Ambivalence scares me, especially my own.  In the area of most ambivalence, amidst the shallow, shoal infested waters that lie between hope and fear, there are moments when I find everything within me rising in hope and I cry out: save us, we pray -hosanna! Then in the next moment the impossibility of my hopeful exultation crashes under the weight of a defensive cynical realism, and because I am an INTJ, http://www.16personalities.com/intj-personality I quietly give voice to my fears and whisper: crucify him.

Palm Sunday is my least favorite stop on the Easter liturgical Express https://relationalrealities.com/2015/03/21/all-abord-the-easter-bound-liturgical-express/. I find the contradiction of blessing palms and singing Ride on, ride on in majesty before minutes later hearing an enactment of the Passion, with its crescendo cry of crucify him, crucify him, deeply disturbing.The juxtaposition between hosanna and crucify him administers a shock to the system. For this is an expression of the human capacity for shocking contradiction. We retreat into our paranoia saying: see there really is something out there to be afraid of.

In 160BC after seven years of guerilla resistance, Judas Maccabeus led the triumphant Jewish Resistance back into a Jerusalem newly liberated from the yoke of the Seleucid Emperor, Antiochus Epiphanies. The Jewish forces carried blessed palm branches with which to begin the cleansing of the Temple, a Temple that  had been defiled by the image that Antiochus had placed of himself in the Holy of Holies. The Maccabean Revolt was the last time the Jew’s could point to a successful assertion of their independence from foreign domination.

I find drawing a connection between the Maccabean cleansing of the Temple and Jesus being welcomed by the crowds bearing branches they had cut from the trees gives an insight into the hopes and aspirations of the crowds that welcomed Jesus into the city. They were welcoming in the name of the great King David a new liberator, who like Judas Maccabeus would liberate them both from the foreign Roman domination and the Jewish Temple authorities, the domestic collaborators with Roman oppression.

We know the end of the story. We know that as the events of Holy Week unfold, things don’t go in the direction of fulfilling public hopes and expectations. These increasingly turn to disappointment and in disillusionment the crowds turn on the one in whom they felt their deepest longing had been betrayed.

This is what happens when our impossible expectations fail to materialize. We turn on those who have hitherto evoked our hopes and crush them. It seems the only thing we can do to express the rage and despair that feed our fear that nothing has, nor will ever, change.

How does the profound disillusionment of the crowds at large, and of Jesus’ own inner circle in particular play into our current experience of the world? We live in a world in which the political, judicial and law enforcement, the educational, economic, and religious institutions that articulated our highest aspirations and hopes as a society are either in rapid collapse or changed beyond recognition. We seem to be returning to an age when the levers of power are firmly controlled by those with unaccountable privilege while the rest of us are gripped by a growing sense that we are helpless in the face of a new world in which there is a great deal to be afraid of.

The danger is that our liturgical journey through the events of Holy Week and the Great Three Days of Easter communicate only esthetically and sentimentally. We are moved, maybe even caught up in the drama of this week. Yet, when the gruesome ordeal of poor Jesus is vindicated in his glorious and shining resurrection, we breathe a sigh of relief. Easter is now over for another year and we are reassured by having witnessed the archetypal triumph of good over evil.

The danger I fear most is that we travel through the events of Holy Week and Easter as if we are only attending consecutive performances of Shakespeare’s history plays or the demanding three days of Wagner’s Ring Cycle. We emerge from the experience moved, disturbed, elated, saying to one another: gee that was powerful!  Like drama and opera, liturgy has the power to transport us from one spiritual state of awareness to another. Liturgy is the vehicle that moves us into and through what I have been referring to as sacred time. Yet, the question will remain, for what purpose? Is the drama of Holy Week and Easter just another form of entertainment? Or is Holy Week and Easter fundamentally important to our ability to live out our hopes and longings?

What scares me about my ambivalence is that in the events of Holy Week and Easter as they are particularly magnified on Palm Sunday, I see myself in the crowds crying both hosanna, and crucify him. I am full of hope and longing for a world transformed beyond the maintenance of the status quo, the endless repetition of business as usual. Yet, my very hopes and longings also terrify me, and so I resist the change I most long for. If I really believe that self-sacrificial love can change the world, challenge the tyrannies of power and privilege, where then would I find myself? What might an allegiance to self-sacrificial love cost me? What will following Jesus to the Cross and beyond demand of me? Now that really scares me! Ambivalence is a good place to hide.

This Lent, I’ve been exploring the traditional spiritual disciplines of fasting and self-denial; meditation on God’s holy Word; and self-examination and repentance. My central theme has been that spirituality flows through practices that discipline the human heart. Spirituality needs a vehicle or instrument for expression.

Today I turn my attention to the spiritual practice of worship. The Episcopal Church is a liturgical church. We are not the only one, yet what distinguishes us even among other liturgical churches is the beauty of our worship and the importance we place on its form. But what does this really this mean?

I don’t know about you, but I love trains. Given a choice I would always go by train. Let me explain. We board a train in order to be taken on a journey. Along the way, we make numerous stops, but each stop is simply a station we pass through along the route to our intended destination. There is something about being transported at speed, through an ever changing landscape, free of the anxiety of watching the road or the traffic.

Applying this metaphor image to our worship, liturgy like a train transports us through the landscape of sacred time. On Ash Wednesday, we boarded the Easter-bound liturgical Express. It has taken us on a journey through the Lenten countryside; making stops at a different station each Sunday. Along the route, we notice that terrain changes.With each change, our awareness deepens, or maybe heightens is a better spatial term, in preparation for arriving at our ultimate destination.

The final stage of our liturgical train journey will take us through some very dramatic scenery. I am talking about the scenic contours of Holy Week. Our itinerary has us reaching the Palm Sunday station on April 3^rd. Here, we notice a change in the air quality, laden with a heightening of expectation as well as apprehension. Compared to our long journey through the Lent countryside, with long expanses between stations, the last leg of our journey is short in terms of distance, the stations increasingly close together. Between Palm Sunday and Maundy Thursday we will stop at the stations of Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday in Holy Week. Each station is a metaphor for a liturgical experience of the events in Jesus’ last week.

On April 7^th, we arrive at the major junction of Maundy Thursday. From here we travel overnight and through the following day’s descent into rocky terrain, reaching the station of the Good Friday Liturgy. From here the liturgical train takes us through a barren plain of Holy Saturday. By evening, we will begin to pass through the last canyon before emerging into a lush valley, the location of our final destination, the golden city of Easter. We might decide to leave the train at the first station in the Easter City, called the Easter Vigil. However, many of us will want to continue through to the main terminus of Easter Day.

Liturgy moves us through sacred time, or put another way the eternal now of God. Psychologically as well as spiritually, liturgy transports us into and through the spiritual landscape of the Christian Calendar. The journey from Ash Wednesday prepares us for joy-filled arrival at Easter. The promise of New Life offers enrichment for our everyday living. Mentally, emotionally, as well as spiritually, we need to prepare for our arrival. Easter is not something you can just parachute into at the last minute – if you want, that is, to be ready for the fullest experience possible.

Worship brings us into the company of others and together we journey into the encounter not only with God, but we also find ourselves reflected in our encounter with one another. Worship brings us to the cross, in the sense of an intersection between the vertical and the horizontal dimensions of life. Invite your friends and board the Easter

Why not invite your friends and board the Easter liturgical Express, stopping at stations in Holy Week and the Triduum or Great Three Days of Easter. You won’t arrive if you don’t get aboard.

