ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1995, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, December 25, 1995 TAG: 9512260029
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: C-8 EDITION: HOLIDAY
SOURCE: PETER STEINFELS THE NEW YORK TIMES
The Rev. Arthur Caliandro, pastor of New York's distinguished Marble Collegiate Church, has a recurring way of responding to ``my favorite season of the year'': He gets sick.
Returning to work early last week after four days laid up, Caliandro reflected on the strains, psychological, spiritual and physical, that Christmas puts on clergy.
For many priests and ministers, it is a time when exhaustion wars against obligation, when the year's greatest opportunity to deliver the message of the Gospel threatens to outstrip energy, and when the tensions between responsibilities to congregation and those to family grow most intense.
To clergy, the journey to Christmas can seem as bumpy as Mary and Joseph's donkey ride to Bethlehem.
In large suburban churches, it is marked by ambitious special programs and multiple services that bring thousands of strangers into the pews. In small inner-city congregations, it is a journey where the shared sorrows and hopes of a single family can test a pastor's strength.
At Calvary Church in Grand Rapids, Mich., 11 performances of a special Christmas program have just drawn more than 20,000 people. ``It's very exciting, but the net result is exhaustion,'' confessed the pastor there, the Rev. Ed Dobson. ``I don't have much spirit left.''
Dobson, who was an aide to the Rev. Jerry Falwell in the heyday of the Moral Majority, now describes himself as a very nonpolitical pastor of a ``mainstream evangelical church'' attended by about 6,000 people.
Like many clerics interviewed around the country, he swings between weariness and exhilaration when he talks about Christmas.
Last Sunday, he missed a public-school concert where his 11-year-old daughter was performing: he had to preach at three morning services and then was back at church for two evening Christmas events. (He managed to catch his daughter's Monday performance, however.)
``The general talk among clergy is that Christmas comes but once a year and thank God for that,'' Dobson said. ``But the truth is that while clergy complain about it they really love it, because it provides a wonderful opportunity for precisely what we've been called to do.''
Dobson sounded another common theme of the clergy: ``It seems there are an inordinate number of tragedies around this season.''
His hardest Christmas as a pastor occurred when a leader of the congregation went into the hospital in December for routine treatment, was found to have cancer and died in two weeks.
Dobson said he had a stack of names of all the church members who had become widows or widowers during the year.
``I'm calling them all this week,'' he said, ``because this first Christmas without their spouses is so very difficult.''
Tragedy and hard times are, of course, the specialty of the Salvation Army, and so is Christmas. Besides special activities like toy distribution, blanket drives and children's pageants, this is also the organization's prime fund-raising season.
If a Salvation Army officer - the organization's term for its clergy - is married, the spouse also serves as an officer. So at Christmas, said Major William LaMarr, general secretary for field operations in the New York metropolitan area, ``instead of a situation where one mate can complement the other, both are running full out.''
LaMarr recalled the birth of his first child, on a Dec. 23. His wife went into labor as he was distributing Christmas presents on what would be the busiest day of the entire year.
That was almost three decades ago, but he recalls the inner conflict he felt, and the gratitude when volunteers ``practically pushed me out of the building.''
At many large churches, holiday tasks can be parceled out to full-time staffs. Willow Creek Community Church in suburban Chicago, one of the nation's largest ``megachurches,'' expects 36,000 people at its eight Christmas services over two days.
But Willow Creek has a staff of 300, with a whole department, for example, that works with grieving people.
The Rev. Timothy Power, pastor of Pax Christi Catholic Church in Eden Prairie, Minn., a suburb of Minneapolis, said it was not easy to preach to a church full of unfamiliar faces at Christmastime.
``A couple of years ago, I had to adjust to the fact that the crowd at Christmas was different,'' he said. ``I had to be more evangelical and not presume too much.
``The stress I feel is struggling with the message in the midst of a very commercialized society,'' he added. ``The strain is to get that across in about eight minutes.''
Power expected about 12,000 people to attend his church's six Masses on Christmas Eve, and the one on Christmas morning. As the only resident priest, he would celebrate four of those; a visiting priest would celebrate the others.
The burdens of Christmas in smaller churches were captured by the Rev. Barbara Lundblad, whose small congregation had been intensely caught up in the birth of a couple's first child, who then required intensive-care hospitalization.
``With Christmas' focus on the coming of a child,'' said Lundblad, whose Lutheran church, Our Savior's Atonement, is in Manhattan, ``that kind of thing is magnified in a little congregation.''
``In the 15 years I've been here,'' she said. ``I never experienced so much pain as in this Advent.''
She draws strength from Isaiah's message, read in church at Christmastime, about new life in the wilderness and light shining on those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death.
``It's very important for me to find a time during the day to be silent,'' she said, ``and to let the words of the lessons sink in without thinking of how I'm going to preach about them.''
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