These teachers taught me how to do nothing

My undergraduate Baptist college adviser was looking over his glasses at me as I prattled on and on about all I was doing. In my final semester, I was taking 18 hours in an attempt to pull a final-semester 4.0 with enough weight to redeem my less-than-stellar freshman year and graduate with honors.

I was on the speech team, where I eventually would win a state championship. I was student government president. I had been appointed by the college president to speak at the state denominational annual meeting, and he later told a crowded room of dignitaries I had “hit a bases-loaded homerun.” I was getting things done and wanted my mentor to be proud of me as he wrote recommendation letters.

Yet, as I excitedly droned on, this chair of the department of psychology was staring at me impassively. Then, when I finished my monologue, and after an unimpressed pause, Bill Fletcher flatly said, “Bradley. We are not human doings; we are human beings. What would it mean for you to just be?”

My bubble gum didn’t pop. I sucked it back in whole, where it glued my proud mouth shut. My adviser made no further comment. That son of a Baptist just left me to sort out my answer to his piercing feathered-arrow question.

Fast forward to Baptist seminary and Bill Leonard’s church history class — a course that made my subsequent Ph.D. a relative cake walk by comparison. In his class, I wrote a paper on the history of penance. I had seen the movie The Mission and how an act of penance helped redeem the murderous slave trader Rodrigo Mendoza — played majestically by Robert DeNiro.

The pivotal scene’s impact on me could not be overstated. It convinced me that Baptists’ doctrine of the priesthood of the believer had gone too far, resulting in cheap grace. Had Zaccheus not told Jesus he would repay with interest those whom he had cheated? I failed to see that Zaccheus’s actions didn’t bring about his redemption but flowed from redemption.

That realization would be prompted by a mere six words from Bill Leonard. The conclusion of my paper for him stated that in the process of researching the topic and writing the paper, I had realized a plan of action that would offer a logical consequence to help me do penance for whatever wrong had been committed by hyper-guilty 24-year-old Southern Baptist me.

When I got the paper back, it was marked with a grade in the high “A” range. I excitedly thumbed through the paper. There were very few marks. I got to the last page. There was my conclusion that the project had led me to discover appropriate penance for some sin. In the margin beside it were these six words: “When will it ever be enough?”

“In the margin beside it were these six words: ‘When will it ever be enough?’”

That son of a Baptist annihilated my thesis in six words. How arrogant of me to think Christ’s forgiveness was not enough and I had to do more? Look at that. I can’t even explain his remark in just six words.

Apparently, I’m a slow learner. Bill Fletcher posed the nine-word question: “What would it mean for you to just be?” Bill Leonard echoed with his six words about my plan for redemptive action: “When will it ever be enough?”

Now, fast forward to my one-year Baptist hospital residency as a Clinical Pastoral Education intern chaplain. I once heard a military chaplain say if he had to choose between repeating boot camp or repeating his first unit of CPE, he would re-do boot camp because it was easier. I describe my first unit of CPE during seminary as having open-heart surgery without anesthesia, the surgeons abruptly leaving, and I was left to sew myself back up.

My full-year post-graduate CPE unit started off only slightly worse — but led to healing.

A few months in, I admitted to my supervisor and two fellow interns that I hated doing waiting room visits. I enjoyed going into patients’ rooms. However, in crowded waiting rooms, I had become so self-conscious, I avoided them whenever I had an excuse to do something else. The reason? I felt I had to say or do something unique and powerful to each family. But all the other families could hear me. By the time I got to them, I would be out of material and be either silent or sound like a broken record.

Staring at me blankly, my supervisor, Larry Austin, told me to check my calendar for the next day. It was clear. Then that son of a Baptist directed me to spend the next day sitting in the coronary care ICU waiting room. I could go to the cafeteria for lunch; otherwise, I was to be planted in that waiting room.

The next day, the waiting room was, for the only time I remember that year, completely empty of anyone but me — all day. Across that crushingly isolated and boring day of doing nothing, each of my two classmates paid me a visit. I later found out my supervisor had not asked them to do so. I was struck that they didn’t say anything particularly profound; they just asked me about me. One of them prayed for my comfort over my lost checkbook — which I thought was silly, but it felt good.

I spent the last hour and a half completely alone. It would be eight more years before I would read Anna Quindlen’s brilliant essay “Doing Nothing is Something.” She’s right.

A half hour or so after I had flipped through all the magazines twice, I was empty. The sound of the institutional wallpaper fading was pounding in my head, ejecting everything by raw realization. I started free-association doodling on a yellow lap pad. An image from my childhood emerged.

I stared at it. My pen started writing, driven by the force of what comes out when defenses have been shattered by the exhaustion from lack of distraction amidst doing nothing.

When I was a boy, I saw myself as a good boy. I saw other children as naughty. I came to see becoming a minister as the pinnacle of being good and correcting the bad. I therefore became a minister not out of a sense of love but out of disdain.

It terrifies me to think of launching into my career in ministry without that realization. And that realization flowed not from doing but just being — forgiven.

 

Brad Bull has served as a UPS driver helper, pastor, professor and is now a freelance writer and private-practice therapist in Tennessee and Virginia. His therapy, retreat and speaking services may be reached at DrBradBull.com.