Opening reflection

I have been thinking about a recent experience. Late last year, I asked my bishop about the study resources he draws on in his preaching. Now, I should have known better. My bishop is quite a scholarly guy and so he recommended a biblical software package called Logos. I dutifully signed up and purchased Logos 6 (Anglican version of course) software, on monthly installments. I felt that this was quite an investment and that I needed to get the most out of it. However, I could not make it work for me. I mean, it’s a complex software and it takes time to know how to get into all it has to offer, which is truly exhaustive. That was one challenge. More significantly, I just didn’t find its resources useful for my sermon prep. I have come to the conclusion, not for the first time, that I am not a scholarly preacher.

I found all the background information on text a little tangential to my main interests. I am interested in text as it relates to exploring the chasm into which the biblical author’s intended meaning falls, as the result of translation of a word from Hebrew or Greek into English. Languages have equivalent words, but equivalent words often do not convey equivalent emphasis or meaning. But overall, when it comes to interpreting Scripture, I am a broad brush-stroke kind of preacher. It’s the intuitive impression of the text, filtered through the prism of my own, and my community’s preoccupations and experiences that seems to be the grist for my preaching mill.

So I finally had to admit that Logos 6 was not for me. Relinquishing my scholarly presumptions to struggle with my pride, I have come, not for the first time, to a realistic acceptance of who I am. My Parish Administrator came to my rescue. She offered to wrangle with Logos 6 customer services to extricate me from the installment plan. She’s good at that sort of thing!

The text

I am putting aside for a moment that fascinating vignette, giving us access into the struggles of the Israelites in the wilderness, that comes to us from Numbers 21:4-9. Turning first to the readings from Paul’s letter to the Ephesians and John’s Gospel, both appointed for Lent 4, I find myself struggling with my own knee-jerk reactions to the text.

From my broad brush-stroke vantage point, the Scriptures often communicate a worldview that fails to translate well into my own 21st century way of looking at things. The tone of both Paul and John in these readings evokes negative feelings in me, feelings of being lectured by the voice of authority, telling me that because of my miserable worm-likeness God has deigned to throw me the carrot of salvation, but only as long as I tow the line and stay within the fold of the elect, or as John puts it among: those who believe in him are not condemned, but those who do not believe are condemned already. 

Biblical worldviews, for there are many, to my 21st century mind can communicate the feel of a predominantly, hierarchical, patriarchal- which kind of goes with hierarchical, and exclusionary perspective. I mean that so often it’s childlike (unquestioning) obedience that’s required to make sure we find ourselves among those who are included and not among those excluded. This worldview contrasts with my broad bush-stroke encounter with the spirit of Jesus’s teaching. Jesus’ emphasis is less on obedience and more on metanoia – turning of the heart. It is less about exclusion and more about God’s invitation, for all are included.

The scholar and the pastor

As a preacher,  I feel I am knowledgeable, but the purpose of my knowledge is always pastoral in application. The scholar has a primary interest in the text. Logos 6 was not of great use to me because my interest is less in the text itself, and more in the impressions the text gives, and the reactions it evokes in us, its hearers. My passion lies in taking the impressions and intuitions that emerge from my 21st century shaped encounter with the Tradition, something I deeply cherish, in order to render it accessible to my community’s 21st century mindset so that our lives too, may be enriched by its timeless wisdom.

Getting to the point

My opening section has taken the form of a kind of self-examination, and it enables me to neatly segway into an examination of the next spiritual practice, which the Prayer Book mentions as necessary for keeping a holy Lent – self-examination and repentance.

Self-examination

It was Socrates who said: the unexamined life is not worth living! The Christian spiritual tradition is certainly in agreement with Socrates on this score. Yet, it is also part of our human nature to shield ourselves from too much self-examination, because it’s often painful.

Self-examination and repentance

The Prayer Book invites us to keep a holy Lent through self-examination and repentance. Oftentimes self-examination is the path to repentance. Repentance is the doorway to our liberation from the pain and shame of the past.

Most Episcopalians think of confession either as the General Confession in the liturgy, which is communal not individual confession or as the Roman Catholic practice of going to confession. In the Book of Common Prayer, we have a rite called the Reconciliation of the Penitent. Contrary to common knowledge the practice of going to confession has always had an important place in Anglican spiritual practice. Cranmer talks about the need to seek ghostly counsel from the priest. The difference between Anglican and Roman practice is that the Prayer Book understands going to confession or Reconciliation, as a spiritual and pastoral practice. This is in sharp contrast to the Roman view of confession as being reinstated to a necessary (juridical) state of grace in order to receive the sacraments.

At certain points in life, we are led to a reflection on the deeper currents that flow beneath the surface of our lives. These currents are fed from deep wellsprings of spiritual and emotional energy that hold the potential to enrich our sense of connection with God, with ourselves, and with other people. A paradox of life is that our strengths and weaknesses, joys and sorrows often flow from the same source. Beneath the surface of our living we also find feelings of shame, guilt, and the pain of relationship loss and failure.

The Sacrament of Reconciliation is designed to aid us when we feel stuck; when we sense that something is blocking the reworking of pain into gain. Unlike modern counseling which brings a psychological framework to bear on self-examination, Reconciliation brings a forgiveness framework to bear on our internal reflections. The real problem is not whether God forgives us. The real stumbling block is our inability to forgive ourselves!

Human beings are at heart relational, and so there is a limit to how far we can get by simply talking to ourselves or even talking to God within the privacy of our own minds. When we can’t make progress on our own, what is needed is to be able to talk to another person. The Sacrament of Reconciliation provides the confidential space for opening ourselves to the healing grace of God, mediated through the ministry of a priest representing the living Body of Christ.

Painting with a broad brush

My attention is riveted by the implications of the story about the infestation of the Israelite camp by venomous serpents in Numbers 21:4-9. It seems that in response to their endless grumbling, God’s patience comes to an end. He punishes the Israelites by sending an infestation of poisonous snakes among them, with the result that many of them die.

God instructs Moses to cast in bronze an (graven) image of the snake and raise it up at the heart of the camp. Anyone with snakebite has only to look up at the image, in order to be healed. The real snake kills. The image of the snake of bronze heals. The connection between the two lies in the source of death also being the source of life. This is what I mean by a spiritually, homeopathic solution. The image works like a psycho-spiritual vaccine, healing through exploiting its associations with the source of the poison.

Our potential to be healed and to experience joy flow from the same place as the source for much of our pain and suffering. This is the paradox of human emotional life and is not dissimilar to the realization that our main strengths are not different from our fundamental weaknesses.  For us, Jesus is raised upon the cross, not as an allopathic (combative) condemnation of sin, but as a homeopathic source for our healing. As we explore self-examination in preparation for repentance, we encounter a loving Christ who feels with us in our weakness because he too, knows first-hand, the vicissitudes of the heart.

When we bring our self-examination and our earnest desire to be liberated from the pains and shames of our past into the shadow cast by Jesus of the cross, we are not submitting to an experience of condemnation, a kind of spiritual snakebite. We are opening ourselves to being healed by the one who not only knows of our suffering, but is well acquainted with the sources of our grief. For as the prophet Isaiah says: by his stripes we are healed.

The theology of Reconciliation of the Penitent in the Episcopal Church can best be summed up as: all may, none must, but some should, make their individual confession. Some people find the Reconciliation of the Penitent to be a valuable and regular part of their spiritual formation. For others, it is a remedial and healing action taken at particular times in pursuance of a healthy pastoral care. Either way, this Lent why not consult with a priest near you?

The God of the Covenant

The old Testament lections for the previous two Sundays have recounted the evolution of a  crucial element in the historic relationship between God and humanity. This crucial element we call, covenant. On Lent I, we received a reminder of the second covenant. God makes the first covenant with Adam and Eve.  The flood symbolizes a God who despairing of the evil that had come to distort the goodness of creation wipes the slate clean. In this second covenant that God makes with Noah, we glimpse a sign of God’s regret, having destroyed the creation, he now vows to never do this again. God seems to have learned that destroying things is not the way to reform them.  As an enduring sign of his faithfulness to his promise to Noah and all of those who are, symbolically, his descendants, God makes the rainbow in the sky.

