Another Kind of Desert

I have written before here about my growing sense not only of a increasing personal call to some kind of hiddenness, but also of the way in which the (at least in the UK) repeated lockdowns and "tiered" partial easings of lockdowns have contributed to the growth of what Steve Aisthorpe calls The Invisible Church:

There is a growing realisation that church is what occurs when people are touched by the living Christ and share the journey of faith with others. Whether that occurs in an historic building or online or . . . wherever, is unimportant.

The history of religion is littered with examples of the way that the luminous insights of prophets and poets and contemplatives (in my usage, Jesus would be all three) become clouded and encoded by institutions, and by their uneasy relationships with power and wealth. Obvious examples would be the Roman church in the years following the Emperor Constantine's conversion, and the chaos of the English Reformation and the ensuing Civil Wars, but within other religions there are many parallels such as the  troubled history of the Islamic Caliphates and the role of Buddhism during the politically volatile late Heian to early Kamakura period in Japan.

Time and again contemplatives have broken away from the apparent corruption of state churches on the one hand and religion-inspired revolutionaries on the other, sometimes forming loose communities, and retreated from formal organisation almost altogether. Examples are as diverse as the Desert Fathers and Mothers in Egypt and Syria around the 4th century AD, the Pure Land (Shin) schools of Buddhism founded by Honen and Shinran in 12th and 13th century Japan, and the Quakers in 17th century England.

These contemplative movements, often based around simplicity of practice and openness to the Spirit, seem to arise when not only are the religious establishments in a compromised and sometimes corrupt condition, but the state is in flux, sometimes violent flux. Trump's America and Brexit Britain, scoured by the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, would seem to provide fertile ground for contemplative change in this way.

Needless to say I have no answers, but the question underlies, it seems to me, much of the interest in "Churchless Christianity" that has flared up even more strongly during the present crisis. There will be voices raised, of course, both on the side of secular humanism and on the side of organised religion, accusing "hermits" of retreating from their responsibilities to the world, just as parallel voices have been raised at the hinges of faith and practice throughout history. To them I would offer these words from Caryll Houselander (quoted in Richard Rohr's The Universal Christ)

Christ is everywhere; in Him every kind of life has a meaning and has an influence on every other kind of life. It is not the foolish sinner like myself, running about the world with reprobates and feeling magnanimous, who comes closest to them and brings them healing; it is the contemplative in her cell who has never set eyes on them, but in whom Christ fasts and prays for them—or it may be a charwoman in whom Christ makes Himself a servant again, or a king whose crown of gold hides a crown of thorns. Realization of our oneness in Christ is the only cure for human loneliness. For me, too, it is the only ultimate meaning of life, the only thing that gives meaning and purpose to every life.

A New Start

It seems to me to be time to begin posting here regularly again. The blog at Silent Assemblies will continue, but I seem to be coming to the conclusion that I need a space to discuss contemplative prayer in general, and the Jesus Prayer in particular, without feeling the need to put things in a specifically Quaker context.

I sense in any case that I am being led to rediscover, to reaffirm maybe, my roots in the Church with a large 'C', and to explore what that might mean. If I have anything of value to share, it will come out what little faithfulness I can bring to that leading, and to the movement of the Spirit behind and beneath that.

The practice of contemplative prayer, especially that of the Jesus Prayer, is not so much a matter of personal choice as of leading, and, as the Pilgrim found, being faithful to that leading is not always an easy matter. It shouldn't be thought that contemplative prayer is an easy alternative to either action or to verbal prayer. Opening one's heart to God in this way opens it to God's love for our brokenness; allowing Christ to dwell in our hearts by his Spirit involves us in the love of Christ, and its consequences: as Paul once wrote: "I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me." (Galatians 2.19b-20a)

The author of The Cloud of Unknowing wrote: "It is not your will or desire that moves you, but something you are completely ignorant of stirring you to will and desire you know not what." It is in simply willing to follow that desire that we are led, like the Cloud author, into the way of contemplation.

For all I have said about the seriousness of the call to contemplative prayer, it really is very simple indeed. Irma Zaleski, in her classic Living the Jesus Prayer, wrote:

The Kind of awareness that the Jesus Prayer may lead us to is very simple. We do not try to imagine that Jesus is there, and even less what he looks like or what he says. We do not engage in any imaginary conversations with him. We simply try to be aware of him and attentive to him in a similar way as we are aware of the presence of someone we love in the next room, or as a mother is attentive to what her children are doing, however busy she is. We believe - we know by faith - that God in Christ is here, with us and in us. Our task is to try and remember him and be attentive to him. It is this attentiveness that is the door to our experience of the presence of God. We cannot summon this experience at will. We cannot grasp it as if it were a possession. It is, like the Prayer itself, a gift. Ours is only a discipline of faith and perseverance...

Blood sisters, and brothers...

When God makes a covenant with us, God says: “I will love you with an everlasting love. I will be faithful to you, even when you run away from me, reject me, or betray me.” In our society we don't speak much about covenants; we speak about contracts. When we make a contract with a person, we say: “I will fulfil my part as long as you fulfil yours. When you don't live up to your promises, I no longer have to live up to mine.” Contracts are often broken because the partners are unwilling or unable to be faithful to their terms.

But God didn’t make a contract with us; God made a covenant with us, and God wants our relationships with one another to reflect that covenant. That's why marriage, friendship, life in community are all ways to give visibility to God's faithfulness in our lives together.

