Holy Week 2013--Parts I & II

PART ONE

My spiritual director thought God spoke to me last week. Maybe she’s right.

We were listening together to the bumps and jostlings of my journey, which led to a question that had snagged some attention in me this week. “Given all you know of the church, why do you stay?” This was asked by a colleague-become-friend as we whispered together during her son’s afternoon nap. We were in a Children’s Hospital, and had been journeying together for over a month as this little one had entered the PICU then responded to treatment well enough to heal with greater speed than they’d at first feared. He was finally sleeping peacefully after his speech therapy session, and she and I were discussing the mundane things seminary professors do together. “Given all you know of the church, why do you stay?” she asked me, most likely asking herself as well. An answer arrived in tonight’s writing-circle guided meditation, as I crossed a threshold toward an envisioned banquet table set before me, as I approached the chair left there for me in the spoken imaginings.

I stay because the church never leaves me.

I like this answer for a couple reasons. There is no ‘there’ of the church in which I must ‘stay,’ but instead, a lived reality of over forty years steeped so deeply in my bones that it’s no longer a matter of volition or overt choice. I’m not ‘staying’ where I do not belong as much as recognizing where I have belonged for so long that it’s pointless to suggest I could live without at least reference to it in some fashion. This has obvious personal referent—I grew up ‘churched,’ as the literature calls it—but I would also argue an unavoidable cultural referent too, at least in the ‘fly-over states’ and ‘non-urban settings’ of the United States. Given popular media and a Midwestern location, there are very few places for anyone to go today that does not have some public bump-in with some notion of “church,” usually one of a conservative flavor and a provincial tone. Well-meaning, good-hearted, largely ignorant of pluralistic or intercultural realities so necessary to encounter in today’s ‘global village.’ You can’t help but bump into someone or something that thinks it’s the only organization or lifeworld in town. So there’s no ‘there’ of the church in which I must ‘stay,’ but an intimate-family and present-cultural reality encountered largely without choice.

This is not to say I, or we for that matter, have no choice in fidelity to a path both inside and outside of “the church” today. I spend faithful, waking hours with non-Christians who intimately shape my heart, mind, and spirit more than today’s “church.” I spend faithful, waking hours with Christians who speak a language I still recognize, a language in which I think and live, though the words are all beginning to mean things most of them would not recognize nor claim. So I listen and live every day, to the best of my ken, attempting to be faithful to a path unfolding both within and outside of today’s “church.” But this “church” does not hold me in a place I must “stay.”

I also recognize this answer helps fewer and fewer people today, that it may not be useful for those newly encountering the Christian theological tradition, but I think some variant of it holds true nonetheless. Each of us is able to ‘find our work’ when we belong somewhere and with someone held within a horizon of ultimate value (Thanks, Sandra Schneiders). For most of us, that means a web of relationships that nourish and challenge, those in which we may change and grow while being held consistently ‘in relationship.’ Centuries have unfolded in which church communities were that web of relationship. It holds true for many today as well. But it need not be as we imagine it for it to be “church” that is Spirit-led and life-giving today. To understand these musings requires an ever expansive notion of what “church” includes—perhaps a posting for another time—but its fruit is to attend to those relationships in which we can find belonging, contribution, challenge, service, laughter, nourishment for the spiritual journey into being human with a whiff of infinity ever a part of our being.

Mostly, I like my answer because, in a deeply-rooted sense, it allows me to stay and leave at the same time. Most folks I know or have read who are finding their path within and beyond traditional institutions today have felt the need to proclaim their departure from crumbling and/or useless institutions in various ways. Like Barbara Brown Taylor’s Leaving Church, her memoir of becoming an Episcopalian priest then departure of ecclesial orders to teach in a small college. Something in her required her to articulate a leaving, a departure. What I know now, in my bones, doesn’t feel like that to me. I’m aware of being in the church as it claims me in what I do. It has elected me to leadership. It seems interested in what I’m learning, if not so interested as to take notice outside its own agenda. So I bumble along in what I do, what feels given to me to do—interreligious companioning seems to describe it for now—and the church has not left me. I feel no need to proclaim a departure and it has not left.

Which is (also) not to say it will never leave, in some formal action or confrontation, though I cannot imagine today a scenario in which what I do would be so threatening to a communal body that it would awake from its slumber with focus and/or awareness on me. Perhaps it could happen. Perhaps I would be bereft, were what I’m learning and how I’m receiving it push me outside the bounds of acceptable doctrine or theological tradition and my own faith family were to disown me.

But when you’ve found a treasure in a field, or a pearl of great price, do you look behind you and mourn the dusty road, or the pains it took you to find the pearl? Of course not. When you have been given a lively devotion to your own Teacher so sensately in your bones in companionship with Buddhists, Jews, atheists, pagans, and more, do you relinquish it, them, in order to hold onto the web of relationship in which you were born and nourished in your earliest years? Of course not. Everyone has to grow up and sort out how to love your own family while not allowing it to disempower what you’ve been given to explore, to learn, to love, to know. You must grieve, naturally, responsibly, that which you have lost or left behind. There may be sadness at departure or separation, but this is also simply healthy process so you may open your hands more fully to what is being offered in front of you, right now, ever always. You hold in sadness a parting of the ways even as you bless those departing with a gentle wistfulness and best wishes for the grace of God to live in you, in them, further afield than it did when you both were together.

