Grace
and peace to you from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ.
I share
with you a blog I wrote last year because this Epistle is a variation on that
theme. You may want to check it either before or after reading the 34th
Epistle. The blog says our project as the Church is to be in relationship with
each other, and then together to be in relationship with the world outside on
behalf of Christ. It also says that is a hard project indeed and we often fail
chiefly because relationship costs us a piece of ourselves, and that’s a price
we are not willing to pay. http://bishopdansblog.blogspot.com/2017/08/
If I
seem a bit obsessed with our relationships, permit me to list the basic
reasons:
1. 1. Our
understanding of God as Trinity means God is love, that godliness is a matter
of relationality. God is the source, the destiny, and the meaning of our lives
so to miss God (love/relationality) is to miss the heart of everything. Because
God is who God is, the only way to God is through relationship with each other.
2. 2. Whenever
God acts to draw us into relationship with him (apologies for the male
pronoun), God always – always –
establishes a covenant to create a human community with himself in the middle of
it. The Church is either a covenant community or we are a sham. It is in the
covenant community that we support each other and challenge each other (sometimes
by being flawed) to practice virtues and grow in grace.
3. 3. When
asked “What is the greatest commandment?” Jesus could not give just one. He had
to give two because they are equal and inseparable: love of God and love of
neighbor. (Mt 22: 36-40)
4. 4. The
entire theology of St. Paul is an elaboration on finding our salvation, our
wholeness, through being incorporated into the Body of Christ, an all too human
community. (e.g., I Cor. 12)
5. 55. St. John
says it is impossible to love God without loving each other. A purported spiritual
bond to God absent a community of faith is, in John’s word, a “lie.” (1 Jn. 4:
20)
6. 6. The
Catechism says the Church’s mission, our reason for being, the thing we get up
for each morning, is to restore all
people to unity with God and each other in Christ. (BCP 855)
7. 7. This
literary genre of the Epistle is, of course, an homage to the New Testament
Epistles, and they are overwhelmingly on a single theme: Be a covenant
community!
Those
are some of the reasons I feel compelled like Jeremiah (Jer. 20: 9) to speak of
this. I do not mean to pressure you to connect with each other in a life
giving, inspiring, rooted, meaningful way. It is my job to pry the door open
but whether you choose to enter or not is up to you.
I write
this Epistle to make two more points beyond what I said in the blog – the
first, faintly implicit in the attached blog; the second, not mentioned but it
is vitally important.
1. I. The Triumph of the Centrifugal Force.
Usually,
we simply disconnect from each other. It is hard to draw people together in a
parish, harder still to draw parishes together into a diocese. There are
multiple practical pretexts for disconnection. But the underlying real reason
is that connection involves a kind of loss of self. To connect, we have to set
our thoughts and opinions aside to listen to each other, shelve our own agendas
to care about each other, to risk being changed by the relationship. It is a real
risk. The reason to do it is that we also discover ourselves in a whole new
light in the context of relationship. He
who seeks to save his life will lose it but he who loses his life will find it.
(Lk. 17: 33).
The
centrifugal force in our culture is strong these days. Maybe it is because
institutions have a history of oppression and corruption. They are composed of people
and we know how people are. Or maybe it is because the first 6 decades of the
20th Century grew stiflingly conformist. Or maybe it is just a surge
the individualist isolationism that all the name brand religions see as an
inherent problem in human life. There are no doubt reasons we disconnect, but
the spiritual and emotional price we pay is high.
The new
point I offer about disconnection in the Church is that the parishes that are
most disconnected from the Diocese (their sister parishes and partners in
mission) turn out to be the ones whose members are disconnected from each
other. Sometimes a parish sets out to bond internally against the outside
threat of the Diocese, but invariably internal discord either precedes or
succeeds the isolation of the parish. Conversely, congregations with a healthy
connection to the wider Church have healthy internal dynamics as well. I have
no idea which comes first. It looks like chicken and egg. But the correlation of
internal and external cooperation shows up over and over and over.