Henri Nouwen, from Bread for the Journey

 

We are continually trying to make God in our own image, instead of letting him (re)make us in his. We judge God’s faithfulness by our own faithlessness, God's mercy by our own vindictiveness. But God is not like us, and his covenant is not like our contracts.

 

Jesus spoke of this the night he gave us the Holy Eucharist, saying, “This cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood...” (Luke 22.20) We are living under a new covenant, as the writer of the Letter to the Hebrews wrote (quoting Jeremiah):

This is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel
after those days, says the Lord:
I will put my laws in their minds,
and write them on their hearts,
and I will be their God,
and they shall be my people.

In Christ we have a covenant which is written on our very hearts, not some external document. We have become members of his very body, sisters and brothers in blood, his blood. Oh God, give us the grace to live like it!

 

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner...

 

Believing in the Church…

The Church is an object of faith.  In the Apostles' Creed we pray:  “I believe in God, the Father ... in Jesus Christ, his only Son – in the Holy Spirit, the holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting.”  We must believe in the Church!  The Apostles’ Creed does not say that the Church is an organization that helps us to believe in God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  No, we are called to believe in the Church with the same faith we believe in God.

Often it seems harder to believe in the Church than to believe in God.  But whenever we separate our belief in God from our belief in the Church, we become unbelievers.  God has given us the Church as the place where God becomes God-with-us.

Henri Nouwen

I am so grateful for this! I know that a some people who feel quite spiritual believe that they can find God in country walks, or sitting by the sea, better than they can in a church, but somehow the point is missing here.

Christ is “God-with-us”, Emmanuel, and the Church is the Body of Christ (1 Corinthians 12.22ff) at whose centre is the Eucharist, where the Body of Christ becomes real and present among us. How can we not be fractured, lost, outside the Body of which we are a part? We cannot live alone; members of any living body, if severed, do not live a wild and fruitful life: they die and shrivel. We must remain in community even when it hurts, even when we cannot for the life of us think what we’re doing there—only as part of a Eucharistic community can the life-blood of Christ, bearing the oxygen of the Spirit, flow freely in our veins.

Thank God for the Church—for each of us, frail and fallible as we are, living in this messy and glorious community of ours, and for the eternal Church “spread out through all time and space and rooted in eternity, terrible as an army with banners…” (CS Lewis)—our home and our refuge, and our sign…

All in the end is harvest…

Christianity has many things in common with the other religions of the world.  But we are the only religion that says that God became a body, that God became a human being, that God became flesh as John’s Gospel says (John 1:14).  Our fancy theological word for that is the Incarnation, the enfleshment.
So we have material reality being the hiding place and the revelation place of God; where God is at the same time perfectly hidden and perfectly revealed.
The same scandal that the Jewish people had to deal with 2000 years ago, we have to keep dealing with—that the hiding place of God, the revelation place of God is the material world.

Richard Rohr, adapted from Eucharist as Touchstone (CD)

The beauty of this morning’s Harvest Festival service at St. Mary the Virgin, my new Parish Church, was an almost perfect example of this. We celebrated not only Christ’s sacrifice and his resurrection, but his presence with us in the creation that was made through him, his feeding us with the true bread that came down from heaven, the real drink of his shed blood (John 6:48ff). His presence was hidden, in the bread and the wine, in plain sight—and yet his presence was in us and with us and among us. Truly, we are all members of the one Body, and each one of us is a part of it (1 Corinthians 12:27), and all creation is coming into the glorious freedom of the children of God (Romans 8:21). We are free, free! If the Son sets us free, we are free indeed!

A Name and a waiting...

A candle of the Lord is the soul of man, but the soul can become a holocaust, a fury, a rage. The only cure is to discover that, over and above the anonymous stillness in the world, there is a Name and a waiting. Many people suffer from a fear of the self. They do not feel at home in their own selves. The inner life is a place of dereliction, a no-man's-land, inconsolate, weird. The self has become a place from which to flee.

Abraham Joshua Heschel, with thanks to  inward/outward

Faithfulness is consecration in overalls. It is the steady acceptance and performance of the common duty and immediate task without any reference to personal preferences--because it is there to be done, and so is a manifestation of the Will of God... The fruits of the Spirit get less and less showy as we go on. Faithfulness means continuing quietly with the job we have been given, in the situation where we have been placed; not yielding to the restless desire for change. It means tending the lamp quietly for God without wondering how much longer it has got to go on. Steady, unsensational driving, taking good care of the car. A lot of the road to heaven has to be taken at 30 miles per hour.

Evelyn Underhill, The Fruits of the Spirit.

People should not worry as much about what they do but rather about what they are. If they and their ways are good, then their deeds are radiant. If you are righteous, then what you do will also be righteous. We should not think that holiness is based on what we do but rather on what we are, for it is not our works which sanctify us but we who sanctify our works.

Meister Eckhart, with thanks to  inward/outward

Sorry for the silence since Connect 2010. I've been trying to make sense of my own feelings. Nearly a week of being so close with my sisters and brothers in Christ, of worship and prayer and talking, of just being church, is not easy to put into words. It might sound trite to some to call it a glimpse of Heaven, of the Kingdom to which our Lord is betrothed, but honestly that's how it was.

