Senate’s Pastor Will Be Hard Act to Follow

The Rev. Richard Halverson, the chaplain of the U.S. Senate, was walking with a senator one day when a police officer asked him to pray for his ill wife.

Halverson did, right there, along the east front of the Capitol.

“He didn’t wait to go to the office and pray,” said Sen. Mark O. Hatfield (R-Ore.). “It was on-the-spot chaplaincy.”

Halverson is best known for his folksy prayers--he opened one especially difficult session by admitting to the Almighty that he did not “know enough about this situation to pray intelligently.”

But he is credited with moving his job beyond just giving the Senate’s opening prayer to include ministering to those on Capitol Hill. It is his counsel and humility that will make him difficult to replace, Hatfield said.

Halverson, 77, tendered his resignation last fall for health reasons. He agreed to stay until the Senate leadership finds a replacement.

“You ask any policeman, the pages, elevator operators. (Halverson) has reached out to truly be a support, an encourager of the whole institution,” Hatfield said.

Halverson, a native of North Dakota, was appointed to the post in 1981 after a long career as pastor of Presbyterian churches in California and suburban Washington.

The secret of his success is rooted in a painful childhood in North Dakota, long before he went to Hollywood seeking fame and a pastor introduced him to Christianity instead, Halverson said.

Halverson’s family was poor, his father was an alcoholic, and his parents divorced when he was young. He was born in Pingree, N.D., but his family moved from town to town as his mother tried to eke out a living.

“I grew up with a very low self-image that persists to this day,” Halverson said in a recent interview.

“Even to this day I’m not comfortable around the kind of people I serve, for example. I never feel I really belong.”

He said he learned to turn that low self-esteem into humility.

One senator recently told Halverson that he was the “most Christlike man I’ve ever known,” said Halverson, whose office walls are adorned with pictures of Jesus.

“I believe that Christlikeness is there because I’m not in the way of it with my ego,” he said.

Before Halverson, the chaplain’s primary job was to open the Senate with prayer. He still does that, nearly every day, with an originality that regularly makes its way onto the news pages.

During one prayer, he referred to Senate leaders as “maestros conducting a symphony while each musician plays his own music.”

Another time, he quoted a nursery rhyme: “Humpty Dumpty . . . had a great fall. Dear Father, help the Senate not be Humpty Dumpty.”

But Halverson’s biggest contribution has been in turning the job into a pastoral role, Hatfield said.

Senators seek him out for advice on legislation. He said that he doesn’t give advice, only opinions, and that he urges them to vote their consciences, even if that doesn’t please constituents.

The toughest issue he has faced, he said, is gays in the military.

Halverson, an evangelical, said gays should be allowed to serve in the military as long as they observe rules against homosexual relations.

“I believe homosexuality is wrong, but I don’t think it’s worse than any other sin. I think that homophobia is wrong,” Halverson said.

He regularly meets for Bible studies with Senate employees and with a small group of senators, who lunch with him every Thursday.

“You’ll find that the whole institution is aware of the office,” Hatfield said. “He has personalized it. If there’s an illness in the home, he’s the first there.”