Letter 10: You have asked what I have learned, after so many years as bishop, about the actual work of the office.

Faustus to his beloved brother in Christ. You have asked what I have learned, after so many years as bishop, about the actual work of the office. I will tell you what I wish someone had told me at the beginning. The bishop is a servant — this is the theology, and the theology is correct. But what this means in practice is not what a young man imagines when he hears it. It means that the people of your diocese have legitimate claims on your time, your energy, your attention, and your care, and that these claims do not disappear when you are tired, or ill, or grieving your own losses, or in the middle of the theological work you find most interesting. They are always there. The discipline that this requires is not primarily ascetical in the sense of the monastery. It is the discipline of showing up for other people's needs when you would rather be doing something else. This is, actually, a form of dying to self. It is less dramatic than fasting, but I am not sure it is less demanding. What sustains it: the knowledge that you are, in fact, useful. Not useful in the grandiose sense of shaping events — most of what a bishop does has no perceptible effect on anything beyond his immediate vicinity. Useful in the small, real sense of a person who was helped, a dispute that was resolved, a dying man who had a bishop present when he died. This is enough. It has to be enough. Your brother, Faustus