On Lent II we read of the call of Abram and Sarai, whom God now renames Abraham and Sarah as a sign of the covenant God makes with them. The promise is to Abraham and Sarah, a promise to make their descendants as numerous as the grains of sand on the seashore and the stars in the sky. In return, God simply asks for Abraham and Sarah to keep faith with God and to trust God in a relationship of collaboration.

Covenant evolves as God renews the covenant he made with Abraham, with each of the Patriarchs, the son, grandson, and great-grandson of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph. Then today we hear of a new covenant between God and Moses on Mt Sinai. The covenant with Moses takes a new form. This time the human side of the obligations are spelled out and written down.

The New Covenant

In many of our Anglican-Episcopal churches dating from the late 17th and 18th Centuries, Trinity Newport being a fine example, one often sees the tablets of the Ten Commandments on either side of the altar. What many don’t fully appreciate is that this is a particular theological statement of the period. It’s somewhat anomalous to have the Ten Commandments depicted in tablet form adorning Christian Churches because they have been supplanted by Christ in his teaching of the two great commandments: love God and love one another. For Christians these two great commandments take the place of Moses’ ten. 

The presence of the Ten Commandments in some of our colonial churches represents a shift in religious consciousness during the period known as the Enlightenment. This shift was characterized by a movement away from a relational experience of God, mediated through image, ritual and mystery, towards an experience of a more impersonal universe, where God having set up the mechanism goes on vacation. Now, the goal of the spiritual life is not the pursuit of a felt relationship with God, but to live an ethically-moral life.

The basis of an ethical and moral life is to live according to the codes, hence the importance of having the mother of all codes in plain sight. Codes, stipulate what is, and what is not to be done. Like all codes, the Ten Commandments  tend to emphasise the negative – thou shalt not. The ideal may be that following the code leads to an appreciation of all that it noble and true, but the danger is that code driven faith degenerates into a stultifying legalism. At its best, pursuit of the moral-ethical life decoupled from relationship with God becomes an allegiance to the grand project of ethical and moral self-improvement, both at the level of the individual and at the level of society.

This has produced our modern secular age in which it is now possible to live morally and ethically without any reference to God. This is no small achievement and I don’t mean to disparage it. I mean only to refute the widespread misapprehension that to be a follower of Jesus amounts to simply being a good person, dedicated to a life of ethical and moral self-improvement. Christians are not good people merely doing what society dictates that good people should do!

Paul, in the opening of his first letter to the Corinthians, speaks of this tension. On the one hand, there is the high ethical philosophy of the Greeks that places the self-assertion of the noble individual as the source of wisdom. To the Greeks, allegiance to Christ seemed folly, flying in the face of reason. On the other hand, he speaks of the slavish adherence to every letter and jot of the written code. He characterises this kind of legalism as the struggle within the Judaism of his day. Ethics on one hand and legalism on the other, neither of which are the way of Christian discipleship.

In John’s Gospel, we are shown a picture of Jesus, raging. What has made him act in a manner that most of us consider to be out of character with our conception of Jesus, meek and mild? Jesus rails against a religious institution, i.e. the Temple, that has placed money as the determinant of access to God. No money equals no pigeon, or no sheep, which equals no sacrifice and thus no access to God. He rails against a system of exchange – the money changers- who defraud the people. To buy what was necessary to make sacrifice, you couldn’t use ordinary money. You had to change your heathen denarii for Temple currency at an extortionate rate of exchange. Jesus cries out against an attitude that says that doing business as usual is the price for purchasing a relationship with God.

Much more significantly, we see Jesus engineering a shift. This is a shift from a spirituality which locates God in the externals of a building or a code, or in behavior. He alludes to his body as the Temple, signaling a shift in emphasis from true religion as allegiance to institutions and codes, to true religion as an allegiance to personal relationship.

Living in the New Covenant

This last week we celebrated the lives of John and Charles Wesley. These great Anglican priests, were part of a reaction against the Enlightenment’s impersonal view of God, a view which goes by the name, Deism. They led a return to a spiritual emphasis on the primacy of relational love as the way to live the New Covenant, inaugurated by God through Jesus.

For the Wesley’s relationship with God was more than being ethical, or moral. It had little to do with being wise and reasonable. Relationship with God was a manifestation of devotion, devotion rooted in the worship and common prayer of the Book of Common Prayer. For them and those who joined them, relationship with God emerged from a heartfelt encounter with God through the Scriptures, a heartfelt encounter that compelled them into lives of generous service. They were branded as Methodists, because of their methodical commitment to loving God from the heart, marked by a life of devotion.

In my two previous postings, I explored fasting and self-denial in an attempt to make these ancient practices comprehensible to our 21^st Century mindset. Prayer and meditating on God’s holy Word are further practices commended to us. Many of us get stuck on prayer as intercession. Much intercession seems to function as our initiative, seemingly designed to raise God’s consciousness about the concerns we think important, or to present God with our shopping list of desires. In reality, intercession works in reverse. Intercession attunes our consciousness to the concerns that God continually bears for the plight of the creation. Thanksgiving is prayer opening us to experience gratitude, paving the way for converting gratitude into actions of generous living. These forms of prayer take root only when we begin to listen more and speak less. So what are we listening for?

In answer to this question, I would like to commend two ways of living prayer-filled lives guided by meditation on God’s holy Word. I’m more intuitive than sensory. Therefore, I try to follow a pattern of sitting and listening for the presence of the Spirit speaking through my intuition, which is my gut-level awareness, or through my insight, which is more of an intellectual awareness. If you are more sensory in orientation, you might listen for God communicating through images, and, or feeling states – often triggered by the world around you. Very often, the most I can manage is simply to try to sit in one place and watch myself breath, repeating under my breath the Aramaic phrase: Maranatha, or come Lord! I am hardly ever conscious of how this prayer makes a difference other than at some dim level of awareness I know that in the silence, which is paradoxically still filled with the clamor of my thoughts, I am opening a little chink in the protective walls of my defenses, my preoccupation with myself, through which I am slowly being transformed by the trickle of Grace into my life.

To meditate on God’s holy Word is an ancient practice known as Lectio Divina or divine reading. Taking a small section – no more than a sentence or two, particularly from the Gospels or Psalms, we slowly read the passage several times. We note the word or phrase that attracts our attention. This word or phrase creates associations in our imagination. This is not so much a study of scripture as it is an encounter with the text brought to life so that we might discover God’s invitation to pay attention to something in the next 5-7 days. Norvene Vest describes this process in a very user-friendly manner in her little book, Gathered in the Word http://www.amazon.com/Gathered-Word-Scripture-Pathways-Spiritual/dp/0835808068

A startling discovery

The invitation to keep a holy Lent speaks of the spiritual practices that help us to translate into action and behavior our spiritual longing for relationship with God. Oftentimes we live out of touch with this longing because it does not always register consciously. Spiritual practices are simply methods for bringing unconscious soul longing and soul pain into conscious awareness. In this sense, are we not all methodists?

Mark

In those days, which is the equivalent to the modern TV phrase recently in the Gospel of Mark, Jesus appears at the Jordan and is baptized by John and the heavens are ripped apart and the Holy Spirit as a dove descends on him and God booms out in an amazingly loud voice this is my Son and in whom I am well pleased,  then the Holy Spirit drives-out Jesus into the desert to spend 40 days tempted by Satan, then he comes back because his friend John the Baptist has been arrested and begins his ministry with the words: the time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near, repent, and believe in the good news. 