Things are not going to be the same, even if there is not another Connect in next or subsequent years, even if those who were there try to forget what they saw, and heard, and felt. The Church (deliberate big 'C') in the Isle of Purbeck knows now, very practically and simply, that it is one, that our different ways of doing things, our different comfort zones in worship and in the minor application of doctrine, are pretty irrelevant beside the great love our Lord has put into our hearts one for another...

"By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another." (John 13:35)

We are in a state of waiting. The Kingdom is here,  and yet it has not yet come. (Mark 1:15; Luke 11:2; 11:20; 12:31) And yet we are not alone, far from it. Our waiting lives within the Name of Jesus; all we are is in his wounded hands. What shall we fear? (Romans 8:28-39)

Tomorrow, I'm off to Hilfield Friary, for the Caring for Creation in a World of Crisis weekend. More when I get back, I hope...

Connect 2010

Next week, starting on Tuesday night, I'm going to be at Connect 2010 at Holton Lee.

From the website:

What is Connect?

Connect 2010 is a five-day teaching and worship event where hundreds of people of all ages can connect and grow together in Word and Spirit. The last three days will include family camping and a change of flavour as young families invade the site.

More than 30 south Dorset churches are involved in organising the event, which is held at Holton Lee (between Poole and Wareham in Dorset), just a few minutes walk from the beautiful Poole Harbour and with its own stunning heathland walks in 350 acres.

The family weekend (July 16, 17, 18) will include a full programme of children’s activities in their own separate marquee, a chill out zone on Saturday evening for 13's to 17's plus a variety of fun family events throughout the weekend.

If you come, look me up. I'll be the one wearing a Tau Cross and a green Prayer Ministry Team name-tag!

In one of those God-incidences that is always surprising, but shouldn't ever be, this morning's email from Richard Rohr's Centre for Action and Contemplation reads as follows:

Greatness emerges when, above all else, people are confident. When we believe - together - that life is good, God is good and humanity is good, we become very safe and salutary people for others.  What we seem to suffer from today is a lack of confidence, which would become a calm self confidence.  St. Therese of Lisieux wisely said that her entire spirituality was about "confidence and gratitude"!

We can all do exciting and imaginative things when we are confident that we are a part of a story line that is going somewhere and is connected to something good.  Without this, it is very hard to be either confident or grateful.

Richard Rohr, from Hope Against Darkness

This event has grown from a glimmer of an idea into this wonderful thing in what seems like no time at all - but it's not without a pre-echo, as it were. You can read my account of the event at Wareham 11 years ago on The Mercy Site.

Our Vicar at Holy Rood, Rhona, writes in her pastoral letter in July's Parish News:

People often ask why the churches don't work together more closely. It's true the amount of time we spend worshipping together is relatively small. But churches work together to a remarkable degree, supporting one another to a variety of ways. They are often overlooked as much of this is less visible to the general public...

A major new joint venture that is gathering the churches together from across south Dorset takes place at Holton Lee, Sandford this month. More than 30 different churches are involved in organizing Connect 2010. It is a five-day teaching and worship event where people of all ages can connect and grow together in Word and Spirit. We see it as a time for recognising our shared faith and mission and to find what things we can do better together than apart. It aims to be outward looking, not so much getting over hurdles as reaching shared goals.

Come and join us in this adventure of making strengthening old connections and forging new ones.

Do click over and read the whole letter... and do consider coming and joining in if you're going to be in the area. I rather suspect this will be something not to miss!

Of and with the poor…

We can no longer be satisfied by simply being the Church for the poor from our position of establishment.  We must realize that sometimes that very generosity, that very attempt to be good to other people, has kept us in a position of power and superiority.  Somehow we must be of and with the poor, and then be ready for some mistrust and even criticism.
Dom Helder Camara (1909-1999), the holy Archbishop of Recife, Brazil, said it so truthfully, “As long as I fed the poor, they called me a saint.  When I asked, ‘Why are there so many poor people?’ they called me a communist.”

Richard Rohr, April 2010

As Franciscans, I think it is crucial that we face this question. The First and Second Orders, by virtue of their vocation to the Evangelical Counsels, live it out in common with their sisters and brothers in other religious communities—but we as Tertiaries need to examine ourselves rather rigorously on this point, I feel. Though, as our Principles state, “we possess property and earn money to support ourselves and our families,” we must consider how Rohr’s words here question our own vocation.

I don’t have an answer, of course, to these questions. The path God has somehow laid out for me has brought me closer to the way of poverty than some of my sisters and brothers, but this is through what might be called (if you leave God out of it!) force of circumstance: I can claim no holiness, or acuity of discernment, for myself. All that life since the farm accident that stopped me working some years ago has done is to give me a different perspective, a way of seeing that I didn’t have before; a cure, maybe, for a blindness common to so many educated people of my generation, who have not had to live frugally amid abundance. But it has not shown me any specific advice for anyone else… Maybe each of us has to plot our own course through this land of inequalities—it would be so hard to offer advice without appearing to manipulate, or to offer criticism.
One thing I do know. As Franciscans we must look clearly, with wide open eyes, at the poor who live among us, quite as much as at the glamorously poor of what used to be called the Third World. (I am using deliberately provocative language here!) We must set aside the dark glasses of prejudice, the tinted lenses of class, and look, really look, into the eyes of the Big Issue sellers, into the bundles of rags under the city bridges, into the doors of the temporary accommodation dotted even among the prosperous and leafy villages of Dorset, and allow them to ask their own questions of us, of our own vocation to the Third Order of St. Francis…

Being Franciscan…

Thinking, as we move into this New Year, about my Franciscan vocation, and the call to prayer that has, ultimately, shaped all of my life, I have discovered two marvellous posts by the Church of Ireland priest Patrick Comerford, both addresses under the titles Saint Francis (1): Lifestyle for today? and Saint Francis (2): Community Life for today? given at the Francistide Observance of the Third Order of Saint Francis in Saint Ann’s Church, Dawson Street, Dublin, on Saturday 3 October 2009. Start with the first address here.

