry. Where two or three are gathered together and the name of God comes up, a committee is formed for making an idol.
• Vocational holiness, in deliberate opposition to career idolatry, is my subject. Personal holiness, the lifelong process by which our hearts and minds and bodies are conformed to Christ, is more often addressed.