There seems to be a lot of confusion right now over the terms “high” church and “low” church – the terms seem to have lost their meaning in our contemporary church context. In part, this is because these are terms of past struggles with which people are less familiar. It is also due to the fact that the “high” church movement has won much, at least ceremonially, in the new Prayer Book. We have regularized Communion, Confession, Holy Week liturgies, and much more that would once have been unthinkable to include in our corporate, agreed upon common life. Moreover, things like candles on the Altar, vestments, and the like are a regular part of many, many congregations.

The deeper issue has to do with the heart of the forms and the externals. Even though vestments are regularly used, how many Episcopal priests would or could articulate that their vestments are sacrificial ones? Their use was opposed on the grounds that the Eucharist was not a sacrifice and thus such vestments were inappropriate in Anglican churches.

I was once at a Morning Prayer service at a largish Episcopal Church in New Haven. It is one of the few churches left in the Episcopal Church that maintains the tradition of Morning Prayer with Hymns and Anthems as a principal Sunday service. As I was leaving, I heard a young woman get on her phone and say to her conversation partner, “This church is so high!”

What she meant was that the liturgy was dignified, the choir magnificent, and the liturgical atmosphere relatively formal. It was rather like visiting the best of an English Cathedral matins service.

Equally, serving in an Anglo-Catholic parish, I had a seminarian ask me if the parish was “low” because we offered morning prayer every day. Of course, she had gotten the message that Sunday morning prayer was a low tradition and translated that to mean that parishes with regular morning prayer must be low ones.

The challenge is more than semantic – it has to do with essentials of parish identity. The terms are no longer really significant but the approaches to sharing the Gospel and drawing others to Christ are deeply relevant.

The cathedral I serve now has a contemporary, experimental liturgy with world music and very modern language for the Eucharistic prayer – yet that same service also includes lots of incense, meditative prayer stations with icons, censing of the stations of the cross, and more. Is it high? Is it low? I’m not really sure – what I do know is that it draws many to the Church in a way that many other services might not be able to do. We use EOW regularly but we also have Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament every Wednesday evening. This is, in some ways, the vocation of a Cathedral – to represent the best of the liturgical life of the whole diocese.

Yet it is also the vocation of every church – to draw on the riches of our heritage and share it such that we are also sharing something life-giving of the life of Christ.

We like the short-hand of “low” and “high” – it gives us an easy way to describe (or think we are describing) other churches or even people. Yet, the Church is more complicated than any shorthand can manage to adequately encompass.

I was once asked if I’d only like to serve at Anglo-Catholic parishes – I borrowed a friend’s description and replied, “I really don’t care – I’ll celebrate the Lord’s Supper from the North end of the Lord’s Table in a dirty surplice and tippet. I just want to be in a place that is authentic and takes its worship life seriously.” Well, confusion abounded at my reference to the north end of the Altar (as directed in the 1662 Prayer Book).

We are being challenged, as a Church, not so much to live into a predefined definition of who we think we are but to do the deeper work of offering praise and worship that comes from the deepest place of our being as a Body. This will not always be “high” or “low” or in any other way definable. I saw a catty comment about sung compline by candlelight referred to as “playing” church the other day on Facebook. More of us might need to “play” – to rediscover the joy and wonder of lovingly offered adoration of God in Christ.

The simplest thing I can offer about high and low is this – look to the Prayer Book. Learn it, live with it, wrestle with it. It protects the Church and the people from liturgical and theological malpractice. It is neither high nor low really – it provides the ground for rich exploration and we have really barely begun to delve into its riches adequately.

Whether you consider yourself and your church high or low, the Prayer Book serves as an excellent source and shape for the lived Christian experience in and with Christ. Whatever our preferences are – there is ample room in its expansive breadth to be Church in a way that is at once corporately and universally authentic to our Church’s identity while offering an authentic shape for local congregational exploration and experimentation. The answer lies in intentionality – the lovingly offered outpouring of our thanks and praise that takes its shape in excellence and intentionality of giving.

Is your Church a place of solemn processions and sung Te Deums? Brilliant. Is your church a place with sung Morning Prayer and minimal Eucharistic fussiness when you do offer it? Great. Are you a place of family Eucharists with banners made by kids and children gathered around the Altar? Perfect.

So long as we are always allowing the Spirit to move us to new places and seeking to offer whatever we do with integrity and an eye toward the One who comes among us when two or three are gathered, then high or low are pretty irrelevant. Any church can make an idol of its worship and the priests the center of a show – it takes care and discipline to make sure that our churches are always focused, in every way possible, on the Living Word.

Robert

A Postscript

Something that occurred to me during Vespers about form and intent was this – the intention of a certain form is essential to its integrity and identity.  For example, I would argue that a parish that offers Morning Prayer as a principal Sunday service with the intent of drawing people into Baptism and regular Communion (if infrequent) is operating out of a “higher” Sacramental theology than a parish that offers Communion Regardless of Baptism with minimal theological and Sacramental preparation.  Of course, few examples are so cut and dried.