They are long addresses, but I would strongly urge you to read them in full. Canon Patrick speaks at length on our Rule of Life, on the Cross of San Damiano, and most importantly on the Franciscan call to rebuild the Church, and the life of the Church as community. He says:

Francis can be seen as being both Catholic and Evangelical. His conversion was the principal impetus for his mission, yet that mission included a call to the traditional church.

Francis valued the traditional expressions of Church life, yet his rule of life and his gathering of friars was then a fresh expression of church…

It is no wonder that as the tradition of religious communities was being explored once again, rediscovered, revived and rebuilt in the Anglican Communion in response to the Anglo-Catholic revival, many of those involved turned for inspiration to the Franciscan tradition.

The gentle approach to obedience in the Franciscan tradition has been described as a “middle way” in the monastic tradition, and so the Franciscan tradition has an immediate appeal to Anglicans of the Via Media.

The Daily Office, which is the office book of the Society of Saint Francis, was among the first to be fully up-dated with the Common Worship Lectionary, and so was used in the wider Anglican Communion. But it also provided the model for the offices of Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer in Common Worship…

But Francis and Franciscan values also have a relevance to the wider, international and global community.

This is a world that has never been more in need of those Franciscan values of Peace, Poverty, and respect for the environment.

The Church exists to call the world into it not so much that the world may become the church, less so that the church may become the world, but that through the Church the world may enter into the Kingdom of God.

In age of a nuclear overkill, climate change and global poverty, Francis and his rule for his community, first shaped 800 years ago in 1209, continue to call us back again to the true values of Christian community and lifestyle.

But do read both addresses in full—my extracts here don’t begin to do them justice.

The final loss…

The Church is called to announce the Good News of Jesus to all people and all nations. Besides the many works of mercy by which the Church must make Jesus’ love visible, it must also joyfully announce the great mystery of God's salvation through the life, suffering, death, and resurrection of Jesus. The story of Jesus is to be proclaimed and celebrated. Some will hear and rejoice, some will remain indifferent, some will become hostile. The story of Jesus will not always be accepted, but it must be told.

We who know the story and try to live it out, have the joyful task of telling it to others. When our words rise from hearts full of love and gratitude, they will bear fruit, whether we can see this or not.

Henri Nouwen, from Bread for the Journey

There is a darkness that we are all led into by our own stupidity, by our own selfishness, blindness, or by just living out of the false self. And there is a darkness that I believe God leads us through for our own enlightenment. In both cases, we have to walk through these dark periods by brutal honesty, confessions, surrenders, letting go, forgiveness, and often by some necessary restitution, apology or healing ritual. I still hear of Vietnam vets who feel they must go back to Vietnam and help some Vietnamese children to be healed.

Different vocabularies would have called these acts of repentance, penance, mortification, dying to self, or ego stripping. By any account it is major surgery and surely feels like dying (although it also feels like immense liberation). We need help and comfort during these times. We must let ourselves be led by God and also by others. But how can we know the light if we’ve never walked through the darkness?

Richard Rohr, from Hope Against Darkness, pp. 165, 173

I honestly believe that the process Rohr describes is what Jesus was describing when he spoke of taking up one’s cross to follow him, of losing one’s life in order to save it (Luke 9:23-24). This loss of ourselves is true poverty. We speak of “making losses” in business, we speak of losing friends, losing social standing; but these are mere shadows, pre-echoes, of this final loss.

Only when we have faithfully followed our Saviour on the way of the Cross will we have any witness to bring to others. If we have not done this, we shall have nothing to say.

I think in our own time, as in any other probably, too few people realise just what we are called to as Christians. It is far too easy to stop and merely enjoy the social, musical, companionable, comforting aspects of church (good and lovely as they are) and miss the heart of the matter. I think this is what Jesus was getting at when he said, “…small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.” (Matthew 7:14 NIV) This is anything but elitist. All are called to follow Jesus; it is only our own reluctance to walk through the darkness of confession and surrender that holds us back from finding the way to life. May our Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on us sinners, truly…

The love of Poverty…

The most honoured parts of the body are not the head or the hands, which lead and control. The most important parts are the least presentable parts. That’s the mystery of the Church. As a people called out of oppression to freedom, we must recognize that it is the weakest among us—the elderly, the small children, the handicapped, the mentally ill, the hungry and sick—who form the real centre. Paul says, “It is the parts of the body which we consider least dignified, that we surround with the greatest dignity” (1 Corinthians 12:23).

The Church as the people of God can truly embody of the living Christ among us only when the poor remain its most treasured part. Care for the poor, therefore, is much more than Christian charity. It is the essence of being the body of Christ…

Like every human organization the Church is constantly in danger of corruption. As soon as power and wealth come to the Church, manipulation, exploitation, misuse of influence, and outright corruption are not far away.

