Postscript: What is Church?

2 May

When Christianity loses all the capacity to produce new words, new images, new poetry, new music, it will be dead.

- José Tolentino de Mendonça

I began the last post asking Is there such a thing as a progressive Cardinal?, and ended it feeling like I wasn’t ready to let go of Francis yet.

I also wonder if those in the ‘progressive’ camp are sometimes so charmed and moved by Francis’s presence, depth, and integrity, that we lose touch with the restless questions of our conscience.

Such as:

1. What is the Catholic Church’s perennial problem with human pleasure? Why can't it admit what almost every human being - celibate or non-celibate - truly knows (or comes to know at some point in their adult life): that sex isn't just about procreation, vital as that is. That sex - potentially - is a tremendous form of physical pleasure, sensual joy, and connecting energy, and a powerful form of emotional, energetic bonding (whether used for good or ill)? For all these reasons, that sex is a powerful connection with life, which is to say, with the divine. And if Catholic people - mystics and saints - truly know this (which of course they do), why is this knowledge, experience, and testimony so consistently absent from the Church’s official voice?

2. Why does the Catholic Church persist with its myth of changeless truth? Because it has tended to emphasize, theologically, the changeless-ness of God, without enough attention to the other pole - dynamism, change, evolving truth? Because it emphasizes “God the Father”, without enough emphasis on “God the Spirit” (or, indeed, God the Mother)? Because of its doctrine - presumption - of being Christ’s representative on earth?

3. Of course, the great elephant in the room: Why would anyone, most of all women, take sex advice and moral teaching from a group of celibate men?

4. Who is the Church? Is it the teaching magisterium, the people of God, the communion of saints, the mystical Body of Christ? Is there any point in believing in ‘the Church’ as one body or ideal? Perhaps it is much better to pragmatically accept what seems to be reality: that Christianity is pluriform and always has been. That attempts to maintain a single unified body - however diverse in practice - betray reality, and possibly God, and lead to hierarchy, clericalism, and inertia. That theological, spiritual, and ecclesiological plurality - from conservative to progressive etc - simply represents the different spectrum of human needs and cultural realities.

5. What is ‘core’ to Christianity and how should this be discerned, interpreted, and transmitted and taught? Through a ‘magisterium’ of elderly, celibate men, with limited interaction with the rest of the people of God? Through a ‘synodal structure’ that allows greater feedback and input into the magisterium? Directly, through the guidance of the Spirit or Teacher within, as George Fox believed? Through the Spirit being tested and discerned in community? What sort of community? A ‘communion’ where power is devolved and democratically contested, with lay, clerical, and episcopal involvement (such as the Anglican Church and Communion)? Something even more devolved and local?

6. Who am I? Why can't I give up my identity as a ‘Catholic’? Isn’t it enough to just embrace this in an Anglican fold? Or hold it more lightly in a contemplative frame? Or let go of it completely - burn it - in a Quaker fire? Is church membership and identity how we truly solve this deeper question of Who Am I?

7. Who can help with these restless questions?

One of the great attractions of George Fox (founder of the Quaker movement), for me, is the story of how he came to his enlightenment.

Wandering the divided, war-torn English countryside, sometimes sitting in the hollow of a tree, reading a Bible, living in his own ‘tumbling ages’ (where so much “truth” was suddenly up for grabs), depressed, disconnected, yet still holding a little candle of hope, Fox visited as many clergy or “professors of religion” (Presbyterian, “Anglican”, Calvinist, Nonconformist) as he could find. In all cases, he was profoundly disappointed.

Some ministers told Fox to sing more songs: just sing the Psalms and trust in God. One vicar told him to smoke more tobacco. Others recommended bleeding to expel noxious spirits. Others gave set doctrinal answers - mostly out of the new continental, Protestant theology - that were ‘windy doctrines’ without any ‘life’. One vicar seemed more promising until Fox accidentally stepped into one of his flowerbeds, at which point the vicar became angry, hostile, and threw him out.

Now after I had received that opening from the Lord that to be bred at Oxford or Cambridge was not sufficient to fit a man to be a minister of Christ, I regarded the priests less and looked more after the dissenting people…

As I had forsaken all the priests, so I left the separate preachers also, and those called the most experienced people; for I saw there was none among them all that could speak to my condition. And when all my hopes in them and in all men were gone, so that I had nothing outwardly to help me, nor could tell what to do, then, oh then, I heard a voice which said, ‘There is one, even Christ Jesus, that can speak to thy condition’, and when I heard it my heart did leap for joy.

