Monday, November 13, 2006

A Rough Thursday

This past Thursday evening I attended a session of our local denominational group outlining a restated vision. I found myself growing rather ambivalent towards what was being presented. On the one hand, I struggled with a number of issues around language — I was very aware that I wasn't at all sure that I knew whether the words and terms used meant the same thing to the presenters as they did to me or to others. With uncertainty around a common understanding of the language systems in use, how could there be any certainty of any real commonality of vision flowing from a common vision statement? These language questions just seemed to intensify the feeling of doubt as to whether I really belonged here in this tradition any more. Yet on the other hand there was much of what was presented that I could be encouraged or even excited about, if I could just get past the doubts.

At the end of the meeting I started to express to an individual beside me that some of the things we had discussed would require a pretty significant change in paradigm, particularly in concepts of leadership and governance at play in our congregation, if the desired outcomes were to be truly realized. But the conversation went badly and degenerated quickly, with my frustration becoming rather evident in both tone and content — I don't think any real communication happened at all. And it certainly wasn't gracious on my part.

Was the gulf between the tradition in which I had been nurtured and in which I had laboured for so long and who I had now become so great as to have become unbridgeable? And who had I become, anyway? What was it that fed this ugly lack of grace that I had experienced within me? What would it take for me to allow God to lead these people through whatever roundabout path He chose? Had it come to the point where we must part company for me to grow in grace, or would that trouble just follow me? These were questions that I pondered as I drove away and began the post-mortem reflection.

I found the following quote at NextReformation:

“There are two ways to picture how God interacts with history. The traditional model shows a God up in heaven who periodically flashes a lightning bolt of intervention: the calling of Moses from a burning bush, the Ten Plagues, the prophets, the birth of Jesus. The Bible indeed portrays such divine interventions, though they usually follow years of waiting and doubt.
“Another model shows God beneath history, continuously sustaining it and occasionally breaking the surface with a visible act that emerges into plain sight, like the tip of an iceberg. Anyone can notice the dramatic acts — Egypt’s Pharaoh had no trouble noticing the plagues — but the life of faith involves a search below the surface as well, an ear fine-tuned to rumors of transcendence.”
Philip Yancey, “Soul Survivor,” page 252

What I found as I reflected was that the systems of language and symbol that predominate in the churches of my tradition tend to be more consistent with the first model, particularly so when the subject at hand is vision or mission. At times in the past, the language has been quite explicit that the completion of the mission depends entirely upon us, indeed that God is counting on us to accomplish His mission and if we don't step up to the plate it simply will not be accomplished — there is no "Plan B" as it were. And of course, there is no time to lose. This puts enormous pressure on those who take the subject seriously.

Regrettably, however, taking up the vision cast in such an environment often results in that course of events so ably described by Bonhoeffer in Life Together.

God hates visionary dreaming; it makes the dreamer proud and pretentious. The man who fashions a visionary ideal of community demands that it be realized by God, by others, and by himself. He enters the community of Christians with his demands, sets up his own law, and judges the brethren and God Himself accordingly. He stands adamant, a living reproach to all others in the circle of brethren. He acts as if he is the creator of the Christian community, as if his dream binds men together. When things do not go his way, he calls the effort a failure. When his ideal picture is destroyed, he sees the community going to smash. So he becomes, first an accuser of his brethren, then an accuser of God, and finally the despairing accuser of himself.

I have certainly experienced this within myself. And as I reflect upon it further, I find that I am most susceptible to the temptation to see in the current situation only those barriers to the ultimate vision when I have been too long immersed in systems of language and symbol which encourage me to think of God as largely non-active in the world, and mission as something we bring about. Unfortunately for me, the systems of language and symbol that are most prevalent within my tradition are precisely those which do just that, and I have been immersed in them for a very long time.

I also realized that it had once again been quite awhile since I had gotten my Liturgy Fix, as I put it once before. So on Sunday morning I returned to St. James Anglican, on just the right day to hear Arthur speak from Hebrews, mentioning how symbolic systems shape us, for good or for ill. He focussed particularly on the eucharist, on the now common understanding of its being rooted in Christ's sacrifice that He made "once for all", and on the historic anglican emphasis on the primary direction of the eucharist being from God to us, moreso than from us toward God.

Once again, the entire effect of the liturgy — including the corporate prayer of confession, the eucharist, and the passing of the peace — was that of the Holy Spirit re-membering me into the Body of Christ. Although I thought that I was getting along fairly well, my experience on Thursday evening proves that I need more than just a light fix of liturgy every two or three months. Rather I need to be much more deliberate in immersing myself in an environment of language and symbol that remind me that it is God, and not us, that is primarily at work in fulfilling His mission in the world, and building His Kingdom — an environment that redirects me over and over again to the reality expressed in the words with which Bonhoeffer finishes his section on community:

Christian brotherhood is not an ideal which we must realize; it is rather a reality created by God in Christ in which we may participate. The more clearly we learn to recognize that the ground and strength and promise of all our fellowship is in Jesus Christ alone, the more serenely shall we think of our fellowship and pray and hope for it.

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