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Comforting hands
Special to United Methodist Insight | Jan. 20, 2026
Whenever I ponder my career, I find myself boggled by it. As an occupation, there’s nothing normal about being a minister or a pastor or a reverend or whatever word you want to use for it. And yet the work itself is perfectly normal.
One antique term for pastor is parson, which is an old English word meaning person – in this case, the person in charge of a church. I am just a parson. A person. A generic human whose job is to be humane. And the closer we get to being humane, the closer we get to being divine.
Jim Burklo Ident 2023
I hold a Master of Divinity degree, a title that is the ultimate contradiction. If one can master it, it can't be divine, can it? That includes the divinity who is no more and no less than love, whom I worship. And I'm hardly a master of love, try as I might to be one.
I’ll never live up to the title of Master of Divinity. I’ll never live up to the title of Reverend. But since 1979, when people started calling me Reverend, I’ve been trying.
The Christian religion tells the story of God becoming a human who shows people the way to become Godlike. As a parson, as a person, my job is to tell that story and, more importantly, to live it. All of my sermons are really only one sermon, re-telling this very simple tale, refreshed and renewed every time I apply it to the endless challenges of following the law of love.
My job is to listen people into life. That requires me to be in awe of them. To be in awe of you. Awe – you can spell it however you like. A-w-e or a-h-h-h. With as many h’s as you want. My job is to be awestruck by you, and by all the people I’ve served in different ministry contexts in my career. To attend to you with the awareness that you are God becoming a human… and that you are a human stumbling and striving to be Godlike.
Several years ago at USC, when I was the senior associate dean of religious and spiritual life there, we had a string of student suicides. One of them was a resident assistant in a dorm, a popular student with a life that appeared to be perfect on her social media. She hung herself from the bathroom door of her dorm room. A student friend of mine texted me after hearing the news, despondent. I rushed over and sat with her on a bench for a long time and listened to her as she keened back and forth, weeping with grief.... "I thought I knew her - I thought we were friends - but I didn't know how hard things were for her - I was a bad friend - I didn't really know her - I didn't support her...." I wept with her. Thinking to myself: how did we fail that young woman who took her own life in her dorm room? What can I do to prevent the next suicide? Including that one, I presided at dozens of memorial services on campus. What can I do upstream to prevent downstream outcomes like this? I asked myself.
Then it dawned on me. On that bench out in the quad I was doing exactly what I was supposed to be doing. I was offering my grieving student friend the gift of listening and weeping with her, and sighing – “ahhhhhh”. The gift of doing nothing more than being present with her. So many relationships are transactional. What can you do for me? How can knowing you help me to get ahead? and vice versa. Building your network of transactional relationships is how you get into USC and other quote-end-quote elite universities. It is how you get a job, in an era when emailing a resume cold is not going to get you in the door. Social media turns acquaintances into transactional relationships building up lists of contacts so that posts sharing carefully edited, curated lives get bigger followings.
Even religion can get transactionalized. You make what you think is a friend, and then you discover that this person has acted friendly toward you for the purpose of converting you to their religion, so they can fulfill their religious obligation to evangelize. This is what passes for ministry in much of Christianity today. I don’t want to be that kind of minister. I just want to be a parson – a person who shows up with compassion and an open heart and mind.
We live in a culture that turns human beings – each one a crown of creation, a cosmic miracle – not awesome because of their achievements or roles in the world, but awesome because they exist at all – we turn human beings into little more than the memes that decorate our Instagram feeds.
So in this world of commodified community, this world of phantom friendship on Facebook and Instagram, to be able to seek out a parson – a person - unannounced and sit down and just breathe and be with another human being with no agenda other than listening - that's like finding an oasis in the desert. For forty-six years people have been sitting with me and sighing - “ahhhh….” with relief that the truth of their hearts will be heard, with no other agenda. Already I've served them profoundly without saying a word or doing a thing.
That's my job. I’m not a therapist, I’m not a life-coach, I’m not a consultant dispensing advice. I’m not here to solve anybody’s problems. I’m kind of useless. Paradoxically, that uselessness turns out to be useful. The awesome transformations, the epiphanies, the turning points, the ahhhh moments and the aha moments, the tears, the belly-laughs, the awakenings that I've witnessed for 46 years - they're treasures I'll keep in my heart for the rest of my days. What a privilege to have shared those moments.... with many of you, dear “musings” readers!
Right now you're doing the same job. By reading this, you are “listening” me into life! Keep up the good work! Is this not the greatest gift we give each other? to just be present and pay attention to each other, honoring each other’s awesomeness? When you do this, you, too, are pastors. Ministers. Reverends. Parsons - persons who show up, all the way up, for others. Other parsons – other persons – have done that for me. And I’ll be grateful to them forever for it.
And if we’re listening to each other, paying soulful attention to the needs of people near and far, we’ll take action in service to them. All my work as a pastor for social change has flowed from the spiritual practice of listening.
I am a firm believer in the “priesthood of all believers”. I have consistently flaunted the rules that say that only an ordained pastor can conduct the sacraments. From the start of my career I have avoided wearing clerical collars and robes and stoles and crosses and so on – I only wear such stuff when it is obvious that people really need me to wear them, and those are rare occasions. It’s an irony to me that Protestant clerical robes of today were pretty much the street clothes of men in the 16th century when the Protestant reformation began. So by wearing street clothes today, I’m keeping the tradition - just doing what old-fashioned parsons did!
Perhaps it is no wonder that so many of the great figures of the religions of the world had "awe" in their names: Budd-awe, Krishn-awe, Ram-aw, All- awe, Y-awe-weh, Yeshu-awe (Jesus in Hebrew).... God is love. Love is attention. Love is awe. And ministry is sharing that awe – and ahhh – with others…