This past spring The Contemplative Society website (http://www.contemplative.org/) posted 12 summary statements about the future of church I gleaned from a Lenten Series I attended, accompanied by a response from Cynthia Bourgeault. With Cynthia’s encouragement, I am reposting the original paragraph, followed by her response, and my response to Cynthia. We hope this may generate some conversation. Cynthia will check in and respond to comments if she feels inspired.
6. The church will not recover its nerve, its creativity, or its authenticity simply by instituting fancy new gimmicks, implementing flashy programs, trying to get more organized, or working harder. The way forward is through the development of meaningful spiritual practices, a renewal of corporate spirituality, and a profound shift of consciousnss in the way we do church. These deep inner changes will only be achieved by creating space for an awareness of the presence and action of God to emerge in our midst.
Cynthia: Amen, brother! More than seventy years ago the Quaker mystic Thomas Kelly penned these prophetic words:
Continuously renewed immediacy, not receding memory of the Divine Touch, lies at the base of religious living. Let us explore together the secret of a deeper devotion, a more subterranean sanctuary of the soul, where the Light Within never fades, but burns, a perpetual Flame, where the wells of living water of divine revelation rise up continuously, day by day and hour by hour, steady and transfiguring. The ‘bright shoots of everlastingness’ can become a steady light within, if we are deadly in earnest in our dedication to the light and are willing to pass out of first stages into maturer religious living. Only if this is possible can the light from the inner sanctuary of the soul be a workaday light for the marketplace, a guide for perplexed feet, a recreator of culture-patterns for the human race. (The Light Within, p. 31).
If that Light within truly exists, there is only one authentic way to find it, and it is just as you have named it: “creating space for an awareness of the presence and action of God to emerge in our midst.” If we don’t trust that the light actually exists, if we resign ourselves to being no more than the caretakers of a “receding memory of the Divine Touch,” then we might as well close up shop right now and go join the crew at the Sunday market and soccer practice. At least there’s fresh air!
Christopher: It all comes down to the challenge to trust that the “Light within truly exists.”
How do we grow such a trust when so much of the evidence of our senses appears to contradict its reality?
The world is a difficult and a painful place. We are surrounded on all sides by suffering. Everywhere we look we are confronted by the duplicity of human behaviour and the dividedness of our own hearts. We are too familiar with darkness, too accustomed to the brutality that afflicts so much of the human condition.
In the midst of all the world’s failures, the church stands often as a pale testimony to the vibrancy of the Christ-life in our midst. Churches are full of pain. Our sharp edges frequently rub up against the rough edges of those with whom we share in community. Faith, particularly in its communal expression, is not an easy path.
John the Gospel writer affirms that
The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it. (John 1:5)
But there are times when it is almost beyond imagining that we should trust in the reality of such an inextinguishable brightness. Where might we look for evidence of a light that is never “overcome”?
It would be encouraging if we could point to one piece of irrefutable evidence and say, “Look there is the light that never goes out; there is proof that this eternal light is real.” If only the church could be such a place. If only the community of Christians was eternally bathed in the light of the Christ in whose name we claim to gather. If only the world felt compelled to look at us and declare, “See how they love one another,” as the “pagans” are reported by Tertullian to have done when looking at the church of the Third Century.
Sadly, we know only too well, that the church is a community of human beings every bit as flawed as the rest of the world. We forget this at our peril. Any attempt to point to the church as some kind of idealized community is doomed to failure as soon as it runs in to the reality of our human frailties. We will let each other down. We will fail again and again in our witness to the reality of Christ in our midst.
But perhaps this is the point. Paul says,
But we have this treasure in clay jars, so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us. (2 Corinthians 4:7)
We are imperfect vessels containing the extraordinary richness of God’s Spirit. It is this reality with which we need to stay connected in the church. We do not point to ourselves as perfect examples of love and light. We acknowledge our frailties in the confidence that the light shines out through the cracks that form part of the reality of our lives and our relationships.
It is not by chance that one of the most familiar injunctions of the New Testament to the earliest Christians is to just put up with each other:
Bear with one another and, if anyone has a complaint against another, forgive each other; just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive.(Colossians 3:13)
We who are strong ought to put up with the failings of the weak, and not to please ourselves. (Romans 15:1)
To make space for God’s work in our midst means making space for one another in all of our conflict, confusion, doubt, and contradiction. We follow a Master who carried on with his followers despite their obvious shortcomings and their abundant failures. Jesus stayed with his disciples. When they got it all wrong, when they fell short of the most basic standards of faithfulness and wisdom, he did not walk away. He bore their failures, even to death upon a cross. And, in his faithfulness, a cosmic explosion of love was unleashed throughout the cosmos. We can choose to enter into the energy field of this love with one another and with all the world.
