 |  How to recognize and ride the winds of the spirit
Fall 2001
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What's Like Got to Do With It
Richard Lischer
October 1, 2001
On my first Sunday morning I was taken aback by a ghastly sight in the sacristy. A dying man was sprawled on a chaise lounge in the center of the room. He was white as snow and as cold to the touch. His total hairlessness, I was soon to learn, was the result of an experimental drug therapy. He was dressed in a cassock, surplice, and stole. A hymnal lay open across his lap.
Erich Martin was the former pastor of the church. He was so weakened by cancer that he couldn't sit in a pew. He worshiped in the sacristy with the door to the chancel wide open. From his lounge chair he could also keep an eye on me, and from anywhere in the chancel I had him in view. Since no one could see him but me, he constituted my private audience of one, a second congregation. Whenever I stood in the pulpit during those first months, Erich was a barely living blur to my right. If I was tempted, as preachers occasionally are, to replace the proclamation of the gospel with affable chatter, the presence of a liturgically vested, dying man in a chaise lounge never failed to dissuade.
Long after he was gone, I could not step into the pulpit without instinctively checking the sacristy door.
Although Erich never played the mentor toward me, his presence, at first intimidating, grew to be a source of reassurance. If we are "surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses," as the Book of Hebrews promises, here at least was one I could keep my eye on.
The old academy system of education had forged Erich with a discipline that was foreign to me. I never met a person so utterly controlled by the patterns and duties of the ministry as he. Even among farmers, who are not famous for their introspective nature, I never met anyone less absorbed in himself or driven by ...
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