Then the Lord did let me see why there was none upon the earth that could speak to my condition, namely, that I might give him all the glory; for all are concluded under sin, and shut up in unbelief as I had been, that Jesus Christ might have the pre-eminence who enlightens, and gives grace, and faith, and power. Thus, when God doth work who shall let [i.e. hinder] it? And this I knew experimentally [i.e. experientially, directly for myself]. (1)

Similarly, most of the sermons I've heard, priests I've talked with, books I’ve read, theology courses I've enrolled in, lecturers I’ve listened to, written assignments for, and argued with, or Quakers I’ve met, sat, and discussed with, haven’t ‘spoken to my condition’ as it exists right now. Maybe that sounds arrogant, but it’s true. I wonder if others feel this way as well.

Is this a mid-life thing, or an old person thing? If you've been raised with the faith and heard so many sermons and answers by the time you’re my age?

Is it Fox’s discovery? No human can truly answer our calling and search. Our hearts are restless until they rest in God (Augustine). Maybe the spiritual journey is meant to go like this. Why is the inner the last place we often look?

I stumbled inside, and with Fox’s guidance: stay inside, wait for the time of silence, open your heart, wait in the light. You will be shown.

Absolutely!

And then I pop out again. Francis dies, or is appointed. I want to hear the scriptures read and sit in a beautiful place. I fall in love with a little church and its members. I want my children to be raised with the nourishment of sacrament, word, and season, and the warmth of other hearts and faces. I want this myself.

I pop out and think: Who can I share this with? The inner ground and its riches. Or who will help me discern it, test its spirits, or share in its arising common life, if such a thing indeed exists?

Is it even possible to share “the secret places” of the One who “is in secret”, and who can only be approached by “the prayer in secret”. Maybe our real spiritual lives are both inside, between us and God, and outside, between me and the faces of the others around me, who are also Christ. How do those two ever join up? Maybe they don't. Maybe that’s part of the great “not yet” we all must make room for and patiently live with - or give up our faith in disillusionment altogether.

How does a progressive Catholic wait patiently and yet with hope for the church to serve communion to his Protestant baptized wife, his gay best friend, his divorced other best friend? Or wait and accept, and continue to practice their faith and church belonging, when the Conclave returns with a conservative Pope, a Yes Man, a hollow man, or just another man?

How does an Anglican live with a church that is still arranged in hierarchical ‘tram tracks’, and so often wordy, formal, and cold? Where one part of the church continually threatens schism if another part speaks its mind, trusts its heart, discerns the Spirit, and creates new structures that are more welcoming and loving to its rainbow members and non-members?

How do we live in the great “Now and Not Yet”, where the Spirit is moving within us, Christ is risen, rain is sounding on the roof above me, warm toast in my belly, my daughter playing with her dolls by the fire, and yet the outer Church remains so scattered, unjust, divided, and disappointing?

‘Experiment with Light’

I went inward with these questions, and what emerged was this:

Church is a process.

It’s a boat at sea. It’s left somewhere but hasn’t arrived at its final destination yet. But this language isn’t quite right, either…

Maybe there’s no leaving or arriving, but an acclimatising to the process that we are - fresh, incessant, flowing water.

A process, a flowing together, in which we’re clarified in the truth of Christ - way, truth, life, light - and in which the truth of Christ is clarified for and through us, too.

It’s not really a building - as in ‘the church on the hill’ (though our familiar church building is an upside-down boat). Each physical church is a boat in the ‘slow process’ of matter, moving through time and space.

The small, turreted, red brick church on the hillside in Peter Brueghal's Haymaking is a small boat in the sea of the sixteenth-century Belgian countryside.

Church isn’t really a vault - as in “the Church” houses the truth, the timeless ‘deposit of faith’, as in “the Church” is full of treasures. If it were a vault, we’d all suffocate for sure! A mausoleum.

It’s not the preserve of religious professionals or a ruling elite, though it involves them too. They participate in its life, in its stream. They’re swimming here with us, as part of us. Sometimes they appear very stiff and inflexible, but they are swimming!

It flows over our human boundaries (identities, traditions, ‘communion’) - as in this or that “church”, the “churches” here or there. The Roman Catholic or Anglican or Moravian “Church”.

It’s the process that Christians enter into through water and Holy Spirit - are fed, forgiven, married, anointed, and buried into.

It’s where we worship ‘in spirit and in truth’ (John 4: 23).

Love gathers into love. (2)

References:

(1) George Fox, Journal, 1647; retrieved from https://qfp.quaker.org.uk/passage/19-02/.

(2) George Fox, Epistle 195 (1660), in Rex Ambler (ed.), Truth of the Heart: An anthology of George Fox (2001), p.107.

Image:

Pieter Brueghal the Elder, Haymaking (1565).