Parishes with a “high” seeming liturgy full of chant and incense – like Compline at Christ Church New Haven or Saint Mark’s Philadelphia might be using “high” form but at its heart they are offering an evangelical service designed to draw others into the first steps of a relationship with Christ.  The regular pattern of daily office that so many parishes maintain has both an evangelical and Catholic nature that teaches and forms the soul and intention of those who pray and pray on behalf of others.

The beauty of our tradition is that it is suffused with multiple strains of piety and purpose that blend together to create a unique and potent blend with appeal to those looking for a faith tradition that is comprehensive in its embrace of Truth and comfortable with the complexity of profound questions and multi-layered history.

Postpostscript

Last night I remembered a piece that was important to me in seminary that offers an expansive understanding of the term “high” – more on that here.

I have seen some very interesting conversation going on across social media about tradition and the Church – this has especially been intense as the Baptismal rite has undergone some renovation in the Church of England.

Some Facebook acquaintances of mine have also been passing about a meme about tradition and the Church. Pictured is a cleric in a lovely, heavily embroidered chasuble administering Communion to a middle aged woman sporting a mantilla (a lace trimmed hair cover). The meme consists of various quotes about tradition in the Church. An example is a quote from Saint Vincent of Lerins that reads, “Nothing new is to be accepted, except what has been handed down by tradition.” Another is from Saint Cyprian which reads, “Change nothing; be content with tradition.” And Pope Saint Leo the Great offers that “I have neither permitted, nor shall I permit, the things which have been settled by the holy fathers to be violated by any innovation.”

Of course, this is a charming vision of the Church. It is a place preserved in the amber of holiness and immune to the variation and shadow of change. Yet, I immediately wondered what medieval accretions to the Mass the fellows posting this were willing to tolerate? What innovations, movements of the Spirit, are tolerable so long as they represent the Church at a certain pristine moment in her history?

Holy Tradition must be more than the atavistic desire for perceived stability.

The Church is a Body in movement – she is meant to run, to thrive, to change, and to grow. There are essentials to our life that will be expressed in new and vibrant ways. His Holiness, Pope Francis, in his interview with La Civiltà Cattolica, stated

There are ecclesiastical rules and precepts that were once effective, but now they have lost value or meaning. The view of the church’s teaching as a monolith to defend without nuance or different understandings is wrong. After all, in every age of history, humans try to understand and express themselves better. So human beings in time change the way they perceive themselves. It’s one thing for a man who expresses himself by carving the ‘Winged Victory of Samothrace,’ yet another for Caravaggio, Chagall and yet another still for Dalí. Even the forms for expressing truth can be multiform, and this is indeed necessary for the transmission of the Gospel in its timeless meaning.

There are essentials to our life of faith that we must preserve and guard with zeal and determination. Yet, there will be those things which will appear to us, with the movement of the Spirit, to be ready for review and revision. There is a wonderful line in Scripture, in the letter to the Gentile believers, as the Council of Jerusalem was deciding whether Gentile converts should keep the Law, “For it has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us…” The Church is always in the moment asking itself, does it seem good to the Holy Spirit? Are we being led to this place by a voice of holiness and grace?

Our work is work of discernment using the tools of Anglican identity we have been handed – Scripture, Tradition, and Reason. Tradition finds its proper situation between Scripture and Reason. It is always to be held in the light of Scriptural interpretation and examined with an eye toward its appropriate relationship to Reason. Of course, there will be factions within the Church that will find Scripture to be the primary determination for all decisions and there will be factions equally wedded to modernity and reason as the chief lens for theological innovation. Yet between them stands Tradition – subservient to neither and mediating between them.

Tradition is not the benchmark but the agent of meaning and mediation. Somewhere between the words of the page and the vicissitudes of modernity we dwell as a people of tradition. Tradition finds its role not as the arbiter of right or wrong but as the code, the algorithm, by which we utilize scripture and reason to answer our deepest questions.

It is in the Holy Word that we first know the story of Christ and it is in the stories of the world around us, perceived with all the tools of reason, that we find Christ living and breathing. It is tradition that gives us the means by which we are able to find meaning in either experience. Our tradition gives shape and voice to the Word we read – we come to know the story not just because we run across in on a dusty shelf but because it comes alive in the course of a liturgy or is given interpretation by the work of those who came before us. Our tradition gives shape and voice to the Christ we know in the world around us as we are formed by a Baptismal Covenant, a Eucharistic sharing, and a Christian ethic that provide a framework that stretches beyond the boundaries of time and space that opens us to the Body all about us.

Tradition mediates rather than dictates our engagement with the living Christ. I believe in Tradition – I find in it a shape and form for our Christian journey that both comforts and challenges. Yet we cannot elevate it above either the living experience of the Body nor above the revealed word of Scripture. God is still speaking, still forming the tradition, and we are called not to curate our inheritance alone but to invest in its growth and hold fast to the deepest and most powerful meaning of tradition – living memory.

The memory we dwell in together is a living one that has, at its core, the absolute vibrancy of the Holy Spirit. It is living memory. It is alive and shaping us. It is alive and changing. It is giving us breath and life as the Body as it shapes our very nature and being. It is evolving and maddening in its indeterminacy. It is fixed only insofar as we limit its capacity to shape us anew. Living memory is necessarily the place of encounter with the Living Christ who is always straining and striving to meet us and welcome us into new life.

