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?