There is such urgency in the first chapter of Mark’s incredibly spare and sparse narrative. His urgency is magnified by his use of the Greek word ekballo – to expell as the verb for the Holy Spirit’s immediate expulsion of Jesus into the wilderness.  

Why the urgency? Well, Mark’s context is one of a community undergoing sharp Roman persecution. Suffering focuses the members of Mark’s community to the huge and urgent cost of being faithful to the Gospel, for whom this is a daily matter of life and death – what can be more urgent than that? Mark ends his opening chapter with Jesus proclaiming the kingdom of God is nigh, no time to lose, repent and believe the Good News.

Re-imagining

Mark does not detail the confrontation between Jesus and Satan. Our knowledge of the actual series of temptations comes from Matthew and Luke, not from Mark. I like Mark’s version better, not only for the stark beauty of its sparseness, but because it allows us to populate Jesus’ time in the wilderness with our own imagination.

The first Christians did just this. For them, the season of Lent – a time for intentionally remembering Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness became the season during which new Christians were prepared to enter the life of the community through baptism at the Great Vigil on the eve of Easter Day. Lent was also a time to focus on the restoration of those lost to the life of the community, those whose relationship to the community had been damaged by that which the Prayer Book calls notorious (public) sin. Lent was the season when through self-examination the non-baptized entered upon the path to fellowship, and for the estranged baptized, repentance provided for a way back into fellowship.

A new wilderness

In my community of St Martin of Tour, Providence, many were prevented by bad weather from attending the Ash Wednesday service marking the beginning of Lent. Many this year, did not hear the solemn exhoration in the Book of Common Prayer inviting us: in the name of the Church, to the observance of a holy Lent, by self-examination and repentance; prayer, fasting, and self-denial; and by the reading and meditating on God’s holy Word. 

Nevertheless, for those of us who were able to hear the Ash Wednesday Exhortation, like many in our society we have become inured by our culture’s pursuit of comfort and the anodyne experience. Therefore, the words of solemn exhortation to observe a holy Lent flow off us like water off a duck’s back. Over the years, I have heard this proclamation many times, some years with a shudder and revulsion at the prospect of being invited into medieval images of gloom, doom, and privation. At other times, the proclamation’s sheer out-of-synch-ness with our modern mindset has tweaked my curiosity, briefly, before returning to business as usual.

Vital questions

Is it so hard for middle-class Episcopalians to take the Prayer Book’s invitation seriously? I wonder? I believe that for most of us who fit into this category, our failure to take to heart the Prayer Book’s invitation to keep a holy Lent is the result, not of indifference, but of our experience of wilderness – a wilderness of meaninglessness.

We reject the cultural baggage of sin and suffering emphasized by our Victorian forebears. We also reject the post-war period of shallow hypocrisy, when liberal Christianity and popular American culture seemed so alarmingly, interchangeable. Today we find ourselves in a kind of wilderness where we seem bereft because so many of our historic spiritual practices fail now to sync with our imaginations. Consequently, the words of the invitation to Lent and the spiritual practices they enjoin upon us, leave us not exactly unmoved – they are after all rather majestic in their gravity, the problem is they leave us uninspired. They fail to ignite our spiritual lethargy into life-giving flame.

Is there a way out of our communal and individual experience of spiritual wilderness? The question really is can we re-imagine the spiritual practices contained in the invitation to keep a holy Lent, re-invigorating them for our lives in 21^st Century America?

The modern imaginary

Our relatively modern discovery of the mind has opened up a view where body and mind form one interconnected and interdependent system. Yet, we live largely oblivious of this fact. We notice when we suffer headaches, backaches, digestive distress, or skin conditions. We worry when we develop heart problems. Yet, we seldom make the connection between mind and body as the cause. The mind’s job is to process emotion. Anxiety or stress is a form of emotion. When the mind experiences anxiety overload, the overflow of unprocessed emotion lodges in the tissues and organs of the body as psychosomatic distress. When we make the psychosomatic connection and take steps to address our high levels of stress, our physical symptoms often clear up.

Reclaiming the spiritual within the modern imaginary

Today, we are more aware of the interconnections between mind and body. However, our recognition of the power of the mind has eclipsed a third element, an element our ancestors knew better – the presence of the soul within the human system. It is vital for us to now recognize the presence of soul, which together with mind and body completes the human psycho-somatic-spiritual system.

Soul is the imprint of our God-nature. The full glory of the human being derives from our being made in the image of God.  Our God-image imago dei is our spiritual likeness. In this life, the soul registers not only our connection to God, but it also registers the pain of the physical separation from God. The difficulty lies in the unconscious nature of much of our soul-pain. As unconscious emotional pain can lead to physical illness, unconscious soul-pain powerfully drives our addictions of all kinds. Addiction, even if it’s only to shopping, is the symptom of our attempt to fill the emptiness left by our physical separation from our divine origin. Spiritual practices seek to address disruptions in our psycho-somatic-spiritual balance.

Re-imagining spiritual practice

The invitation to a holy Lent, among other things encourages us to practice fasting and a form of de-centering traditionally referred to as self-denial. Fasting is unfashionable in religious circles these days, which is ironic in a society obsessed with food and dieting. Fasting causes us to feel hungry. Feeling hungry is not pleasant. Yet, countless numbers of us endure dieting in the service of our body-image! Now here is where the re-imagining comes in. Extrapolating from the common experience of dieting in the service of our body-image, might our somatic experience of hunger as a result of fasting function in the service of our God or soul-image?

Fasting re-imagined as a reinvigorated spiritual practice

Fasting is not extreme privation or starvation. Fasting is mindfully altering the pattern of our consumption of food while taking care to maintain good hydration. Abstention from alcohol is a form of fasting. In both cases, we experience a somatic sense of loss that offers us a way to consciously register our profound, if largely unconscious, longing for God – this is the source of our soul-distress – a distress that contributes towards our wilderness experience.

Fasting simply alters our pattern of food consumption. It might mean after a light breakfast not eating, though continuing to hydrate for the remaining 7-8 hours of a day such as Wednesday or Friday before enjoying a light meal in the evening. We return the next day to a normal pattern of eating, but having fasted the day before we are more aware of our way of using food to assuage spiritual hunger. Fasting hunger becomes the physical symptom for our spiritual hunger. It’s the unconscious nature of spiritual hunger that drives much of our addictive, obsessive, highly anxious and other generally unhelpful behaviors.  Fasting brings into conscious, physical awareness our unconscious, spiritual hunger.

Longing for something we are not conscious of longing for fuels as sense of the unrequited. Fasting and other forms of spiritual practice make us conscious of our unrequited longing. Instead of our unrequited spiritual longing driving us into dysfunctional behavior in the hope of filling the wilderness space within us, conscious awareness allows us to choose to draw on the energy of that longing to reinvigorate our sense of wilderness. The great Indian spiritual poet Kabir puts it eloquently when he says: There are seasons in the mind, great currents and winds move there, the true yogi ties a rein to them; a power plant he becomes.

Fasting might also result in taking something like meat or alcohol out of our normal pattern of consumption and translating our experience of loss into concern for the world through financial or practical support for a worthy project or good cause. In this way, fasting begins to work on our sense of connection to the world beyond us, fuelling a sense of compassion for others.

Re-imagined and revitalized spiritual practice is what we have to look forward to when we accept the invitation to keep a holy Lent as prescribed by the Book of Common Prayer Exhortation for Ash Wednesday. During Lent, we also consciously reconnect with the wilderness experience that Mark shows Jesus modeling. A wilderness experience that becomes transformed from one of spiritual futility into a source for spiritual vitality.