How do we prevent corruption in the Church? The answer is clear: by focusing on the poor. The poor make the Church faithful to its vocation. When the Church is no longer a church for the poor, it loses its spiritual identity. It gets caught up in disagreements, jealousy, power games, and pettiness. Paul says, “God has composed the body so that greater dignity is given to the parts which were without it, and so that there may not be disagreements inside the body but each part may be equally concerned for all the others” (1 Corinthians 12:24-25). This is the true vision. The poor are given to the Church so that the Church as the body of Christ can be and remain a place of mutual concern, love, and peace.

Henri Nouwen, from Bread for the Journey

St. Francis saw this so clearly: it was only by “focusing” on the poor to the extent that he embraced their poverty for himself, embraced it as closely as a lover, that he was able—without, at least to begin with, even realising what he was doing—to cleanse the corruption that threatened to destroy the Church in his day.

But how do we, in our own time, come anywhere close to this? I have always wondered how we might truly follow this part of our vocation as Tertiaries. The Third Order of the Society of St. Francis was founded by Francis himself in order to provide a way to live as radical Christians in the world, rather than by walking away from it. As the Principles state (Day 4): “When Saint Francis encouraged the formation of The Third Order he recognised that many are called to serve God in the spirit of Poverty, Chastity, and Obedience in everyday life (rather than in a literal acceptance of these principles as in the vows of the Brothers and Sisters of the First and Second Orders). The rule of The Third Order is intended to enable us in the duties and conditions of daily living, and for us to carry them out in this spirit.”

This is all very good; but where, in our own lives, does the rubber hit the road? It would be so easy to fudge the call to simplicity, or to let it stand as a merely external exercise. Where is the reckless love Francis had for his Lady Poverty?

Richard Rohr has some thoughts:

God calls all of us to take the demanding and liberating path of our own inner truth (John 8:31-32) [Jesus said, “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” (NIV)]—and that means taking responsibility for everything that’s in us: for what pleases us and for what we’re ashamed of, for the rich person inside us and for the poor one too. Francis of Assisi called this forgiving the leper within us and Therese of Lisieux called it “The Little Way.” It is always the way of courage and utter trust, recognizing both light and shadow within us.

If we learn to honour and claim our inner inheritance, we will grant others the same divine donation. If we learn to love the poor one within us, we’ll discover that we have room for compassion for all “outsiders” too, because we now know that we are all the same. Human solidarity now comes naturally.

Those who have enough space within them to embrace every part of their own soul can receive the fully human and fully divine Christ. And the good news is that Christ himself will lead us on this path.

Adapted from Simplicity, p. 174-175

I confess that I’m really quite excited about Rohr’s words here. If the discipline of interior prayer can lead us directly into the love of inner—and ultimately outer—poverty, then at last we have a handle on our calling, and a real understanding of why prayer is so central to our vocation. Certainly my own experience seems to be bearing out all that Rohr says.

I’ll try and write more on this as it (hopefully!) becomes clearer…

Loving the Church...

Loving the Church often seems close to impossible. Still, we must keep reminding ourselves that all people in the Church - whether powerful or powerless, conservative or progressive, tolerant or fanatic - belong to that long line of witnesses moving through this valley of tears, singing songs of praise and thanksgiving, listening to the voice of their Lord, and eating together from the bread that keeps multiplying as it is shared. When we remember that, we may be able to say, "I love the Church, and I am glad to belong to it."

Loving the Church is our sacred duty. Without a true love for the Church, we cannot live in it in joy and peace. And without a true love for the Church, we cannot call people to it.

Henri Nouwen, from Bread for the Journey

I thought this was a good chaser for my last two posts!

A foot in both camps...

It seems to me that the emerging church is emerging because people are finding the ability to have a grateful foot in both camps - one in the Tradition (the mother church) along with another foot inside of a support group that parallels, deepens, broadens, grounds, and personalizes the traditional message. But you don't throw out the traditional message, or you have to keep rebuilding the infrastructure or creating a superstructure all over again.

The emerging church becomes an accountability system for the Tradition, which is needed to keep us honest and not just lost in words. This is a new kind of reformation in which we don't react, we don't rebel, we don't start from zero again. You can't start a spiritual reformation by spinning wheels, particularly not angry wheels. You have to be for something - totally - or it is not religion.

And so the appropriate questions are: What are you in love with? What do you believe in? What is the heaven that you have already discovered? What good thing do you need to share? This is the only work of soul.

Richard Rohr, adapted from the CAC webcast, Nov. 8, 2008: “What is The Emerging Church?”

This is a deeply Franciscan point of view that Rohr is expressing. St. Francis himself, born into a period when the church of his day was not in a good state, wasted no time in criticising either its leadership or its laity, but simply got on with following the Christ he loved as closely as he possibly could, collecting around him those who caught his vision of a truly radical life according to the actual Biblical teachings of Jesus, and lived in the fullness of the Holy Spirit. In doing so, he did far more to rebuild the church than any of its critics and rebels like Frederick II.

In our day most of us cannot, or do not, aspire to Francis' purity of vision - but we can be faithful to the leading of the Holy Spirit; we can go back to the Gospels and fall in love again with the Son of the Living God who died to save us, and by whose mercy we have been set free; and we can try our honest best to live in the Light of Christ regardless of what may be said of us by those who are embarrassed by the truth.

