Teach us to care and not to care

I once knew a retired pastor who prayed the same prayer every night during his ministry. It went something along the lines of: “God, I have done my best. But it’s your church, and I’m going to bed.” I love this prayer, but it is a tough one to live out! There is so much need, so much work to be done that it can feel impossible, irresponsible, even reckless, to consider slowing down or leaving something to the side. How on earth do we discern what actually is crucial, and what is perhaps something we can let go? How do we know when we have done enough? Is there even such a thing? There is a pair of lines from T.S. Eliot’s famous poem “Ash Wednesday” that have stuck with me for years, and I have adopted it as a prayer that has proven deeply instructive. The lines read:

Teach us to care and not to care

Teach us to sit still. 

One of my favorite things about this prayer is its simplicity. It feels like it cuts straight to the heart of the matter, straight to the tension that we feel between serving God faithfully in our ministries and taking on more than God is actually asking us to. Between the two stark poles— caring and not caring— lies a vast field. And it is such a fruitful space for prayer and for discernment. Of course it is important to care— for the people we are engaged with, for the world around us, for the people and places that are far removed from us. There is important work to be done, and none of us is exempt from it. But caring can quickly lead to feeling like it is our sole responsibility— to care for our congregations, to tackle the huge and wearying problems that our world and in our hearts. How can we possibly rest when there is so much work that needs doing? 

That is where the very difficult “and not to care” portion of the prayer comes in. For me, this is not so much a total detachment from caring, or a sealing ourselves off from the very real difficulty and brokenness that we face, but more a trust that at the end of the day, it’s in God’s hands. It is less ceasing to care, and more recognizing with honesty our place in the world— we are finite. We are called to care, to be co-workers in making all things new, but we are not the ones who will finish the job. We serve a God who looked at the brokenness of the world and made it God’s own responsibility to fix it. We are simply called to join in as faithfully as we can manage. 

But perhaps the most important element of this prayer is found in the first two words, “teach us.” We not only need to learn how to seek balance between caring too much and caring too little, we also have a lot to learn regarding what to care about. It can be easy to become so busy doing the parts of the important work that we want to do, that we like, or that have become deeply engrained habits that we ignore or insulate ourselves from other things that Jesus is calling our attention to. It can become easy to invest so much time and importance into certain things, while missing Jesus’ subtle and insistent call to center something (or someone) else in our time and attention. But how can we tell the difference? Our hearts need instruction. 

This prayer is also a tool for learning to love what God loves, and for learning to prioritize what Jesus is calling us to emphasize. How can we learn to focus our time and attention in healthy ways that are also in line with God’s priorities? We can ask for God to teach us. Then sit still to wait and listen. And then do it all again. We serve a God who wants to teach us, who is always seeking to speak to our hearts and guide us. That does not make it easy to discern God’s will in our lives and ministries. That does not mean that finding health and sustainability in ministry is merely a matter of praying the right thing fervently and regularly. Of course it is more complex than that. But we are given a guide, the Holy Spirit who is constantly with us, constantly seeking to teach us. And we get to ask. To ask, to wait, to learn, and then to try it again.