During the journey of Lent, in these blog reflections I hope to continue to explore the possibilities for re-imaging the other elements of spiritual practice mentioned in the Ash Wednesday Exhortation. Stay tuned.

It’s 4.15 on a Sunday morning and I wake early with thoughts about Paul’s letter to the Corinthians in my head. One friend is fond of saying to me: you need to get out more!

The snow is gently falling again in Providence, coating the sand and salt encrusted mountainous brown and soiled snow banks, that have reduced the roads on Providence’s East Side into narrow goat tracks, with a fresh coat of feathery white, sound absorbing, snow. It’s amazingly beautiful!

I spent most of Saturday in a meeting of the Bishop’s Commission on Ministry (COMM). This was only my second meeting on coming to Rhode Island, but I bring four years of experience from my time on the very dynamic COMM in the Diocese of Arizona. I hate Saturday meetings because Saturday is the only day I have for the kind of reflective writing I do each week in this blog. Hence, finding myself at 4.15am, sitting at my laptop trying to get some thoughts down before the busy round of Sunday morning services and adult formation commence.

Vocation is on my mind. It’s what Paul is talking about in the Epistle from 1 Cor 9:16 appointed for Epiphany 5. Vocation is the issue I and my COMM colleagues spent most of Saturday grappling with as we interviewed three aspirants for postulancy. Postulancy is the name we give to the first stage of the public recognition of being called to ordained life as a priest or deacon in the Episcopal Church.

What is a vocation, often referred to as a call? How is a call being manifested in a particular person’s life? What seems to be the purpose for the individual of this new awareness of being called? In our catholic understanding of ministry within the Episcopal Church, the call begins as an individual experience but requires recognition and affirmation by the mind of the Church. In this process, the question is how does this stirring within the life of an individual connect or not with the wider needs of the Church? There are huge tensions within these wider questions that I and my COMM colleagues hold as we seek to encourage those who come before us to invite us into seeing what they see of God moving in their lives. For me this is the question. Is the aspirant able to let me – a representative of the wider mind of the community – into seeing what they claim to be seeing?

Paul speaks of his sense of being called in these terms:

If I proclaim the gospel, this gives me no ground for boasting, for an obligation is laid on me, and woe to me if I do not proclaim the gospel! For if I do this of my own will, I have a reward; but if not of my own will, I am entrusted with a commission. What then is my reward? Just this: that in my proclamation I may make the gospel free of charge, so as not to make full use of my rights in the gospel. 1Cor 9:16-18 

I get the sense that Paul feels that the liberation he has experienced through Christ lays a claim on him, which he has no choice about. For most of us this is a rather alarming image that makes us fearful about going anywhere near the exploration of having a call. Being called is a burden, a kind of compulsion that robs us of our own free agency for choice and self-determination. We hear Paul’s words from a place of fear within us. Our lives are full of experiences of obligation and duty. Yet, in Paul’s feeling that he has no other choice we can also see the possibility of freedom – of the liberation from our all-consuming, anxiety-provoking preoccupations with self.

There is much in our self-preoccupied, individualistic lives that makes us fearful of being called, of having a vocation because we hear being called as another layer of burden – in Paul’s words – a claim upon us. In our over stimulated and impossibly pressured lives, we shrink from involvement, fearing the claims that others or the community might make upon us. Yet, our fearfulness only further abandons us to a sense of dislocation, and isolation – of alienation, no matter how social and full of other people our lives might appear to be. For most of us are profoundly lonely within the pressure cooker of modern social life.

When I was a seminarian I remember a particular supermarket checkout person in the little market friends and I used to frequent. In response to her indefatigable joyful service we used to joke: she’s not got a job, but a vocation! Making allowance for the smug self-importance of the seminarian mindset, that phrase comes back to me over and over again whenever I meet someone who impresses me with their quality of being, often in what otherwise appears to me to be rather mind-numbing situations.

Being called, responding to a sense of vocation is the experience of liberation not
obligation. Our joy comes not from having our needs met, but from serving another’s needs. In our modern alienation, an alienation as much from self as others let alone, what is for most of us the utterly remote concept of God, we have become consigned to relationships, occupations, social connections that are functional, yet, not fulfilling. In our work lives we lack that strong feeling of suitability, being cut-out for a purpose that transcends mere functionality. We long for a deeper, wider, higher – any number of special metaphors will do – sense of purpose for living.

In short, do we not all long for that sense of vocation – now sadly lost to many of us, that infuses the ordinary aspects of daily life lived within a finite set of limitations and boundaries? Liberation is not escape from ordinariness, which is a realization so contrary to the relentless messages of advertising that insulate us in a fog of unattainable illusions. Liberation comes only when we are able to connect with a sense of being called, so that our endeavors come to offer us that particularly strong sense of suitability that makes all that we do, and all that we are, meaningful and fulfilling.

In his sense of being called Paul speaks of being all things to all people? This is not the rather grandiose impossible boast it appears. In his sense of being compelled to serve he encounters freedom to reach out and across the spaces that divide him from others; that fracture that fragments of community into factions. Paul is talking about here,
what we moderns recognize as empathy. Maybe empathy is the first and essential step on the path to accepting one’s calling.

In the Episcopal Church has anyone ever questioned, or, even enquired after what you believe? Maybe they have, or even if no one has you may have had an occasion to volunteer the contents of your beliefs. If that is the case can you ever remember a member of the clergy or anyone else for that matter contradicting you? Maybe someone has said, Oh, I have a different take on that!

In the Episcopal Church has anyone ever told you that you believe the wrong things. It’s possible I imagine that someone may have questioned the veracity of your beliefs. Yet, I seriously doubt if anyone, especially among the clergy, has ever said to you ‘don’t believe that’ or, ‘you shouldn’t believe’, or, ‘that’s just plain wrong’ or, what you believe is not the truth, or, unless you correct your views and accept the truth then there’s no place for someone with your beliefs here!’

I don’t imagine any of these scenarios have ever befallen you in the Episcopal Church. Haven’t you ever wondered why no one, even among the clergy seems concerned about whether you believe the truth or not? This could be an indication that the Episcopal Church doesn’t care what its members believe. Maybe this is a further indication of what other Christians often say about us – that we don’t believe anything, much.

After all we don’t seem very worried about the issues of sexual morality or even issues concerning the right to life that seem to drive many Roman Catholics and especially their clergy to distraction. We don’t seem to be much concerned about how many times you have been remarried. We certainly seem rather lax on letting women do things that in other churches only men can do. I don’t just mean the obvious – like becoming ordained and celebrating the Eucharist, but other things that the Bible clearly says are wrong – such as women exercising authority, speaking- out in church of all places while not even wearing a hat when they do so.

To cap things off, we now seem to be prepared to risk God’s wrath by letting Gay, Lesbian, and Transgendered people be themselves and extend to them the same level of rights and privileges the heterosexual community takes for granted as their birthright. We seem to have departed from the age-old tradition just reaffirmed by the Mormon hierarchy in their recent call for tolerance towards the GLBT community of: love the sinner but hate the sin – which is nothing more that old smoke screen for the maintenance of systemic discrimination.

Maybe this is because it’s true what many Evangelicals say. Many say that the Episcopal Church doesn’t believe in the Bible anymore, and maybe never did. Two popular descriptions of the Episcopal Church as catholic-lite, and all of the pageantry with none of the guilt are stereotypes assailing the Episcopal Church from conservative expressions of Christianity.