I love this sense of having a foot in both camps. I simply cannot live any other way myself. I know there are plenty of friends of mine who find this habit slightly difficult. Some of my evangelical / charismatic friends find my devotion to our Lady, my (very) high view of the Eucharist, and so forth, deeply peculiar if not downright suspect. On the other hand, I have Anglo-Catholic friends who not only cannot understand my taste in worship music, but who find my (very) high view of the role of the Holy Spirit in the church in general and in prayer ministry in particular, deeply peculiar if not downright suspect. I don't think either group of friends readily understands the depth of my devotion to God's Word.

I can't help that. Here I stand, as Martin Luther is reported to have once said, and I can do no other. Actually I think it is terribly important that, like Brother Francis before us, we adamantly refuse to be recruited by any camp in opposition to any other. We have good precedent. Throughout the four Gospels we can find accounts of Jesus refusing to be recruited by the Pharisees, the Zealots, or anyone else who would gladly have called him "one of us", slipping away through the crowd anytime anyone tried to make him king (John 6:15).

We must keep a foot firmly, I'm coming to believe, in both camps - and we must, gently but firmly, resist anyone who tells us that our views are internally contradictory, mutually incompatible, or any of that. We must go our own way, or rather Jesus' way, even when it costs us, as it cost him, dearly.

Simple competence...

Another exciting piece of Emerging Christianity is that, really for the first time, we've stopped idealizing or being preoccupied with the top. We have turned to a search for actual gifts, real service, and proven holiness. What we need now is simple competence in doing the job of revealing, healing, and reconciling this pained humanity and this suffering world.

The first question is not, "Is she trained in theology?" or "Is he ordained?" The first question is "Can she do the job? Is he changing lives? Is it working?"

For centuries we have argued about bishops, ministers, priests, and protocol, with few results and more divisions. Now we realize that it is simple competence and holiness that finally matters. Are lives being changed? Are people meeting God, themselves, and one another in good and healing ways? All the rest is window dressing. Jesus had legitimization from no formal institution, but he sure did the job.

Adapted from the CAC webcast, Nov. 8, 2008:

“What is The Emerging Church?”

I have to confess that this idea of simple competence is one of the things I miss about the Vineyard. Admittedly, in the UK at any rate, it's never been much more than an idea, or an ideal at best, but it is a beautiful idea. When God's call is filtered through years of vocation conferences, study, assignments and examinations, its edge is often blunted if it isn't lost altogether. All this may help provide a firewall against potential abuses (though tragic events have often enough proved that it isn't an impenetrable one) but it most certainly loses vocations, and breaks hearts longing to serve God.

The theology of holy orders, and the traditional roles of Bishop, Priest and Deacon are deeply attested to in the history of the Church since the earliest days - some would argue, from the apostles themselves. Perhaps the old concept of Minor Orders was intended to extend this, and in many ways roles within our own Church of England such as Licensed Lay Minister (or Lay Reader), Lay Pastoral Assistant (or Lay Pastor) are a modern equivalent. Certainly they provide a welcome and useful path to service within a disciplined ecclesial structure.

It would however take a hardy Catholic, whether Anglo- or Roman, I think, to assert that the Holy Spirit should be limited by the structures of church governance. I am excited and challenged by Rohr's words here. And Rohr, remember, is a Priest in the Roman Catholic Church, and a Franciscan (OFM).

Things are moving and changing in the church (I use the small 'C' advisedly) in ways I don't understand. Some I know feel terrified, as though the earth itself were shifting under their feet, and I sympathise. But Aslan is not a tame Lion, as Mrs Beaver observed, and we are only human. The world has changed out of all recognition in the few years I've walked around on it; should the church not change too, since it is made up of ordinary people trying to follow Christ? It is still the Body of Christ in the world, but it must be flexible in order to serve in the world, just as my hand must flex to turn a sick person's door handle if I am to be able to visit them.

All together now...

As Jesus was one human person among many, the Church is one organization among many. And just as there may have been people with more attractive appearances than Jesus, there may be many organizations that are a lot better run than the Church. But Jesus is the Christ appearing among us to reveal God's love, and the Church is his people called together to make his presence visible in today's world.

Would we have recognized Jesus as the Christ if we had met him many years ago? Are we able to recognize him today in his body, the Church? We are asked to make a leap of faith. If we dare to do it our eyes will be opened and we will see the glory of God.

Henri Nouwen, from Bread for the Journey

What is remarkable is that we are, ourselves, our own frail broken selves, the Body of Christ in the world. Of course we can't do it by ourselves. Could I? Of course not. Could you? Hardly. But together... all together...

Being part of it…

Over the centuries the Church has done enough to make any critical person want to leave it. Its history of violent crusades, pogroms, power struggles, oppression, excommunications, executions, manipulation of people and ideas, and constantly recurring divisions is there for everyone to see and be appalled by.

Can we believe that this is the same Church that carries in its centre the Word of God and the sacraments of God’s healing love? Can we trust that in the midst of all its human brokenness the Church presents the broken body of Christ to the world as food for eternal life? Can we acknowledge that where sin is abundant grace is superabundant, and that where promises are broken over and again God's promise stands unshaken? To believe is to answer yes to these questions.

Henri Nouwen, from Bread for the Journey

I’m aware that for some of my readers yesterday’s post will have raised difficult questions. This reflection from Nouwen might go some way to explaining why, no matter what, I can’t walk away from the Body that I am part of… and if things are not always comfortable, that’s part of it, part of the whole process, part of being the Body of Christ in a wounded world.