The encounter we are called to is with the Christ who is in the creche, on the cross, out of the tomb, breaking the bonds of Hell, and reigning in glory all at once in living memory. Each new believer is called to freshly live the Gospel story and know its shape as our own even as we tell it anew to the world around us.

He is calling us too to know ourselves as a Body both within and yet unbeholden to any one time – to know ourselves unbound by conceptions of time and place as we dwell deeper in the mystery he is revealing to us by water, cross, crown, and bread. That revelation is mediated by tradition but never captive to it. Death to old life means necessarily a death to even our most cherished imaginings of how Christ is reaching us, forming us, and calling us so that he might speak in fresh ways. It may mean a death to tradition so that we can embrace new life – so that living water might flow.

When the rich young ruler is called to give up all that he has to follow Christ – the choice is too painful to contemplate. We are being called, perhaps, to give up all that we think gives meaning and depth to a form of ecclesiastical martyrdom by which we know that all that stands as tradition, for us, may be in the way of deeper union – it may be undoing our fuller understanding. We are always being called to the place and person of Christ – to mirror his own self-gift and obedience. Once we allow tradition to be unquestioned and unquestionable then we are giving up an essential quality of Christ’s own mission – the undoing of human conceptions of what it means to relate to the Divine. As heirs of the promise, as the living Body, we are given the ability and the mandate to do even greater things.

Tradition itself is a transient concept – one person’s inviolable tradition is another person’s radical rebellion. There are essentials to our faith that must be defended without reservation. Our tradition is replete with the means for drawing men and women anew to Gospel life. I firmly believe that there are elements of our tradition that are calling to the deepest spiritual longings of the lost and hurting. Yet tradition is not meant to be the shibboleth of an inwardly-focused, pure community – it is a living thing making room for new voices to claim and proclaim it.

My deepest longing for the Catholic movement is that we will so order our life and work that the immediate connection that comes to mind when someone hears the term Anglo-Catholic is not about baroque liturgical preferences but about a deep, abiding, and prayerfully held belief in the Presence of Christ. The Altar must form the ground of the world we serve and not be a retreat from it.

There is a difference between Tradition and tradition. The essential quality and nature of the Church and her ministry is formed by Tradition. It is that which binds us to the early Church and to the Church which existed even before Christ walked the Earth. Tradition is that which finds itself unfolding over the centuries as the Holy Spirit continues to move. Almost every aspect of our tradition was once an innovation to some degree or another. Just look at the manifold ways liturgy has changed and expanded and contracted. We firmly believe that the Holy Spirit moves in our liturgical life and yet we perceive this movement differently and invite its presence among us in strikingly different ways from generation to generation. We read scripture differently from generation to generation and the canon itself was set by the movement of the Holy Spirit as tradition unfolded and reason was employed.

There is a world aching for Good News that needs us to reach back before Acts. It needs us to go back further than the nineteenth or the thirteenth or even the first century, to go back to the beginning of it all – to know what it is to have the Word who is with God (and Present with us) speaking anew. This is Tradition – the living embrace and encounter with all that has come before by the movement of the Holy Spirit that those who come after us might know something of the living Christ. Every set of hands that holds an inherited and cherished family possession leaves a mark of some sort. This is not tarnish – it is the mark of a loved and well-used treasure that we pass on with joy.

I write this with the open admission that I am no scholar of the Middle Ages – just a priest with a fondness for Arthurian legends.

There are surely some things to be thankful for when one considers that we no longer live in the Middle Ages.  Yet there is much that the Church might be able to glean by looking at the nature of medieval belief and the way the Church understood its place in the community and state (or perhaps the way the Church understood the place of the state and community within the broadest outlines of the Church).

One helpful way to look at the history of the Church is through the lens of ongoing growth and re-appropriation.  We look back to look forward and we look forward to understand what is behind us.

Undoubtedly there are advances in the life of the Church that we must be grateful for – that goes without saying.  Yet, even as I type this, I am anticipating the critique of those who will immediately apply the language and lens of modern criticism (“Yeah, let’s go back to monarchical, violent, patriarchy!”).  Let’s not.  But let’s also not think that the modern believer has a monopoly on the terms, signs, and substance of our faith.

There are a couple of areas in particular in which the medieval Church was on to something.

