Pastor Dale Returns

Seventy Times

Chapter 31: Pastor Dale Returns

Dale Hargrove arrived on a Thursday in December with a box of glazed donuts and a silence that Ezra had not heard from him before.

It was not the silence of a man who had nothing to say. Dale always had something to say. It was the silence of a man who had been told, two months ago, that the thing he wanted to say was a performance, and who had taken the instruction seriously enough to spend two months learning how to be present without performing, which was a discipline that Dale's pastoral training had not provided and that Ezra's correction had required, and the requiring was an act of pastoral care that Dale had not recognized as such until his wife, Martha, had said over dinner three weeks ago, "He wasn't shutting you down. He was teaching you to shut up. There's a difference."

Martha Hargrove was a woman whose directness exceeded her husband's theology and whose theology, while less formal, was more practical. Dale had considered her observation and had determined that she was correct, which was a determination he arrived at more frequently than he admitted publicly, because admitting that your wife's theology was more practical than yours was a concession that a man who had been preaching for twenty-two years was not equipped to make in front of his congregation but was equipped to make in the privacy of his marriage, which was the room where most of Dale's actual growth occurred.

"Ezra," Dale said.

"Dale."

"Donuts."

"I see them."

Dale set the box on the desk. He sat in the visitor's chair. He did not put his hands on his knees. He did not lean forward. He sat with the particular posture of a man who was consciously not doing the things he usually did, which gave him the appearance of someone who had been given new instructions for his body and was following them with the earnest imprecision of a first-time practitioner.

"I'm not here to suggest anything," Dale said.

"I appreciate that."

"I'm here because it's Thursday and I come on Thursdays and the men expect the worship and the donuts and I am here to provide both."

"Good."

Dale was quiet.

The quiet lasted for fifteen seconds, which was the longest Dale had been quiet in Ezra's presence in the four years they had known each other. Fifteen seconds of Dale Hargrove not speaking was an achievement of restraint that rivaled anything the study had produced, and Ezra noted it with the private appreciation of a man who had spent his career watching people grow and who recognized growth even when it arrived in the unlikely form of a round pastor from Berea sitting in a folding chair with his mouth closed.

"How are you," Dale said.

"I am continuing."

"That's not an answer."

"It is the truest answer I have. I am continuing. The study is continuing. The text is progressing. The men are engaged. The situation is — " Ezra paused. "The situation is the situation."

"Can I ask about the situation? Not the details. The — shape of it."

Ezra considered this. He considered it with the care of a man who had spent three months holding a situation that most of the people around him — Vance, Donna, Caldwell, the men in the study — had some knowledge of and no one had the full picture of, because the full picture was a picture that lived in the room in Ezra's chest and in the room in the chapel and in the space between the two rooms, and the space was a space no one else could enter.

"The shape," Ezra said, "is the shape of Philemon."

Dale looked at him.

"The letter we're studying. The shape of the situation is the shape of the letter. A man in chains sending back the person who wronged a free man, asking the free man to welcome him. The letter is the situation. The situation is the letter."

"And you're Philemon."

"I am Philemon."

The sentence landed in the room with the weight of something that had been true for months and that Ezra had known was true for weeks — since Marcus's voice in his head had said it — but that he had not spoken aloud until now, and the speaking-aloud transformed the truth from a private knowledge into a shared one, and the sharing was a form of the same vulnerability the study asked of the men every Sunday.

Dale did not respond immediately.

He did not respond because he was practicing the discipline of not responding — the discipline Ezra had taught him in September without calling it a discipline, the discipline of letting a truth sit in the room without furnishing it with commentary or interpretation or the particular enthusiasm that Dale brought to every encounter with spiritual drama.

"Is there anything I can do," Dale said.

"You are doing it."

"Sitting here."

"Sitting here. Bringing donuts. Leading the Thursday worship. Being present without arranging. That is the ministry, Dale."

Dale looked at the donuts.

"When I was in seminary," he said, "they taught us about the ministry of presence. I thought I understood it. I thought presence meant showing up with energy and ideas and plans. What I'm learning — slowly, and I acknowledge the slowness — is that presence means showing up without those things. Just showing up. Just being in the room. Not to do something. To be someone. To be the person who is there."

"Yes," Ezra said.

"That's harder."

"Yes."

Dale stood. He straightened his polo shirt. He adjusted the cross on his breast pocket. He performed the small rituals of a man preparing to do the work he had come to do, which was the Thursday worship — leading songs, reading scripture, sitting with whatever men came, offering the donuts, being present.

"Ezra."

"Yes."

"Martha says hello."

"Give her my regards."

"She also says — and I'm quoting — 'Tell Ezra the cantaloupe at Food City is on sale and he should buy one because that man does not eat enough fruit.'"

Ezra looked at Dale.

"Cantaloupe," Ezra said.

"She's been on a fruit campaign. She says the chaplaincy is no excuse for scurvy."

"Martha is a wise woman."

"Martha is the reason I am still standing. She will tell you this herself if asked. She will tell you this if not asked."

Dale left.

He went to the chapel. He set up the Thursday worship. He placed the donuts on the table. He led the songs with the earnest baritone of a man who loved God and who was learning, at fifty-seven, that loving God was not the same as performing the love of God, and that the difference between the two was the difference between a newsletter testimony and a room where the truth survived.

He was learning.

Slowly.

But the slowness, as the study had taught Ezra and as Ezra was beginning to teach Dale, was not a failure. It was the pace at which real things happened in real rooms with real people, and the pace could not be accelerated by enthusiasm or administration or the particular shape of a good man's idea of what God was doing.

God was doing what God always did.

God was working at a speed that no one could track and in a direction that no one could predict and with the patience that only an infinite being could sustain, and the patience was the point, and the patience was the grace, and the grace was sufficient, and sufficient was not the same as comfortable, but it was enough.

Dale sang.

The men sang with him.

The donuts disappeared.

The Thursday continued.