When I write these things it all looks so cold and “pious” (in the colloquially pejorative sense) on the screen, and yet it’s all shining with tears and energy in my own mind and heart. I wish I could somehow convey how all this is alive with the gentle heartstopping desire the Spirit has—how real it is. Christ, have mercy, is about all I can say these days…

Believing in the Church…

The Church is an object of faith. In the Apostles' Creed we pray: “I believe in God, the Father… in Jesus Christ, his only Son, in the Holy Spirit, the holy catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting.” We must believe in the Church! The Apostles’ Creed does not say that the Church is an organization that helps us to believe in God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. No, we are called to believe in the Church with the same faith we believe in God.

Often it seems harder to believe in the Church than to believe in God. But whenever we separate our belief in God from our belief in the Church, we become unbelievers. God has given us the Church as the place where God becomes God-with-us…

Our faith in God who sent his Son to become God-with-us and who, with his Son, sent his Spirit to become God-within-us cannot be real without our faith in the Church. The Church is that unlikely body of people through whom God chooses to reveal God’s love for us. Just as it seems unlikely to us that God chose to become human in a young girl living in a small, not very respected town in the Middle East nearly two thousand years ago, it seems unlikely that God chose to continue his work of salvation in a community of people constantly torn apart by arguments, prejudices, authority conflicts, and power games.

Still, believing in Jesus and believing in the Church are two sides of one faith. It is unlikely but divine!

Henri Nouwen, from Bread for the Journey

If this is true, then we as Franciscans have an enormous responsibility given us by our founder, to whom Christ spoke from the crucifix at San Damiano, saying, “Go, Francis, and repair my house, which as you see is falling into ruin.” We are called to such gentleness and concern, such compassion and longing, for the broken body of Christ, the Church (Colossians 1:24) as was shown by Joseph, Nicodemus, Mary Magdalene and the others (Luke 23:55; John 19:38ff) to Christ’s own body broken on the Cross. Only through such love and self-giving as theirs, and as Francis’ and Clare’s, will we at last see all things made new in Jesus (Revelation 21:5).

Freedom!

The Church is the people of God. The Latin word for “church,” ecclesia, comes from the Greek ek, which means “out,” and kaleo, which means “to call.” The Church is the people of God called out of slavery to freedom, sin to salvation, despair to hope, darkness to light, an existence centred on death to an existence focused on life.

When we think of Church we have to think of a body of people, travelling together. We have to envision women, men, and children of all ages, races, and societies supporting one another on their long and often tiresome journeys to their final home.

Henri Nouwen, from Bread for the Journey

I think this is why any model for the Church other than Christ’s is bound to fail, and fail by causing the greatest misery to those who try to find God through it. We are called by Christ out of those bondages—how then can a church do Christ’s will that imposes them all over again?

This is why St. Francis was so insistent on poverty, chastity and, yes, obedience: only so can we be free from the chains of obsession the world puts about our feet. As Tertiaries we live, as The Principles state (Day 4), in the spirit of those Evangelical counsels, but if we do so we are no different really from any who follow Christ, who are called out of the bondage of wealth, lust and self-will that the world peddles as the greatest good, yet which the young man who came to Jesus seeking eternal life would not be liberated from… (Mark 10.17ff)

Rediscovering Christ…

Emerging Christianity seems to be willing to recognize that it is at the energetic level, the life level, the love level, the lifestyle level that the living mystery of God and Jesus is passed on. It is not just getting the words right, and making a verbal affirmation of your belief in words and creeds. Verbal belief systems ask almost nothing of us in terms of actual change of mind and heart and lifestyle.

The broader Jesus scholarship that we are now enjoying widens the view to include previously neglected perspectives: the essential Jewish lens, the feminist/womanist lens, the lens of the poor, the unique lens of every minority, and the lens of sincere secular seekers, who often point out our own blind spots to us. You cannot see what you were never told to look for from inside.

I personally do not think Jesus ever intended to create Christianity as a new or separate religion. I think he was trying to reform and restore the Jewish religion, and in that he offered us the criteria by which to reform all religion forever…

The contemplative mind is really just the mind that emerges when you pray instead of think first. Praying opens the field and moves beyond fear and judgment and agenda and analysis, and just lets the moment be what it is—as it is.

We really have to be taught that mind. We now are pretty sure that it was systematically taught—mostly in the monasteries—as late as the 13th and even into the 14th century. But once we got into the oppositional mind of the Reformation and the rational mind of the Enlightenment, the contemplative mind pretty much fell by the wayside. The wonderful thing is that it is now being rediscovered across denominations, and there is no select group that holds it or that teaches it. Catholics still use the word “contemplation,” but usually have not been taught the practice, even monks and nuns and priests…

The contemplative mind does not need to prove anything or disprove anything. It looks for wisdom by saying, “What does this text ask of me, what do I need to change in me?” Not, "how can I change others?"

The contemplative mind lets the terrifying/wonderful moment be what it is and primarily ask something of me, not always using it to convert others.

The contemplative mind is willing to hear from a fresh beginner’s mind, yet also learn from the old and solid Tradition.