Stereotypes are easy to draw. Stereotypes function as caricatures because they have enough accuracy to be believable. The Anglican Tradition doesn’t seem to mind being sent up. We even send ourselves up- as in the joke about the Episcopal priest on discovering his salad fork still in his hand as he started on his main course was horrified at the realization he had committed a mortal sin. The irony here, as Cousin Violet, the Dowager Duchess of Grantham would be quick to point out, is that Anglicans don’t catalogue sins into those that are venial -forgivable sin, and mortal – death-dealing to salvation sin.

Maybe it’s that Anglican DNA thing again. Aren’t we such awful Anglophiles panting over Downton Abbey. Sunday PBS viewing has become a feast of double chocolate as Downton is now followed by The Grantchester Mysteries, another romantic parody of English life with ever such a nice-looking young vicar, to boot.

There is that Episcopalian sense that it’s rather bad form and just the tiniest bit embarrassing to take one’s religion too seriously. Yet, history shows, there is good reason not to take one’s religion too seriously.

The easy parodies of Anglicanism and the Episcopal Church point-up the fact that the origins of the present form of Anglican Tradition lie in a 16th-Century solution to religious tensions – the National Church.

The National Church of England brought together the post-Reformation religious divisions in England that elsewhere in Europe led to a hundred years of inter-communal strife, every bit reminiscent of the violence raging across the Islamic World in our own day. In England, conservative adherents of the old religion of pre-Reformation Catholicism met the radical proponents of Lutheran and Calvinist reform at the Church door. Compelled by the law of the land, representatives of opposing factions were forced to sit alongside one another in the same pew where in the course of several generations their spiritual imaginations were shaped by the soaring poetry of Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer.

This produced a context in which Truth, characterized as right belief had of necessity to give way to Love, characterized not so much as warm feelings but as right relationship. Shared doctrine was replaced by common worship as the means of defining community. The differences, both theological and political remained under the surface, erupting into violence finally in the English Civil War a century later. Yet, the Civil War only underscored the importance of a Church structured, not around right belief, i.e. truth, but around common worship, i.e. right relationship. Over a period of some three hundred years the Book of Common Prayer incubated an Anglican religious identity rooted in worship. It is this rich legacy that we in the Episcopal Church, are the present-day heirs.

Human experience shows us that there is never a single truth, only multiple truths. Attempts to enforce a single truth lead only to intractable and insoluble conflict. This is a lesson the occupants of Capitol Hill seem in need of learning all over again. For contemporary America is a society where a sense of the common good is continually fractured by the seeming unfettered exercise of individual rights and competing experiences of truth. There are always contesting truths and this is part of what energizes a society – the vibrancy of its public debate. Yet, public debate results from a holding together of tensions around some sense of the common, the shared.

The Episcopal Church is living proof of how this works. It’s not that we don’t have a body of doctrine. We do and it’s very clear! The interesting thing is that the place where you can find this doctrine is in the same place as you find our patterns of worship – in The Book of Common Prayer. Go to the Historical Documents and the Outline of Faith sections of the BCP and you will find clear statements of what the Episcopal Church believes.

Our beliefs are rooted in the ancient Catholic Christianity of the first five hundred years of the Church. The way we believe this ancient Catholic faith has been strongly influenced by Reformation theology. More distinctively, our spirituality molded by a thousand years of Benedictine Spirituality seeps into us through the practice of worship. We say to others, as we worship so we believe i.e. if you want to know what we believe come and worship with us. For us, worship is the centrally defining element of what it means to be God’s people. Our individual identities, with our own experiences of truth give way to a common identity shaped by the experience of God addressing us as a community, in worship. When you jettison an addiction to truth, then multiple truths can be contained only within the practice of worship.

In the Epistle for Epiphany IV from 1 Corinthians, we listen to Paul’s development of his argument with the rich and proud Corinthian Church. This is a Church that would fit well into contemporary American life, where the rights of the rich and the powerful are exercised with a careless disregard if not disdain for the poorer and less powerful members of the community. The behavior of the Corinthians forces Paul to assert that as a follower of the truth he is entitled to exercise in full, the rights that his conscience as a follower of Christ allows. In this

The behavior of the Corinthians forces Paul to assert that as a follower of the truth he is entitled to exercise in full, the rights that his conscience as a follower of Christ allows. In this case, he has the right to eat meat sacrificed to idols since because idols don’t exist eating such meat can have no spiritually injurious effect upon him. This is the truth; in this Paul is exhibiting right belief. Yet, he gives up such rights in the interests of affirming his right relationship with other members of the community.

Being theologically correct, a disciple of truth is not enough. Giving-up one’s right in order to foster right relationship with others in the community who may not yet be ready to exercise the full entitlement of liberty of conscience is more important, says Paul.

In the Episcopal Church we don’t enquire after whether our members hold the correct belief because we understand that we are individually, members of a community of right belief. As I like to say, the seeds of faith are sown in the fields of doubt. Some days I hold impeccably to orthodox truth. Other days I feel adrift in a see of doubt and uncertainty. None of this matters, because every day, my participation in the worship life of the Christian Community of the Episcopal Church places me in right relationship to others on the same spiritual journey.

I would go so far as to say that none of us individually are saved. What I mean is that because all knowledge is as Paul asserts only ever partial, our grasp of so-called truth is always incomplete. Individually we are saved not by our right belief but by our participation in the life of the community that is saved. The richest form that such participation takes, is found in the worship life of the community of faith.

Participation in that rich communal life owes less to holding a rightbelief than it does to our life-long pursuit of right relationship! Or maybe put another way, am I my brother/sister’s keeper on the road to salvation? 

I arrived at St Martin’s on the Feast of the Most Glorious and Most Holy Trinity -in secular time the 15^th June 2014. At the outset, I felt it was important to set a few immediate priorities, ones that would enable me to begin to structure my relationship with the parish. I wanted to respond with confidence to the very strong signal given me in my interview process – that the parish was ready for change. The experience of change is always ambivalent. Change is yearned for while simultaneously resisted. That which we most long for is also the thing we often most fear.

The quandary for any incoming rector is how quickly to make changes. One argument suggests making change quickly so as to make good use of the honeymoon period when the community is at its most generous, excited about new possibilities, and open to change. The counter argument counsels that important change needs buy-in from the community experiencing the change. The level of buy-in needed to tackle difficult issues comes only with time and the discovery that the new rector is someone who can be trusted.

My initial assessment was that I was coming into a parish experiencing the ebb dynamic in its growth cycle. Like the tide, organizations flow towards fullness only to find after a period of time their energy begins to ebb. I felt I had arrived in a parish, which despite being a community of undreamed-of strength in terms of its human potential was experiencing life at low tide. In the State of Rhode Island, it’s low tide time more generally. There seems to be a fearfulness among many who wonder how much further the tide might continue to ebb before needed change can be embraced.

St Martin’s is a church that for many years has hovered around the transition point that marks the movement from the pastoral, to what I will call, the participative rather than the usual term program culture of parish organization. The pastoral church is focused on the priest at its center. The Rector is looked to for not only strategic leadership but is expected to have a hand in nearly everything that happens. The Vestry tends in this culture to micromanage community life. The problem is that at the upper end of the pastoral organization’s size, and this is where St Martin’s is, being priest centered and Vestry managed, inhibits growth. The expectation of priestly involvement in everything means that the parish cannot move beyond the limitations of one person’s capacity. The preoccupation of the Vestry with day-to-day management prevents it developing a higher level strategic vision.

In the participative parish leadership and initiative are more shared between Rector, Vestry, and membership. This is a community that possesses a higher and more dynamic level of spiritual capacity. The Rector does not have a hand in everything; he or she supported by assistant clergy is thus freed to attend to the strategic direction. Lay-led ministry teams are more active and autonomous. The Vestry relinquishes the day-to-day running of the parish to the paid Staff and is thereby freed to assist the Rector in mapping strategic direction of travel.