1. An engagement with the reality of death and dying:  In a culture that denies death by any means necessary (chemical, surgical, and pharmaceutical) the medieval world’s encounter and wrestling with the reality of the human physical experience is something to re-examine.  Life was devastating at times and the Church openly faced the complexities of suffering.  One need only look at the evolution of All Souls to see the medieval Church pastorally engaging the complex emotional and spiritual turmoil of death.  Look at the deeply moving and powerfully real images of the crucifixion that came into popular use to see a Church that understood and knew the cost of being human in sometimes inhuman circumstances.  There is a world around us and people in our own parishes struggling to face ends that are grim, sudden, shocking, and undeserved – the Church must create space for grief and hope to commingle and find true expression.  Part of being a place of Truth is being a place in which hard truths are talked about openly and with profound humility.
2. A comfort with the physical:  Of a piece with a comfort with death is a comfort with the realities of life.  The medieval world was not one that allowed for tidy spirituality.  It was a tough world with tough choices.  We might now mock the notion of bloody hosts and other miracles – but often miracles were those that established the power of God to work through common and imperfect things and people.  Relics become a means for God to use even dead bones.  The Eucharist is a sign not that simply indicates that Christ might be present in the abstract but that He is with us – made known in the most essential stuff of very difficult lives.  The medieval Church was one that understood prodding wounds with fingers of disbelief, that got what it meant to know the pain of the spear, that bled with saints, cried with grieving Mothers, and found solace and hope in Real Presence.  The medieval Church could engage the realities of pain and suffering because it did not deny them but understood them as crucial to the life of faith and the cost of simply being human.  Yet God’s life with us brought him into our very pressing hurts such that we might know new life and a peaceable reign.  The very lifecycle of the earth was seen through the lens of rogation days – such that daily living had a connection to the eternal beyond.
3. An acknowledgement that sin exists:  The medieval world, a world of hard choices, was not one in which any person could be free from sin and temptation.  Of course, we might think that there were excesses in medieval penitential piety and yet have we strayed too far in the other direction?  Have we pretended that sin is simply in the eye of the sinner such that it is not actual recognition of transgression against God and our fellow man but emotional distress that marks the penitent?  We do not want to lapse into a faith of quick shame and festering guilt.  Yet, there are severe and debilitating costs for a Church or society that find themselves unmoored from notions of sin and repentance.  The burdens society faces – from racism and sexism to climate change to so many more can find their root in our inability to truly proclaim the inviolability of the Body of Christ.  Without a willingness to face and name sin we cannot actually move beyond sin and repentance to renewal.
4. Mystery, Imagination, and Holy Permeability:  The medieval world was one that, despite its harsh realities, also was a place where imagination and mystery collided with holy promise to reveal God at work in mysterious yet common ways.  A forest was a magical place.  A cave promised treasures.  An ocean teemed with challenges both mundane and supernatural.  In all of this, there was an understanding that God was at work in the world.  Of course, so was the Devil.  The world was a place of passionate engagement by God – he was not content to sit on the sidelines and watch things plod along once he had set them in motion.  We have to find a way to share a bit of that cosmic delight with the world around us.  We are faced with so many of the same physical and spiritual realities that faced the medieval Church and yet we are content to believe that we alone face those realities and have often lost sight that God is still at work in the world.  The barrier between the beyond and the here is thinner than we think.  All around us is swirling a world of constant mystery in which God delights to walk with us.
5. Worship like something is happening:  All of this swirling together of harsh reality and divine promise was revealed in the worship life of the Medieval Church.  While we might not wish to ape the complexities of the Tridentine Rite – the complexity of the liturgical life revealed something of the complex reality of faith and the promise of holy beyond.  When believers came together for Mass, something was happening that demanded attention, intention, and prayerful engagement.  This is not to say we want to recapture the prescribed formulas of a practiced elite but that we want to create a space and time for worship that communicates that all are being called into the deepest mysteries of the Word made Flesh.  The whole of the created order takes its form and function through the mysterious working of the transcendent reality of God.  Our worship must explore not simply the realities we face daily but the deeper reality of the Presence of Christ – the Presence we pray will draw the creation and community around us from its present into a new Kingdom life.  Self-referential or watered down worship does not make the divine more accessible it simply makes the mundane, perhaps, more palatable.
6. The Church at the heart of the Town:  The very real and practical effect of having an institution that straddles earthly and heavenly realities is that it becomes a locus for local community.  People look to it for hope and for immediate needs.  Our churches stand as potential gathering places, green spaces, and more for each of our communities.  Gone are the days when we shape the calendar and the daily life of our communities – yet within our grasp is the ability to shape the daily lives of those who come through our doors such that their lives take on a sacramental character and they become living embodiments of the Church’s influence in the world.  We are no longer the arbiters of culture – yet a culture without true arbiters is yearning for voices that will help shape, guide, and give meaning.  One need look no further than Pope Francis to see a hint of what this can mean – authentic Christian living exercises a soft power that no amount of state sponsored mandate or privilege can ever command.

All of this is not to say that we should yearn for a return to yesteryear.  Our tradition, however, is replete with means for drawing men and women anew to Gospel life. I firmly believe that there are elements of our tradition that are calling to the deepest spiritual longings of the lost and hurting. Yet tradition is not meant to be the shibboleth of an inwardly-focused, pure community.  Our work in the world must reflect our deepest longing to elevate all those whom we touch so that those who thought themselves unlovable might know that they are adored by the Christ whom we adore.  This is the promise of the Medieval Church – the world is awash in divine promise and harsh realities alike.  A forward looking Church will hear cracking voices, hold trembling hands, look into tearful eyes, and with courage and humility say, “there is more.”