The contemplative mind has the humility and patience to think “both/and” instead of “all or nothing.” We call this non-dual thinking. It easily leads to a “Third Way” mentality, neither fight nor flight, but standing in between where I can hold what I do know together with what I don’t know. And then I let that wonderful mix lead me to wisdom instead of easy, quick knowledge which largely just creates opinionated people instead of wise people.

Richard Rohr, adapted from the CAC webcast, Nov. 8, 2008:
“What is The Emerging Church?”

I can’t help but feel that Rohr has put his finger here on something very important for us to realise as we look at the Church at the beginning of the 21st century, shaken by internal strife and the rumours of schism, increasingly threatened from without by the minions of political correctness and jobsworthery, yet strangely full of new life and hope on the level of individual fellowships, congregations and groups.

The political model of doing church, just like the Thatcherite business model of running public services, is beginning to fall apart at the seams, showing the creaking framework of false assumptions that holds it all together. We are rediscovering Christ, after all these years!

The Principles, Day 5, reads: “The [Third] Order [Society of St. Francis] is founded on the conviction that Jesus Christ is the perfect revelation of God; that true life has been made available to us through His Incarnation and Ministry; by His Cross and Resurrection; and by the sending of his Holy Spirit. Our Order believes that it is the commission of the church to make the gospel known to all and therefore accepts the duty of bringing others to know Christ, and of praying and working for the coming of the Kingdom of God.”

That is our simple calling. If we do that, if, like Francis himself, we drop everything and follow our Lord, taking him at his word, then all else will fall into place, and as the Lord commissioned him, we will help rebuild his Church. What Rohr calls “the contemplative mind” is in many ways just that: being prepared to look from within outwards to the suffering and broken world with the eyes of the indwelling Christ, who said, “I ask not only on behalf of these, but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.” (John 17.20ff NRSV)

Pax et bonum!

Contemplative Christian has a thoughtful and important post, A New Kind of Christian Politics, which I do urge you to click over and read. He says:

It’s a very interesting time to be a young Christian in America, for there are many others who find the old divisions and stale arguments largely irrelevant. I think there is a movement toward contemplative spirituality within the developing church. In some ways, this movement is apparent within the Emerging Church, the term given the interesting change within the church in recent years…across denominations. But really, it’s bigger than that. There is a fundamental difference between a spirituality based on relationship with God (grace-based) and spirituality based on rightness before God (shame-based). In grace-based spirituality, we become intimately aware of our own smallness, and the largeness of God’s capacity to love. In shame-based spirituality, we are caught in the cyclical struggle to maintain control of where we stand with God, to maintain our position as keepers of knowledge about God. The former can accept unknowns and gray areas. The latter is often defined by black and white thinking…

I guess what I’m saying is that contemplative Christianity… a spirituality of Christ defined by prayer and mystical union… is an answer to fundamentalism and its shame-cycle. I read an article a while ago about conflict in an Islamic country, where the fundamentalist Muslim majority was seeking to silence and control the Sufi minority. Sufis are the contemplatives, the mystics, of the Islamic worldview, and have historically (in this context at least) been peace-seekers, where the majority has continued to wage war and control. Its interesting to see the same dynamic play out in so many contexts. Mysticism challenges black and white thinking, just as Christ challenged the black and white thinking of the religiously certain of his time. The reaction to Christ was violence. We see the same today.

When your world is built upon tightly controlled rules and systems, then you fight to protect your control. The story of the prodigal son illustrates the dynamic beautifully. The oldest son had his world fairly well under control…he had earned his fathers love and respect with hard work and dedication. When the prodigal son returned home and was received with such joy… the love given away for free… the brother’s response was anger. We cannot control God. Yet, when the worldview of conservative Christians is challenged, even if challenged by undeniable logic (such as proof the earth is older than 5000 years) the response is anger and defensiveness…if you’re not with us, God is not with you…

But you really should read the rest. It’s a very interesting time to be a Christian, period, not just a young one in America. Richard Rohr writes:

I want to share with you this week the spiritual genius of St. Francis and how severely, seriously, and wonderfully he wanted to imitate Jesus. That is why so many commentators have called Francis “a Second Christ,” because he tried in so many ways to be exactly like Jesus. Jesus, and what Jesus loved, was his only love and his only concern.

Both Jesus and Francis, by their lifestyles and by their words, expose and undercut the superficial “honour/shame systems” that define most human cultures. They both refuse to live inside of such a falsely constructed world, where the private ego is the primary reference point for what is called morality.

Almost all of the unwritten rules of behaviour in any honour/shame- based society are meant to protect and enforce social class and social order, and to properly humiliate and exclude those who do not conform. It is much more about love of self-image than love of God. Both Jesus and Francis are about inclusion and not exclusion, about protecting the indwelling divine image more than any superior self-image.

(adapted from Francis: Subverting the Honour/Shame System)

We have, as Franciscans, much to share with the wider church; yet we are, the Third Order at least, all too prone to hide Francis’ and Clare’s—and therefore Christ’s—light under a bushel of Anglican reserve, forgetting that Francis himself was anything but reticent about the Gospel! It has often been said that Franciscans are either evangelical Catholics or Catholic evangelicals. Maybe we need to be a little more open about both sides of that equation, so that we can truly contribute to this increasingly powerful current that God has set in motion, far deeper than any faction or fashion, or rumours of schism and betrayal…

Pax et bonum, peace and all good, is the archetypal Franciscan greeting—we need to say it, firmly, to all the Church!