St Martin’s has been hovering at this transition point for a good many years. Recent history shows how difficult it is to secure this transition from pastoral to participative organizational culture. In some years, the parish has crossed the line. This has been marked by confidence and growth usually reflected in the appointment of assistant clergy, the strengthening of the paid staff, and by a surge in the vibrancy of lay ministries. Yet the experience of increased flow has repeatedly been followed by ebb. Energy ebbs back from participative to pastoral cultural modes, as confidence and resources to continue forward, falter.

What is it that flows only to then ebb? At one level, it can be tracked in terms of the crude measurements of money and bums on seats. More significantly, it is the flowing and ebbing of what truly makes a Christian community viable – its spiritual capacity.

In response to my assessment, over the last six months I have been signaling and where possible, implementing changes designed to stimulate the parish’s spiritual capacity. Where have these changes been?

Where have these changes been?

1. The empowerment of the paid Staff through signaling my confidence in them. I have invited them as a team as well as individually, into my confidence. I believe members of Staff understand that I have confidence in them as a team, as well as in them individually. I have seen my task as one of empowering them to function at their optimal levels of skill, enthusiasm, and creativity. I have invited them into my thinking with the aim of engendering a style of a collaborative culture signaled by my valuing of their advice, wisdom, and support. An empowered, highly functional paid Staff, responsible for the day-to-day running of the organization is a hallmark of the participative parish culture.

There are budgetary implications to this empowerment. We will communicate about these in the presentation of the budget at the Annual Meeting. However, I want to emphasize that an increase in paid Staff capacity is the most effective way to lay the foundations for securing and sustaining our transition back t0 being a participative parish. By comparison the appointment of assistant clergy, while being infinitely more expensive, bears more limited fruit in supporting this transition, as this parish’s experience bears out.

2. We engaged professional help to design and launch a new website. I was able over the summer to devote the time needed to write the content for this new website. At the same time, I began stimulating the use by our members of our parish FaceBook page. In the digital age, our web profile is our main communication with the wider world. Hardly anyone will visit us on a Sunday morning without first looking us up on the web. An active FaceBook page is one of the key indicators of energy among the membership. The website is where we profile who we are, and sound our theological and community tone to the wider world around us.

We are not where I want us to be digitally speaking. Yet, we have made a good start. In addition to now posting sermons in blog form on our website the next step is for them to appear as video and audio podcasts. The next phase of development is to move towards greater video, and less text dominated web format.

The missing demographic at St Martin’s is the late 20’s-40 age groups. A more vital web presence, radical Biblically based preaching, traditional worship, and accessible teaching on daily spiritual practice as a support in stress filled lives, are the key elements of spiritual capacity that in my experience, attracts the spiritual seekers in this age demographic.

3. Empowerment of worship and education ministries has been and will continue to be a key priority for me. As Episcopalians, we define ourselves not through statements of belief, but through the central quality of our worship, which is the key defining characteristic of our Anglican Tradition.

Ministries of welcome and new member incorporation are part of our worship life. Our welcome ministry has had a good restart, but we need fuller membership buy-in and participation. Our growth will be limited by the speed at which everyone comes to embrace a model of every member ministry. 

Our Christian Formation ministries are where we attract and nurture our members in the active phases of family life. The nurturance of Christian family life is a complex process today. Once, families defined their spiritual lives through participation in Church Communities. Today, many other demands draw families away from Church involvement and we continue to live in this place of cultural tension.

4. In the fall, the Staff, and I, supported by the Wardens worked very hard to implement a structured, and theologically led, Annual Renewal Campaign. The theology of financial giving seemed to many to be something they had not considered before. Placing gratitude at the heart of our financial thinking is a long-term sell in many Episcopal Churches. Yet, I am encouraged by the start that we have made together. There is very good news to report and more about this will be shared by our Junior Warden Sean Mulholland and our Treasurer Dennis Stark at the Annual Meeting. However, let me note that both the good and bad news is that we now generate an equivalent dollar value with half the number of pledging units we had in 2005. Sean will talk us through that story and its longer-term trend implications at the Annual Meeting.

The Lections today offer us two images of discipleship. In our Old Testament reading from the prophet Jonah we have an image of reluctance and outright refusal in response to God’s call. Jonah shows a very pissed-off attitude towards God. First he refuses to accept God’s call for him to preach to Nineveh, instead sailing away on a ship in the opposite direction. After being punished by being thrown overboard in a storm and swallowed by a whale, Jonah after the symbolic three days is eventually spewed up on the beach near Nineveh. He reluctantly enters the city and after traveling through the metropolis for a day calls the Ninevites to repent or else face the wrath of God. To his surprise, they heed his call, from highest to lowest. When God sees this he relents. In the next chapter, we read that Jonah is mightily pissed-off about this. He angrily tells God, see I could have told you back home that you would act like this. So why have you caused me all this grief only to go soft on Nineveh?

We can contrast Jonah’s call and response with the call by Jesus of his first disciples – Simon, his brother Andrew, and James and John the sons of Zebedee. They immediately drop everything they are doing and follow Jesus. Mark’s depiction of the call of the disciples is cryptic in the extreme. He presents a rather idealized image of a response to God’s call, unquestioning, completely trusting, and willing to give up everything else for the cause of following Jesus.

Jonah is a man who counts the cost of heeding God’s call and he seems to think the price is way too high. Simon, Andrew, James, and John seem heedless of the cost of the call to follow Jesus. Yet as we move through Mark’s Gospel we learn of the more mixed and ambivalent response of his disciples to God’s call.

Paul’s advice to the Corinthians tells us that we should live as if there is no time to loose. It’s just not possible to put off the call of God, thinking there is plenty of time tomorrow to think about this. Paul hints at the possibility of what if there is no tomorrow. How would this affect our decision-making process today?

So my question to all of us is what kind of disciples are we? How much time do we think we have to make up our minds? These are great questions on the Sunday of the Annual Parochial Meeting at St Martin’s, Providence. It’s the answers to these questions that will, or will not, catalyze us towards an increase in the spiritual capacity as the St Martin’s Community becomes more truly magnetic, thereby pulling more and more of those on the search for meaning and purpose beyond mere worldly satisfactions, into its heart.

Identity- a moving target

Last week in my entry titled Adoption https://relationalrealities.com/2015/01/10/adoption/ I touched on the nature of identity. Identity remains a source of continual tension for the contemporary Western person because we have multiple, competing and overlapping sources of identity.

A simple example. Who is Mark Sutherland?  Mark Sutherland is an overly educated, white male, a New Zealander by birth, but British by adoption, living in New England. My identity shifts when I consider, as I recently had to, which passport do I travel on. Returning to New Zealand I left the US on my NZ passport but returned to the US on my British European Union passport containing my American Green Card. Each passport differently identifies me and my Green Card adds a further twist to identity. I am not speaking about legality here, but emotions. Each passport represents crucial emotional elements within an overlapping sense of identities.

My identity also shifts when considering other competing or overlapping elements of identity. Consider the attributes of middle class, overly educated, racially white, gendered male. Each signifies an aspect of identity which taken together construct an identity of someone well placed on the social pecking order – the only thing lacking is the possession of either a noble title or inordinate wealth to shoot me right to the top. However, my identity radically shifts when I add into the mix the element of being gay. In my identity as a gay man my experience of discrimination gives me an affinity not with overly educated white males, but with persons in society who are discriminated against because they are not male, or not white, or not educated.

Identity and global tensions

Differing notions of identity also go to the root of a growing tension between the West and Islamic societies. Although religion seems to be involved this is not a tension between Christianity and Islam. It’s rather a tension between differing notions of how identity is constructed. The capacity of Post Modern Secular societies and Traditional Religious societies to understand one another, never that great, seems to be deteriorating alarmingly. Religion- from the Latin religare, meaning to bind or the lack of it plays a part in this process.