Robert

There is a good bit of conversation going on now in the Church about what it means to be a missional Church.  The general import is that it is critical that the Church do a number of things:

1. Be out in our communities meeting people
2. Concern ourselves with discipleship and not simply attendance numbers
3. View our churches as incubators of engagement and reconciliation
4. View our churches not as monuments but as movements

In so many ways, this is exactly the direction I think the Church needs to go.  We must recognize that the culture we are part of is no longer a “joining” culture so we must become a “sending” Church – one that equips our people to go out and preach the gospel in every way possible.  Our very lives must become the chief means by which others will see and know the transformational power of the Spirit as we are drawn more deeply into the pattern, form, and essence of Christ’s own life.

One issue that continues to niggle at me though is the anti-church and anti-clerical tone that many presentations of this message come wrapped in.  In the rush to create a missional Church we seem to be running past the very essential question of what it means to be Church at all.

When I was going through the ordination process, I was asked what I thought of the Social Gospel – that is the preaching of a Gospel message that focused on the issues of inequality, racial justice, poverty, and the like.  I simply answered that I rejected the notion of a “Social Gospel.” I did not say I rejected the essential nature of the Gospel’s answers to these pressing questions but I rejected the notion that somehow there was a particular form of preaching the Gospel that by its particular virtue elevated it over some other, less social, form of the Gospel.  The entirety of the Gospel is social – its wholeness answers the deepest needs of society.  If one is preaching the Gospel then one is necessarily preaching justice and reconciliation.

This is a bit of my issue with “Missional Church.” If one is truly blessed to be in a place that is living into its fullest identity as a Church then “missional” becomes a redundancy.

The chief vocation of the Church is to worship God.  Our chief act of worship is the intertwining of our life with Christ’s such that his mission becomes ours.  The Church’s role is missional insofar as we are being caught up in the love and life of Christ.

More important than what God is calling us to do is who God is calling us to be as a people formed in the image of Christ.  This is where I think the Missional Church movement and the traditional role of the Church might just intersect.  At its heart, the missional church is one that forms people to be living witnesses in the world around them.  The traditional role of the Church is to give people the basic tools and framework for that kind of transformation to take place.  We form people, at our best, to work, pray, and give for the spread of the Kingdom of God.

This work is not done in spite of the Church but through the Church.  We offer people the fundamental means by which they can know their lives as bound by water and blood and empty tomb to the wholeness of Christ’s.

Worship, for the Church, is not a means to an end – it is the summit of the Christian life.  It is the place in which brokenness and healing come together.  It is the place in which longing and memory commingle.  It is the place in which the holy takes common form and bread becomes Life.  It is the place where first fruits and last things are known.  It is the place where forgiveness is found and forever held in shaking palms.

A Church that offers lovingly and longingly the Presence of Christ is one that will become a missional Church because worship will be not simply a moment or an instant but our very breath.  That breath will take us out into the world as a people refreshed and reinvigorated for the rigors of daily witness.

We must be a missional Church – and we must simply be the Church.

Sometimes we like to make things harder than they need to be.  We look for the new thing that will draw attention or make us more relevant.  Yet what the culture is longing for, aching for, is a place that is real – that is authentic.  Nothing can be more authentic for the Church than to be a place that lives its worship and loves with fearless joy.

In worship we offer our whole and broken selves to God – we make of our totality a living sacrifice that we pray might be holy and acceptable.  The work of redemption is the restoration of our relationship with God and with the world around us.  In true and lively worship, we allow ourselves to be opened to the work of the Spirit such that our lives become things of holy, healed brokenness.

Kintsugi is the art of fusing together the broken pieces of pottery with gold seams such that the newly repaired piece of pottery is deemed even more beautiful for having been broken.  In worship and prayer, we ask God to take the broken places in our lives and fill them – to make us able to serve even as we are signs of God’s healing love.  We become a sign to the world that God uses the broken – even a broken Church – to show forth the beauty of his restoring power.

Our churches, at their best, can be places of action-reflection in which we live out our faith and find within the community the place to refine and deepen our articulation of how Christ is moving in our lives – in spite of and because of our authentic lived experience as a Body.

The Church has existed before Christ walked the Earth.  It is the Body of God’s beloved, known and called by him before the first sunrise.  We do ourselves a disservice if we pretend that to truly be people on a mission that we have to leave the Church behind somehow.  We can’t leave it behind – we can only seek to live into its deepest wholeness more fully.  It needs love, care, and even reform but its essence, which is His Body, will hold fast.

Yet, as we look to the future of the Church, there are essential shifts that might renew our presence in our communities, as we seek to become places of restoration:

1. We should look to offer word of Christ’s love in manifold ways – in the fullness of our lives
2. We should find that unique blend of worship, community, and social outreach that help us to be Church in sustainable ways in our community
3. We should deepen our commitment to the disciplines of regular prayer and worship
4. We should make space for our communities in our churches so that they are recognized as the heart of our communities
5. We should be honest about who we are and what we do – we are the Church and we offer a relationship with God in places of safety
6. We should be a community that breaks bread with dirt under our fingernails – a worshiping community that works as hard as it prays
7. We should be committed to excellence in worship and in service
8. We should be welcoming those whom society doesn’t see or doesn’t want to see
9. We should be places of bold humility
10. We should give people tangible, visible ways to get their hands dirty

There are many more ways for us to live into the wholeness of our missionary vocation as the Church – there are just some quick thoughts and I look forward to hearing the many more that so many have to offer.

