The life I should be living had been mislaid through some clerical error by the cosmic bureaucracy.
This is the only sane clerical the earthquake has exposed to view yet.
The clerical system of church management is exceedingly popular, but the whole thought is foreign to Scripture.
I think it'll take a while to adjust, but when you think about just the creativity of people and what they're capable of and the sort of aspirations and dreams that they have, the idea that they're not capable of anything more than sort of performing these automatable clerical tasks, I don't believe that for a second.
If war's first victim is truth, its second is clerical efficiency.
Fredrick Buechner kind of loosened up my clerical collar, you might say.
The clerical work is par for the course. "Keep on file in numerical order" means throw in wastebasket. You'll soon learn the language. "Let it be a challenge to you" means you're stuck with it; "interpersonal relationships" is a fight between kids; "ancillary civic agencies for supportive discipline" means call the cops; "Language Arts Dept. " is the English office; "literature based on child's reading level and experiential background" means that's all they've got in the Book Room; "non-academic-minded" is a delinquent; and "It has come to my attention" means you're in trouble.
Catholicism has the clerical equivalent to a nut allergy - even a small exposure to change, and the whole thing will go into anaphylactic shock.
When a man really gives up trying to make something out of himself - a saint, or a converted sinner, or a churchman (a so-called clerical somebody), a righteous or unrighteous man,. . . and throws himself into the arms of God. . . then he wakes with Christ in Gethsemane. That is faith, that is metanoia and it is thus that he becomes a man and Christian.
The church may hold whatever it holds with regard to clerical celibacy.
I don't see a clerical class in the New Testament to which evangelism has been delegated. Preaching is not the only way to evangelize; it can happen in everyday conversations too. And you don't need a special gift to witness to the Lord in these situations.