So even were that to happen, even were something so tumultuous and dramatic-sounding as all that to happen, forty years of my church-steeped bones will always have a whiff of incense, I think. A funny image for a Brethren-Baptist heritage Presbyterian whose traditions eschewed Catholic-like things like incense, but the image works. Forty years of steeping in the practices, habits of mind, and relationships of faithful church communities means my very form has been shaped beyond any reckoning I may choose or decide. I may grow and change, I may learn yoga and sit meditation, I may even dance a wild dance in a circle of pagan women, but my bones will always know church. I couldn’t erase church from them if I tried.

So I stay because church will never leave me.

More importantly, the One whom I know as the Risen Lord, in the power of the Spirit, in hypostatic union with the Creator of all there is…this One never leaves me. I may rant and rave, doubt and throw angry sand in this Face at the perils this life involves and the relationships this life threatens, but Her Presence bubbles ever-upward in the spirit willing to relinquish herself at the right time, assert herself at the right time, and enter devotedly into Love with W/whomever appears and welcomes her, no matter what.

Perhaps this is Easter for me this year. Perhaps the Lenten journey has been to enter into companionship across comfortable boundaries, facing mortality alongside others with no recourse to alter any of it, and be content in the emptiness and openness that have arrived. I will listen to the Christian liturgical rhythms and words these next three days. I will honor how significant they are for the Body of Christ I know as my family. I will cherish this Body, as it holds these things as true in ways I cannot today and as I hold these things as true in ways they cannot. And I will honor the lived truths that are born when wisdom offers her way of holding untruth and truth side-by-side in devotion shared with one another.

Resurrection in-deed.

               ***********************

PART TWO

The question appears not to be finished with me yet.  Why do I stay?

I stay because any communal body should be judged, if it must be judged, by its horizons and strengths alongside its past and present. Just because a community fails at being true to its calling does not invalidate the calling nor, en masse, the community, let alone the truth either professes. I stay because somewhere we need to learn how to hold one another in compassion, trust across doubt, and to honor the dignity of every  human being in a creation yearning for compassionate care as well. 

Where better to practice than in a community with so very many opportunities to practice compassion in the face of ignorance, love in the face of fear, forgiveness in the face of injury? The Christian church today is rife with such things, such opportunities for practice; probably always has been.

So a story. I remember seeing a leadership role land at my feet in a group gathered to discern processes and eventually dossiers for calling an executive leader into the community. As I looked around the circle, hoping madly that someone else ‘fit’ better for this role, I felt a sinking reality in my stomach. I knew I had many of the gifts necessary to do this work, even if it wasn’t my desire or much of a felt-choice. I remember thinking to myself, “I wish, for once, I worked for an organization in which I could be proud, in which I could feel worthwhile work unfolding. Just once.” As you can surmise, I was not feeling that at my primary institution of affiliation, and I was despairing that I was now closely associated with a second institution of little else but faults, foibles, fallenness. There was a bit of Rocky-ego simpering along…”I coulda been somebody, Coach. I coulda been somebody.” Instead, I was limping along with an arm of the church, with a leadership role I could not ignore or deny. Sigh.

We gathered, discerned process, garnered dossiers to read and listen to. Eventually, after a couple months, a consensus began to form clearly around one individual, who indeed appeared to recognize a felt-connection with the calling, with us as a local arm of the Body of Christ. I felt satisfaction and even some excitement about the prospect. Phone interview went swimmingly. Face-to-face interview did as well. We decided and he accepted. At the very last minute, however, a snag appeared that required the group as a whole to extend its heart in trust or to decide that trust had already been broken and rescind our interest. The group gathered at my home, to listen together, to have one more cellphone conversation—on mobile speaker phone, low-tech option for our purposes—and then decide what we were being a/Asked to do. The group decided that we were to extend our hearts and minds in trust. Even with the snag, the pathway was clear, with consensus.

And then I felt something I had not expected to feel at all.

I felt pleasure, satisfaction, such wholeness in participating in a communal body that sought grace before censure, trust before a test, communal wisdom amidst individual doubt. I felt a kind of pride in living into a relational way that I know is scarce outside in the overculture today. I was reminded that this ‘way of being the web of relation’ is a (gospel) kind of foolishness that the world scoffs at regularly, and with good reason. It is a fool’s way. It garners you nothing you can call ‘your own’ in the market. It offers your ego nothing in the push and pull of professional standing. From the outside, it looks like a consumer-suicide or a pansy-willed acquiescence to low-standards. And perhaps it is that sometimes. But sometimes, just sometimes, it is the way in which the world’s order is transformed. It is the way in which we can learn how rich life is in relationship, regardless of how the world quantifies or qualifies it. It is the way we know there is something beyond what we can see or fear.

Granted, this way of being human together, strong across doubt, wise amidst risk, is less and less traditioned in how we live, communally, today. It is certainly less common in the “church,” which should not surprise. Just like the rest of us, the church is so captivated most days by the culture that it cannot see its own path or calling to live a different wisdom, a different way into the world. But its traditions and its practices attest to a different way, a deeper logic (to go back to my youthful C.S. Lewis days), a wisdom way to be human beyond expectation, for good.

I stay because I learned this ‘way’ in the belly of a church as fallen as any Presbyterian confesses it to be. I stay because I’ve heard those outside the church be just as mean as those inside the church. I say we need all the traditional resources we can muster to challenge inhuman behavior, wherever it be found. The church has incredible riches we’d be foolish to ignore.

And so, I think any Body ought to be judged, if it is to be judged, by its horizon, its celebrations, its strengths, as well as its obvious faults. It’s easy to poke at the foibles of anyone and anything—just turn on the news and you can see how to mimic that behavior. It is much harder and more worthwhile, I’d argue, to acknowledge and accept the faults and foibles as one’s own, holding the woundedness of others in a compassionate way without defense or reaction.

How else will healing happen? How else will the World to Come come?