Robert

Because this is a penitential season, I thought it might be a good thing to look at how my own tendencies and personality traits sometimes get in the way of communicating clearly and positively what I am thinking and trigger anxiety and reaction rather than conversation and deeper listening.

I am thinking in regard especially to my post on the Presiding Bishop’s Christmas message.  As I have pondered it, I do not think that my underlying supposition was without merit.  However, I should have taken a step back and realized that this was not a piece for debate but a pastoral letter.  That does not mean that it is not subject to critique but that it is designed to do something different than a statement of doctrine.

I think I could have reacted to the letter from the point of talking through its pastoral implications rather than its theological merits.  I think that I did a better job of that in a follow up piece – but the initial response could have been more carefully crafted so as to respond to underlying questions I had about its overall effectiveness.

In looking at a chart about INTP personality types, it was interesting to see how my personality type tendencies were directly revealed in the piece and, moreover, how those who responded with either vigorous assent or vehement disagreement may have been operating out of their own type inclinations as well.

INTPs tend to be

• Analysts and abstract thinkers
• Straightforward
• Insensitive
• May be condescending
• Loathe rules and guidelines

I approached the Presiding Bishop’s message as something to be analyzed rather than engaged.  I was straightforward in communicating that analysis and insensitive to her intent and those who found meaning in it.  The piece definitely held elements of condescension and a loathing of rules and guidelines made it unlikely that I would hold my opinion in check despite the rather wide gap in our respective ecclesiastical standing.

While I do not doubt the underlying validity of my critique, both the writing and the response it generated have reminded me that people will run with whatever you put out there and impose upon you and what you write all that they wish to – and we bear some responsibility for putting out there things that will enliven and yet create space for dialogue.

Opprobrium and Reaction

Once, I had the pleasure of engendering “conservative” opprobrium.  In a conservative journal, I was asked, “What, are you high?” and “Have you been smoking crack?” and fun things like “And where has this silly man been? One can only feel pity. I have no respect for him” were said.

And when I offered a criticism of Communion regardless of Baptism another piped up “You’re OK with pervert priests marrying their paramours, with celebrations of abortion, and THIS is what bugs you?”

Over the course of the day yesterday and today though the indignation and personal attack from those on the liberalish part of the Episcopal Church has, frankly, been just as heated.

One of the more heated remarks went, “Idiots suspicious of interpretive language who enforce their own parched ecclesiology on the rest of us born out of their limited christology may be a binding phenomenon across the Communion.”

This whole episode has demonstrated for me two things.

The first is that there is a passionate debate to be had about what it means to share the Good News in a changing culture.

The second is that there is a need for us to create space for those conversations to happen in which “smoking crack” and “idiots” are not the terms we use in those discussions.

I wrote not long ago on my distaste for using the phrase “You don’t have to leave your brain at the door” to describe Episcopal churches.  This whole debate has solidified my conviction that there is a deeper issue here – we don’t know how to have a lively discussion without often resorting to invective and questioning the intellectual capacity of those with whom we disagree.

My criticism was sharp and pointed – and it focused on the Presiding Bishop’s message.  I did not call her a heretic, tyrant, or an ice queen or any of the other foul things I have seen her called.  Neither did I say she was an idiot or smoking crack.  I questioned her message’s ability to reach those who are unchurched or those yearning for a strong articulation of the promise and person of Christ.

We have this interesting phenomenon going on – we are addicted to politeness and niceness so long as they are being used to ignore difficult topics.  That is until we are not.

Then the gloves are off and there is open season on those with whom we disagree.  The quickest way, of course, for a good Episcopal argument to be settled is by questioning the intellectual ability of those with whom we disagree and dismissing them.

What I am longing for is a passionate, evangelical, catholic articulation of the faith that helps lay out what it means to be a faithful person who belongs to a Church that has taken progressive positions on a host of issues.  This is where we can learn from the Oxford Movement – there was a theological core that made them fierce advocates for social and economic justice.

I am committed in coming posts to exercise as much charity and kindness as possible and to offer positive articulations on faith and hope.  I too don’t want to get caught in the trap of responding out of habit, reactiveness, or personality quirks and to make sure that I am helping to create a space for the honest and open exchange of ideas.

We are trapped in a culture of reactivity and primed to be offended.  I think this has less to do with any one person’s failures than it does with our deep seated desire to find a safe home in which we know who we are.  Whether it is “liberals” (for lack of a better word) who have found a safe haven or “conservatives” who found a place that was a place of disciplined prayer and theological rigor – it is too easy for us to forget that this Church is a home for the wayward and the lost.  It is a home for those struggling to make meaning in a confusing time.

There might be heated disagreement but we are all, ultimately, wanderers who have stumbled in one way or another into this place of grace.  We will have heated discussions about its future and direction because this is a place where our identity is being crafted and new life is being found – it is a place we love because it let us know that we were loved in return.

I am not hoping to quiet or avoid fierce and passionate discussion – I am longing for it.  The Episcopal Church needs a renewed passion and focus.  I just hope we can do so without needing to throw our brothers and sisters under the bus as idiots along the way.