The call to the church is to stick it out in the midst of our failures. If we are to be a church that follows Jesus we need to surrender our demands and even our expectations that the church should be anything other than the flawed broken organization we know it to be.
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July 21, 2011 at 6:58 am
Kim
This morning I am aware of a telethon to benefit mental health programs via a local hospital. The statistics regarding how many of us choose to extinguish our own light staggers me. If I believe there are many paths to find God inside us, then it seems to me the paths will have in common easy accessibility. The concept of the light being available to us will have to be more easily understandable in order for all to partake of it. I don’t know how to say this better than to tell you I know a person who is on that path within a few minutes of being in their presence and it is love that I see. Some real joy, a sense that I am accepted, and a kind of an invitation to enjoy that very moment with them. I always want to stay in their presence and am kind of sorry when we part. I can see how a community that can be some of that would be very attractive to a lot of us. A simple presence of love. I know this attempt of mine is simplistic in the extreme, but I am counting on the rest of you to better explain and “flesh this out”. I am asking how do we make Gods light as its understood here available to the average bloke.
July 21, 2011 at 2:51 pm
Tress
It was not a simplistic answer it was a true answer.
Love is what it is all about.
” unless we enter thekindomof heaven as alittle child”Sorryi cannot find the quotation., but it means it is n’t complicated , it is not deep theology ,we just have to find the love inside us and spread it around. And is not the love inside us god?in one manifestation?
July 21, 2011 at 2:56 pm
Tress
add . matthew 18 .verse three!this is of course if you belief in heaven , where we allow it to be!
July 21, 2011 at 5:24 pm
kimgye
Thanks Tress, I forgot that verse again! I think Christopher has reminded me of that in the past. I agree with what you say here.
July 21, 2011 at 7:11 am
Rose
The ‘Holy Spirit’ has been effecting change for a very long time but could it be that we, human beings, can be more conscious about it – more finely tuned to what the desire of the Holy Spirit is? Could we engage an active process of discernment which includes a fundamental ‘not knowing’? This raises the question of another discussion on the go at ‘inaspaciousplace’ which is that of language. The problem with language is not simply the meaning of this word or a preference for that word but the fundamental place of Word in the scheme of things. Despite the limitations of Postmodernism, one of its gifts was a radical look at how we structure ‘reality’, via language. Its all very well saying God is beyond language but that is just a partial truth, it is not inclusive of the orders of form. It is through language that human beings relate and create the more and more complex worlds we actually live in for REAL. And REAL is God!
It seems to me that not only the world but human beings have been evolving and will continue to do so. My guess is that initially for human being almost all was Mystery, the unknown. There was very little ‘knowledge’. (Knowledge presupposes language). People with pockets of ‘knowledge’ had power, even if it was only the knowledge that they were bigger and stronger and could use force. (Power is the capacity to make desire reality.) Because of language knowledge can be passed on. As time passed those with power (like mummy and daddy) not only told us how things are but decided what, where, when, how, who and why we should do what we do. The acquisition of greater authority is via language – it is an outer connecting and expanding knowledge of ‘other’ and an inner subjective process of using language for thinking, reasoning, plotting, evaluating, changing, transforming. The more humans developed this capacity for languaging the more we were capable of changing and transforming not only ourselves but the world around us. Eventually ‘I’ become the one who decides what ‘I’ want and ‘I’ have greater or less power to effect that. But many of us are now seeing that what ‘I’ want is to be connected and in sync with ‘Us’ and doing things that WE want inclusive of ‘I’. The downside is that, rightly mobilized, we have power for good or ill. But if we pursue this far enough who ultimately is Us and I? It is no longer only a case of following the received wisdom or obeying those in ‘Authority’ but a matter of saying ‘Hey, WE are the authority!’ with all its tension between the I and the we, the us and them. And We in its ultimate sense is It, includes everyone and everything and no ‘thing’ at all . This means being aware of a fundamental ‘not-knowing’ because ‘things’ are Relational i.e. not discrete, as well as Positional i.e. are differentiated. It is the capacity while having identity as a personal self and the glory of The One incarnated Divinity, to suspend every identification, to empty one’s self and be like Christ Jesus, emptied and human. (Phil. 2) Real God.