In the world of Late Modern Western Culture, identity has become decoupled from family, clan, and religion because it is now firmly rooted in individual self-awareness.  While in Traditional Religious Culture identity is rooted not in an individual self awareness, but in a set of relationships that are structured by, and mediated through family, clan, and or religion.

The process of moving from relationally based identities fostered by the glue of religare, to secular individualist identity, decoupled from any notion of the existence of the divine has been chronicled by the philosopher Charles Taylor in his major opus A Secular Age. In the long progress of Western Society towards arriving at the first example of a secular society in human history, Taylor refers to the emergence of the buffered self.

Taylor defines secular to mean a social arrangement in which individual identity has not only become decoupled from family and clan with identity now residing in the unique and autonomous individual – the buffered self, but, and this is his main point, that the buffered self is a particular characteristic of the secular society, a society where identity is defined without any reference to the divine or God.

The notions of unencumbered right

Once upon a time, the framers of the Second Amendment to the US Constitution understood the right to bear arms as the right of the community in the form of the militia to possess the means to defend itself against the encroachment of tyrannical government, acting unlawfully. The right the bear arms has now become the right of the buffered self to use or abuse guns in the pursuit of self defense against other members of the same community.

Once upon a time the right to free speech was the right of individual self expression free from the coercion of, and encroachment from, social and political authority.  Today, the right of free speech has become the right of the buffered self to say whatever is considered lawful to say, without regard to the consequences for others. Freedom of speech is now significantly decoupled from any sense of a duty to preserve social and political harmony. Free speech is controlled to some extend by legal duties that prevent speech that results in actual harm to another. Yet, there is no duty to refrain from intentionally giving offense through the unfettered exercise of free speech.

As we move further into the 21^st Century, the world is increasingly characterized by a growing divide between societies in the Post Modern Western secular mode and societies that still adhere to traditional modes in which individual identity is defined by relationship to an extended community. In traditional societies social identity is still coupled to a sense of the presence of God and the social support afforded by religion.

In the growing acrimony and increasing violence that characterizes communication across the divide between Post Modern Western and Pre Modern Traditional societies, freedom of speech has become a litmus test, the core defining value for Western Society. We see this in the way freedom of speech has become a recent rallying cry following the terrorist attacks on Charlie Hebdo. We rally to the cause in collectively identifying with the cry – je suis Charlie! 

Living in the tension

I am a product of the secular West. For me the right to individual free speech is inalienable. I believe the achievement of the right to individual freedom of speech to be one of the crowning achievements of our Western social development. Consequently, I too feel the surge of passion in the proclamation je suis Charlie as a protest against the forces of mindless and brutal terrorism. This form of terrorism is so called, Islamic. Yet, under any sane analysis this kind of violent response is anything but Islamic. Terrorism in the name of Islam is the distorted and perverted response from the authoritarian mindset to the challenges presented by the Western value of freedom of speech. Yet, a question continues to haunt me.

Islam has not undergone a process of secularization. It still posits a worldview in which society and religion are not separable. In this worldview disrespect shown for the Prophet is not severable from an experience of being disrespected as a Muslim. The question that haunts me is: given that we know the offense felt by Muslims in the visual characterization of the Prophet, how is our freedom of speech commended or defended by gratuitously publishing images of the Prophet justified on the grounds that we are only treating Islam with the same degree of disrespect and mockery we accord to our own Christian and Jewish faith traditions? It is only within our worldview where religion is separate from society that ridiculing of its more ridiculous antics is fair game. This right does not extend, in my view, beyond our own worldview context.

Individual isolation the reification of individual rights

I value the development of the buffered self in the way it has enabled individual identity for the first time in history to stand out against collective definitions of personal identity. Yet, I agree with Taylor that an unintended consequence of secularization has been our increasing sense of personal isolation from one another. Reification is where something essentially abstract is made into something concrete. Is the exercise of our individual rights immutable, i.e. fixed and unchanging regardless of circumstances, or relative and contextual?

I believe that our total emphasis on individualistic rights decoupled from corresponding duties beyond the minimum stipulation of the law, is damaging for our society. Rights become distorted when we exercise them without any regard for a corresponding duty towards others. This is not only a somewhat remote duty towards societies that see the world differently from us, but when we increasingly exercise our rights without basic regard for one another’s wellbeing within our own society, something is un-balanced. I do not want to exercise my right to free speech as a weapon that causes gratuitous offense and hurt to my neighbor. My right to free speech is a right only to defend myself from social and political forces of coercion.

Religion and personal identity in a secular society

Another level of identity complexity resides in my notion of the baptized buffered self. Even if I am guilty of a certain selectivity among the various claims urged upon me of my baptism, as a baptized buffered self I recognize a higher duty towards others enjoined upon me by my Christian faith These claims impact my exercise of my legal rights.

A Christian voice

It is somewhat timely, that as the terrorist alert ratchets upwards and Western voices are raised in somewhat belligerent defense of our freedom of speech values we find ourselves being addressed by St Paul in his first letter to the Corinthians. There is a context and a specific content to this exchange between Paul and the Corinthians that relates to sexual behavior. It seems that the Corinthians are still acting like Greeks in terms of a freedom to consort with prostitutes that Paul sees this as inconsistent with being Christian. It’s easy to read Paul as advocating a Jewish, puritanical attitude towards the sexual freedom, otherwise considered normal in Corinthian society. However it’s not the context or the content of Paul’s conversation with the Corinthians that interests me here.

What grabs my attention in this reading is Paul’s assertion that because he has a legal –here read moral as well as narrowly legal – right to a certain action or behavior, it does not automatically follow that it is beneficial for him or others that he insist on exercising his right. Paul is advocating a degree of self-restraint in the interests of promoting social harmony. This seems obvious in societies where identity is relational, i.e. a sense of identity being conferred through networks of extended social relationships like a family, clan, or tribe, supported by the adhesive function of religion. It seems less obvious when identity resides in individual self awareness.

Secular Western societies are comprised of buffered selves, individuals who compete and conflict with one another in the exercise of the rights they enjoy under the law. The law is the ultimate guarantor of our rights and is also the minimal referee between competing rights in the interests of a minimum of social order. However the law is selective. For instance, racial or gender abuse is no longer protected under the right to freedom of speech, but abuse of gays and religious believers still is. Beyond the minimal constraint imposed by law we are left to exercise our rights as if we lived in isolation from one another. There is little sense of duty owed towards one another. Yet, Paul reminds us that for those of us who recognize God’s claim upon us through our allegiance to the Christian faith, we must consider our duty towards others as a primary factor influencing the way we do or don’t exercise our rights.

In this way our religious identity becomes another significant element in our experience of multiple identities. Christian faith moves from the purely private sphere to influence our behavior in the public sphere. Paul goes on to develop his argument in 1 Corinthians. He says that although the gospel frees him to do all that his conscience allows, if the free exercise of his rights causes another to stumble, then the duty he owes to those not able to exercise the full degree of freedom is to restrain himself in his otherwise lawful exercise of his rights.

The giving of grave offense to Muslims cannot ever be a justification for acts of terrorism in the name of the Prophet – peace be upon him. Yet, the Apostle Paul reminds us of the danger in exercising rights unfettered by a sense of duty to others. Translating this into our current global context, freedom of speech is not an absolute right exercised as if in a moral vacuum, mindless of consequences. It is limited by our duty not to give gratuitous offense to another. It is doubly so when we very well know that grave offense will be the consequence of our insistence on our legal rights.