Robert

I have gotten, in the last few days, no small amount of flack about my post on the Presiding Bishop’s Christmas message. I will say that my willingness to post such a missive demonstrates one of the things I love about the Episcopal Church and Anglicanism – we can have the conversation.  I love being part of a Church in which the things that frustrate us are points of conversation and debate.

I thought, after a day or two, that it might be helpful to talk a little about the cultural context and why I think our new cultural realities demand a different kind of engagement with the world than the message offered.

One critique I heard was that it was obvious that she was talking about Jesus – look at the terms she uses “Word” and “Prince of Peace.” Yet, even as those terms were used, there was little declaration about what it exactly means for the whole of humanity that a Savior was born among us who is the Word made Flesh and the Prince of Peace.

We are reaching a cultural point in which the majority of those coming of age will have little or no real exposure to the Gospel message.  I cannot count the number of people who come through the doors – young people – who have no idea who Jesus is.  I have been literally asked, repeatedly, “Who is Jesus?”

Public messages from leaders in our Church are an opportunity for us to lay out, for a new generation, who Christ is and what his birth and resurrection victory mean for the whole of the human family.  Whether we like it or not much of our engagement with the emerging generations is going to feel a little remedial.  That’s because people are asking us “Who is Jesus?” because they haven’t heard it much before and they haven’t seen it much lived out either.

Too many of our churches, across denominational lines, are offering training for our youth that is, as writer Kenda Creasy Dean says, a form of “therapeutic moral deism.” It is the kind of faith that is comforting for those who grew up in religiously abusive environments and it is vague enough not to scare off those who have only experienced Church as a source of shame or fear.

(If you doubt the challenges we face in Episcopal Christian formation – I invite you to look at this post I did on the National Study of Youth and Religion – and the follow up piece here.)

However, the fruit of that kind of religion has been, quite simply, the hollowing of the Church.  There are many, many more factors at play in the decline of churches across the spectrum.  But here is the core problem – when people ask (aloud or silently) “Why does the Church matter?” We often aren’t offering much.

We are meeting a national cultural identity crisis with an identity crisis of our own.  There are people across our country who are begging to find hope and meaning in the world around them and the Church is that place which is most poised to answer that yearning – if we have the courage and conviction to welcome others to the Body.  We can boldly do this not for our benefit but in thanks for all of the benefits of Christ’s own victory.

The challenge for the Church now is not soft-peddling our message of Christian hope found in Christ out of fear of offending but to know ourselves so caught up in the saving love of Christ that the only thing we can do is share that hope with others.  Messages like a primate’s Christmas and Easter messages are a prime place for this to happen – to set a vision and course for the Church and her faithful people.

There is a desperate need for a faith in this country that is clear, welcoming, and theologically orthodox.  I use the term orthodox not to create boundaries and limits but to indicate that we can be a Church that welcomes and affirms not because we are avoiding theological truth and spiritual rigor but because of them.  I use the term welcoming not to indicate that we fling open the doors and just gather about and do yoga and hold hands – but because we welcome all into the life-giving work and labor of the Christian faith as we come to know Christ at the Altar and are sent out in reckless joy.

Those coming to our churches are not looking for one more place to be affirmed or marketed to – they are looking for a place that will unmake and remake them.  Whether they can articulate it or not their search for hope and meaning is grounded in a search for the grace and hope we hold dear.

They are yearning for Baptism.  They are yearning for Communion.  They are yearning to be transformed.

The commitment so many young people are making to things like the Episcopal Service Corps, Lutheran Volunteer Corps, and Jesuit Volunteer Corps demonstrates the real longing that our young people have not only to make a difference but to find out who they truly are in the context of a community that offers not a new identity but gives them a chance to know their true identity bound up with Christ’s own.

They are not looking for an easy, vague, or veiled faith.  They are hyper-marketed to and don’t have time to sift through what they think we might be saying.

They are struggling to find a place that is authentic and real – that offers a faith that is a both mysterious and gritty – that breaks bread with dirt under the nails.  Messages that soft-peddle the Incarnation and the Resurrection are simply not going to communicate the kind of authenticity and vigor that a new generation of seekers is demanding of us.

If we want people to hear, see, and know that the Church is making a difference we must be clear that we are different not because we are here but because Christ is.

Robert

As we are preparing for several mission trips in the coming year, I have doing some writing and thinking about a theology of mission – especially in the context of thinking about Advent and repentance.  I found an essay that I wrote several years ago that proposed a theology of mission and evangelism grounded in the Sacrament of Reconciliation and include some of it below along with some new thoughts.  It should be noted that though this essay stresses the work of international mission, there is a desperate need in communities all around us that are as foreign to many of us as any distant shore.

Mission is one aspect of the Church’s work of reconciliation in the world.  It is an expression of the repair of the present and past looking forward to the future. When it is undertaken appropriately, the Church and the Holy Spirit can find the mistakes of the past to be tools of learning and reconciliation.  The efforts of a Church yearning to be reborn in the Spirit are expressed in vigorous mission efforts that blend the voices of past and present, self and other, into a body whose praise for the Holy is service and whose service is offered with joyful hearts.