2. II. The Triumph of the False Centripetal.
On the
other hand, we are hardwired to long for connection. We need some level of
human interaction to live. In this time of radical individualism, we are
lonelier and lonelier. So, we need to come together. But, we don’t want to lose
ourselves in that coming together. We are ambivalent. So, we tend to come
together on a shallow and oft-times pathological basis. The most common commonality
is that we unite against someone or
some other group. It is an us against them
or, even better, an us against him. Systems
psychologists call that a false bond or
a bogus relationship. We are not
appreciating each other, caring for each other, risking that essential loss of
self in authentic relationship with each other. We are just getting together to
talk trash about someone who is not our
sort dear or against those people.
I see
false bonding in the Church a lot – a whole lot – of the time. Our diocese has
its outcasts who serve as our scapegoats. We find our unity in condemning them.
I hear the clergy of one region of the diocese speaking contemptuously of our
Church in another region. I hear the persistence of some in believing that no
one cares about them even when others have labored long and spent resources to
support them, but they are bonded with each other in the conviction that no one
else cares.
The
problem with false bonding is this: it inoculates us against authentic
relationship. It is a mirage of community. It will not slake the real thirst of
our souls.
3. III. Getting Past Both Alienations To Find Wholeness.
It is
entirely ok to stay isolated. I want to say the only ones we are hurting are
ourselves. That isn’t quite true. We are all essential members of the team. So,
if we don’t show up, the team is diminished. But the Church team has been
playing with 8 on the baseball field or 4 on the basketball court so long no
one is apt to notice.
It is
less ok to bond on a negative basis. That does hurt other people at the same
time that it corrupts us. But the Church has become so optional in a secular
society, people should not have too hard a time escaping us.
The real
point is the missed opportunity not only for each of us individually but for
each other and for the wider world. We are invited to lose our (little) selves
in order to find our (larger) selves as the Body of Christ. Our mission is not
to form a mutual support group. It is to be the Body of Christ in the world.
The Catechism, remember, says our mission is to restore all people to unity with God and each other in Christ. The basis of our unity
is all important. We take up our cross (on which our little selves are
crucified) in order to be raised into the meaningful life of Jesus’ Kingdom
Mission.
What
does the Kingdom Mission look like? The synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and
Luke) speak of little else. Good news for the poor, broken hearts mended, release
for the captive, liberty for the oppressed. (Lk 4: 18) God’s gracious will is
done on earth as it is in Heaven. (Mt. 6: 10) We carry out the mission as we worship and pray, proclaim the Gospel, and
promote justice, peace, and love. (BCP 855) It’s a big, big mission. It is
fulfilled only at the end of the age, but the Kingdom happens, it breaks in
here and now all the time. It happens whenever we discern God’s will and do
God’s will together.
That
Mission is big enough to lift us up out of our lesser selves and are set free
to become our true selves. This is how we become whole. If we “come to the
garden alone when the dew is still on the roses,” and if Jesus shows up to walk
with us and talk with us, either he’ll eventually invite us out of the garden into
the mission field with our fellow Christians, or he’s an imposter.
The
point is coming together for a higher purpose. We have reached important
insights into human nature through research on PTSD among combat veterans. That
condition among veterans these days is proving harder to eradicate than other
trauma survivors. There are probably several contributing factors, but the main
one is what matters to us. Combat trauma survivors relive their combat
experience. The thing that keeps them stuck in the trauma is that they don’t
want to give up the rest of the experience. Other trauma survivors are not so
nostalgic. There is nothing positive for them to remember.
So,
what’s so special about combat? Two things: First, for people in our
self-focused society, it is the one time in their lives they were serving
something more important than themselves, something they were willing to live
or die for. Second, they were bonded to their comrades in that cause, ready to
sacrifice themselves for each other’s good. That was their taste of real life.
No wonder, they don’t want to let it go even if it is laced with terror. The
point for us is that the reason combat PTSD is so stubborn is because in
civilian life, in civic life, we are not connecting for something vastly larger
than our own personal agendas.
Covenant
community is a whole new way of being in the world. It would be boldly
countercultural in the West today. You
may call me a dreamer (ironic allusion), but I hope for some of us it is
still possible.