Which is a big problem when it comes to decision making about what do WE want and how do we realize that or make it real in a real world? (WE being the Holy Spirit!)
Currently everyone throws in their thoughts but if we are serious about continuous change not only for ‘me’ but ‘us’ then we need a process or ‘strategy’ and some theoretical underpinning which can be evaluated and improved or discarded. Inquiry is such a spiritual practice. True Inquiry embraces all modes of knowing – sensory, cognitive, imaginative and contemplative. Many do not like to approach Spirit scientifically even if they are not averse to Science. But Science is about truth just as Religion is. And truth is about love and beauty as much as love is about truth and beauty. (A good theory is simple, beautiful and fecund!) Why then can they not join forces? They can providing they have some common ground as points of departure which means tackling the thorny issue of language and agreeing on some fundamental premises. Science would accept a rigorous process which bases action or ‘experimentation’ on agreed data. And Science acknowledges that there is both known and unknown data. Science no longer purports to be objective but acknowledges a defined frame of reference and the subjectivity of interpretation. (Which is the thorny issue of language) Science (or Religion) will never have absolute ‘knowledge’ while the REAL may be said to be the relation of subjectivity to objectivity.
The question is therefore can we propose a process of change which includes all of this, the whole, the Holy, that comes not simply from an egoic or even a ‘we-goic’ perspective but includes both the transcendent and the immanent? Over millennia human beings are evolving to becoming more able to act collectively from an ethical perspective, that is, to co-create for the good of the whole inclusive of the parts in all their particularity. In embryonic form we could take the matter of the Future of Church as an example:
1. What ‘Church’ are we talking about ? The whole of Christendom, The Anglican Communion, St Philips? And what / who are significant context to their functioning?
2. What-is-going-on not only for those inside ‘the body’ but also the relevant parties on the outside? How do we engage with those who do not share our language or perhaps do not have much language facility? What data do we collect and from which sources? And of course no one person, or even the collective we are looking at, has all the data about what-is-going- on.
3. Who interprets the data? How do we go about doing this and what do we do when we inevitably find that no one person or sub-group has the only right interpretation of the data? Can people begin to inquire into who or what the personal ‘self’ is and suspend their egos temporarily to see an ‘other’ perspective?
4. Who has or for whom is there a problem with any general perspective or course of action ‘the body’ takes? Where are the deep rifts or splits in the one body? It is essential that people be authentic. In other words are some people so convinced that they are ‘right’ and that ‘the body’ must bow to their (God’s?) view? How do we as a group do the shadow work necessary to own our obstacles and resistances and move on beyond blocks within our personal self and serious divisions in the collective ‘body’ to a place of unity in diversity. Is there a capacity to suspend not only the egoic but the we-goic level of identification? Can members of the group switch to imaginative, archetypal or contemplative modes rather than purely cognitive ones as a mode of inquiry?
5. It is really only from this genuine deep openness with each other that we can experience the presence God and hope to ask ‘What does God require of us, what is wanted, desired?’ and take that out into the world.
6. It is from here that true vision and action can emerge which also caters for each of us uniquely. Transformation into ‘openness’ leads to healthy groups and more ethical outcomes because the hard inner work of recognition and realization of connectivity and union with ‘other’ is being done. Which includes differentiation and clarity of boundaries.
7. And this is not a one off. It needs to be done over and over, with all the time it takes, if we want to stay in tune. And it is necessary for us to do it regularly as organic single cells or ‘body parts’ if the whole body is to remain healthy, whole, Holy. In some ways one can liken it to the ‘Examen of Consciousness’ of Ignatian Spirituality although that is usually personal whereas I am proposing collective Inquiry as spiritual practice.
So why don’t we all just be ‘silent’ and from that place communicate what is wanted and then go ahead and realize it in the world? Because the truth, love and beauty of being is also becoming its uniqueness in form; the glory of each particularity and inclusive of that we call ‘other’.
