In her remarkable poem Obligations 2, Oglala Lakota poet Layli Long Soldier invites us to travel down a path of our choosing.
It’s notable how each line of the poem draws us down the page, from reaction through action, into the rawness of grief, then finally toward transformation and the haunting image of light and ash.
You might approach it as a choose-your-own-spiritual-adventure poem. Or, perhaps more pointedly, as an archaeology of faithful leadership. The surface layers are all about immediate response to the march of time (whether we resist or embrace the future, past, or present). Going a little deeper, we hit a lode of activity (working, struggling, beginning, failing). But going deeper still, beneath that busyness we encounter sorrow—grief, upon grief, upon grief, upon grief. Only by engaging the grief (whether we shift, or wield, or bury it) do we reach the transformative light … and ash … across our faces.
There are choices at the start that mirror the choices your church board faces with regularity. These choices feel all-consuming in the moment, noisy, full of demands:
Resist or embrace!
Focus on the past, the future, the present!
And whatever you do, act, act, act!
And yet, whatever you do, you will encounter grief.
That grief—though we rarely talk about it in church board meetings—lies right beneath the frenetic activity and obligation of church life.
Grief for congregants’ pain we absorb
Grief for our own unprocessed losses
Grief for the gap between vision and reality
Grief for our spiritual drought while watering others
Studies show that more than thirty percent of pastors have considered leaving ministry, primarily due to exhaustion from doing rather than being. It’s unfortunate that the data only looks at pastors, and not members of church boards. Deacons, elders, council and vestry members can feel the same exhaustion.
What does that have to do with Soldier’s poem?
The physical descent of the poem = the spiritual descent required of faithful leaders.
You can’t stay at the “work, struggle, begin, fail” level. You must go down to where the grief lives before you can emerge, whether with light or ash across your face—in either case marked by genuine encounter rather than simply efficient ministry.
The poem’s physical structure makes you slow down—you cannot skim it. Similarly, spiritual depth requires us to stop managing long enough to feel the grief which we shift we wield we bury / into light as ash / across our faces.
Corinth was, at the time of Paul’s writing, a city of manifold griefs—a city that had been conquered, destroyed, rebuilt, re-conquered. Former glory existed only in memory and loss.
So Paul’s words in 2nd Corinthians 4:7-10 carry special weight:
But we have this treasure in clay jars, so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us. 8 We are afflicted in every way but not crushed, perplexed but not driven to despair, 9 persecuted but not forsaken, struck down but not destroyed, 10 always carrying around in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our bodies.
What if the grief beneath all the activity is actually the doorway that you, as church leaders, are called to walk through?
What most puzzles you about Soldier’s poem?
What do you feel as you descend through the poem?
What do you make of its final three words, across our faces?
What griefs lie just below the floor of activity and obligation in your church work? Can you name a few of them together?
What do Paul’s words in 2nd Corinthians 4:7-10 call on you to do with the grief?
Where and how would you begin?
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