For quite some time, but especially since my ordination five years ago, I’ve been trying to make theological sense of pastoral care. I admit that, when I was in seminary, I wasn’t too impressed with any of it. I wanted to be a priest, sure, but I also wanted to be a serious theologian—and serious theologians, so far as I could tell, didn’t have a lot to do with pastoral care. Three-and-a-half-years into my priesthood, I converted my full-time Ph.D. program to part-time in order to take a full-time position in a parish. I had discovered, much to my surprise, that pastoral work was more difficult, not less, than academic theology, and I didn’t know any other way to learn how to do it than simply to practice it.

Looking back, I think I was certainly misled by the attitude toward pastoral ministry implicit or explicit in many of the courses I’d taken and books I’d read—and particularly by which courses and books counted as really serious scholarship and which didn’t. But I also think I was undersold pastoral care as an enterprise worth giving one’s life and energies to. Think for a moment about what ordinarily goes by the name “pastoral”: people whom we consider especially nice, activities which have to do with active listening, professional services done by very poorly trained social workers called “clergy,” and so on. None of these come even close to what I can only describe as the most spiritually, intellectually, and emotionally demanding labor I have ever attempted—not to mention the most rewarding. Nearly eight years ago in an interview at Duke Divinity School, Sarah Coakley named the disjunction between systematic and practical theology as one of the most consequential challenges facing theological education and the church today. I’ve come to think that to address it we need not only to change the attitudes of many who consider practical questions theologically unserious but to give a better—and theological—account of the endeavor in pursuit of which these practical concerns are raised.

I’ve been quite taken with Chris Corbin’s suggestion that earth and altar “represent the totality of Christian existence and hope.” Together, they make not so much a complete inventory of creation but a summary of the Christian reality: that God has loved into existence a world really different from God, and that this world’s fulfillment is found in its being offered up to God in praise and thanksgiving. I’m fortunate to worship regularly in the shadow of an incredible mid-century sculpture that puts this theology on display, the modernist reredos that sits behind the main altar of my parish in New Canaan, Connecticut. The masterpiece of Clark Fitz-Gerald, it depicts God’s work of creation through a shimmering descent of birds and camels and otters and starfish and penguins, concluding with the human beings Adam and Eve. This downward movement of creatures and glory—depicted by the sparkling flecks of brass Fitz-Gerald interposes between the creatures—is answered by an upward movement issuing out from the human beings and featuring symbols of human response to God: martyrs (Cranmer’s burning hand, for example) and traditions (Luther’s rose) and doctrines (the trinity represented by a triangle). Taken as a whole, the reredos makes a subtle clarification of the exitus-reditus pattern beloved of theologians as diverse as Origen and Thomas Aquinas: that creatures are consummated not by being dissolved back into the essence of the One from whom they came but by “returning” to the Lord of heaven and earth via the altar, offered to God for God’s use, others’ blessing, and their bliss. As Alexander Schmemann would have it, human beings are eucharistic creatures, and all the world—ourselves included—is meant to be the matter of the sacrament.

I’ve come to think of pastoral care as the concrete means by which human lives are set apart and consecrated as offerings to God, in union with the one offering which our Lord Jesus Christ made of himself. It is a priestly activity—which is not to say that it is something reserved for the ordained. It is the work of the baptized, the totality of whom share in the royal priesthood of Christ and are called to join him in consecrating and offering the world to the Father—a shared mission that ordained priests, through their sacramental ministry, put their peculiar twist on, but which is by no means theirs exclusively. To make the world a Eucharist is just the human vocation, the consummation of which the sacrament of bread and wine is an icon, as the ordained priesthood is of the vocation generally. In other words, priests make visible and explicit by means of their particular sacramental ministry what is true of all Christian caregiving in general, and by the actual celebration of the sacraments they facilitate the priestly ministry shared by the baptized as a whole. They do both chiefly by the celebration of the Eucharist, at which the priest as pastor leads the people of God in offering their lives as well as bread and wine to God, trusting that nothing ever given to God returns to us unchanged.

Pastoral caregiving is itself an act of consecration: a prayerful setting-apart of something in someone’s life by setting it in the context of Jesus’ own life, death, and resurrection. Doing so requires serious knowledge of human nature as well as God. To set something apart, we must isolate and name it for what it is. This is no small feat given the fact—acknowledged by Christianity and psychoanalysis alike, for what it’s worth—that we are not transparent to ourselves but are comprised of conflicting drives, desires, and passions that may or may not be wholly available to us at any given moment. Really getting to the bottom of what someone is facing, sifting, in many cases, through a good deal of unconscious material, is crucial to the task of pastoral consecration. It becomes an act of oblation and not just catharsis by being incorporated into the story of Christ by prayer. Sitting at the foot of someone’s hospital bed, kneeling beside a parent who has just lost a child, celebrating with someone who has just had a longtime dream come true: these can all be acts of oblation by prayer and grace. Just as in the Eucharist we take bread and wine and bless them by recalling the night when Jesus did the same, we consecrate all human life by recalling his, invoking his experience of joy and blood and bread and dust in our own, and trusting that the Holy Spirit can make him present here too. In and through pastoral ministry human beings become sacraments in ordinary, tinged with glory. Worth giving one’s life to, indeed.