We cannot fundamentally transform ourselves, our organizations and our societies if we have erroneous beliefs about who we think we are. Commonly we believe we are separate discrete entities forever locked in battle with other separate discrete entities. This view makes conflict inevitable. We have finally to see that there is no separate self but an inter-connectedness that is non-separate. Inquiry is a way to see the entrenched positions of the separate self and transcend them by seeing that one’s own point of view is not the only point of view. It is really a process of becoming aware, of living from awareness as well as from the thinking mind. It is living non-attached to the identities that the mind constructs for us and thereby putting us in a different kind of relationship with all of life. It is about being and becoming – living in a creative state of unknowing which does not exclude thinking and knowledge. It is “creating space for an awareness of the presence and action of God to emerge in our midst.”
We are confused and in conflict, not because of our thoughts and beliefs but because of the way we relate to them. To embrace a fixed position in one of openness is to become whole and complete. It is a sane and joyful state of mind. We need to become aware, through circulation to deeper levels of Inquiry, of where we lack freedom.
July 22, 2011 at 9:17 am
Mark Nielsen
Thanks.Excelllent material. I’m in the midst of a divorce, so maybe some of my perception/ideas are colored by that. But the mediation process, and my contemplative journey, are effecting a change in my attitudes about love and forgiveness — in the church and/or in life overall.
Making space for another’s failure or incompleteness (and one’s own) is the Way of Jesus, to be sure. But there’s a mysterious line I can’t get across, that it feels like the Holy Spirit won’t let me cross, which is the modern temptation to say that we are not *opposed in this struggle by something (some one?)that is outside ourselves and is “not-God”, or “not-love”, or active negative force which prefers chaos to God’s perfect order. Orthodoxy is our attempt to keep order in this context, therefore. And thus i have to ask, is the Holy Spirit here to bring peace, or a sword. Or “Is a comforting lie one tells oneself just easier than the Reality revealed in the harsh, life-changing light of truth, … And what is MY role in ANOTHER’S discovery of those absolutes? Or else, what’s a church gathering FOR?
July 22, 2011 at 6:25 pm
Kim
Hi Mark. Sorry for your struggles. That has been an ongoing learning experience for me even 14 years down the road. Were you asking or commenting on the existence of an opposing force to light? I wasn’t really sure what you meant and it interested me. If you have the time or inclination could you expand a bit with that?
July 22, 2011 at 11:16 am
John Anngeister
Christopher, your wrote:
“We follow a Master who carried on with his followers despite their obvious shortcomings and their abundant failures. Jesus stayed with his disciples. When they got it all wrong, when they fell short of the most basic standards of faithfulness and wisdom, he did not walk away. He bore their failures…”
My comment:
I think this inspired depiction of the longsuffering Master is actually also a perfect symbol for the light within which Cynthia (and Thomas Kelly) recommend. Jesus himself implied the existence of such a very patient inner light-which-lights-everyone, and which will never ‘walk away,’ when he said even to his enemies (a group of Pharisees enquiring about the kingdom) – “The Kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17:21).
I know that the church loves and teaches a different translation of Luke 17:21 these days which makes church membership a requirement for getting this spirit – that it is not actually within everyone but only ‘in our midst’ as the so-called people of God. You evoked this modern variant when you wrote:
“To make space for God’s work in our midst means making space for one another in all of our conflict, confusion, doubt, and contradiction.”
This is true as far as it goes, but I have found that the operant Greek phrase in Luke 17:21 is nowhere else in the Bible rendered as “in your midst” but always “within you, in your hearts” – (see Ps. 38:4, 108:22, 103:1, Isa 16:11, Dan 10:16, Ecclus. 19:23).
It was only at the end of the nineteenth century that the meaning “…in your midst” and “…among you” graduated from being an interpretive gloss to becoming first a footnoted ‘alternate’ and finally the preferred translation – in some newer Bible translations it completely displaces the original literal sense of “within you.”
In my view this text is huge for the rise and fall of Christianity, now and forever. But I don’t deny the attraction which ‘group energy’ translations hold for the church – as in your comment:
“We can choose to enter into the energy field of this love with one another and with all the world.”
I only worry that the newer, unbiblical sense of Luke 17:21 tends to leave the spirit without a real ground except ‘in the air’ between us, like the smoke left over from a day when, as you write, “a cosmic explosion of love was unleashed throughout the cosmos.” Seriously?
July 27, 2011 at 5:46 am
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[...] question was posted in a comment by Kim in last Thursday’s blog post on the Future of Church. http://inaspaciousplace.wordpress.com/2011/07/21/the-future-of-church-6-with-cynthia-bourgeault/#com… I have been thinking about it ever [...]
November 27, 2012 at 5:11 am
Future of the Church – Part Six « An Epiphany
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