For missionary churches in the post-colonial era, there is a degree of guilt present in the collective consciences of those sensitive to the evolving awareness of our collective guilt for the abuses of the past. This awareness is, in some part, a healthy regard for the other and a movement toward accepting the legitimacy of a variety of worldviews and histories without seeing them as invalidating one’s own. However, this awareness has also resulted in, what some would argue, is a potentially crippling reluctance to engage with the other in an open and honest way for fear of reenacting historical abuses or reinforcing past prejudices.

The vague uneasiness of the contemporary Christian has, in some ways, been shifted onto the mission enterprise and become an excuse to devalue or redefine mission.  Lamin Sanneh argues, “Much of the standard Western scholarship on Christian missions proceeds by looking at the motives of individual missionaries and concludes by faulting the entire missionary enterprise as being part of the machinery of Western cultural imperialism.”

Yet, in the rush to deemphasize mission, or worse, to implicate it as emblematic of the predations of imperialism, the Church may have set aside its most potent and powerful tool in the work of reconciliation. A Church that seeks to make amends for historical wrongs must engage with those it believes it has wronged and who believe they have been wronged by it. An open and humble missionary Church can gain an understanding of host cultures that is unmatched within the sending church.

Moreover, a missionary’s work at the level of the individual believer and the individual host imbues the relationship with an incarnated holiness that is at once a reflection of and reflected in the wider Body of Christ.  Missionary endeavors, when undertaken with humility and with an eye toward companionship, presence, and mutuality can become a sign of redeemed living and a symbol of self-offering.

It is in the meeting of the other that stories of abuse may be brought to light, dealt with, or simply heard, depending on the needs. Moreover, in those very human interactions, the missionary and the hosts begin that Incarnational dialogue that repairs the breaches of time. Missionaries are, in many ways, the modern Confession of the Church body. They are an offering from one Church to another in the hope that true Communion might take place and, like any offering, the fruits are manifested in such a way as to blur the line between giver and receiver.

Our missionaries are on the ground, engaging in individual dialogue with those who may have been wronged in the past, hearing those voices and stories through which we come to understand the lasting legacies of past injustices and, moreover, hearing the needs of the contemporary societies.

It is in those discussions that we come to truly be martyrs in the ancient sense of the word, witnesses. This martyrdom, like Confession, erases our pride and self-importance and brings us into an honest, sharing, mutually enriching relationship with others.  C.M Rogers wrote in 1958, “A real meeting between a Christian and a non-Christian in Asia or Africa presupposes a willingness to be open on the part of the Christian to all that the non-Christian has to share and has to give.” This engagement with the other begins to fill a “lack” which is sin, begins to create understanding.  Mission, like Confession, calls us out of our perpetual enchantment with the self while refocusing our energy on understanding God and the other.

Mission is the point at which we can provide timely and human repentance that is steeped with deeper meaning than a declaration or announcement by a Church body.  That meaning is provided, in part, by the embodied reality of the missionary in the context of a lived relationship – and that common relationship becomes a point in which sacred meaning can find root.

Mission provides a means of embodied hope and for the translated contrition of the church yearning for deeper relations with the other in an honest spirit of humility.  Just as sin, a lack, makes itself known in our interactions with the other, so too is reconciliation and grace made manifest in and through the other.

The dangerous thing though is for us to go with an eye toward undoing or repairing historical wrongs.  Our task is much simpler – we are being called to listen.  To be present.  Not to  the busyness of fixing but to the harder work of opening up to the voices of those unheard.  It is tempting to give in to modern forms of discrimination which Ian Douglas identifies as “dysfunctional rescuing, avoiding contact, and denying differences.”

By neglecting fulsome, on-the-ground missionary efforts in favor of grant-giving, the church has indeed, too often, engaged in behaviors of dysfunctional rescuing, avoiding contact, and denying differences. Mission is our Church’s Confession that we still have much to learn from the world around us, that we are willing to be vulnerable to the work of the Spirit, and to admit that our blindness, fear, or even laziness have habituated our institutions to simultaneously old and new forms of racism. Missionaries are one way for the church to rectify and avoid these manifestations of racism.

The missionary enterprise, rooted in the open and confessing spirit, expressly engages the other, recognizes differences, and seeks reciprocal friendship rather than the false hope of “rescue.”  Our amendment of life takes place in moments when we act in love, partnership, and openness with others. This joyful amendment of life, in the constant reflection and refraction of the reconciling spirit, reverberates through the web of individual relationships the missionary is blessed to be a part of, including both the wider sending church and the host culture.

The joy of forgiveness can empower churches to fully reengage in mission and to recognize that the missionary endeavor itself, rather than being an impediment to reconciliation, may be our most sure way of realizing it. That reconciliation requires churches and missionaries to be marked by sympathy, self-awareness, and humility.

The joy of our faith in a God of Creation is that this God is the Lord over all the Earth in its manifold splendor and diversity. There has never been a time when any person, village, or people have been forgotten by God. Thus, we enter each village, city, and home as a sister and brother sharing a Father. That divine parentage is the very ground upon which we humbly walk as stories are shared and the blessings of companionship and solidarity are known.

Solidarity is our goal in so many of the Sacraments.  Baptism, Confirmation, Communion, Confession, Ordination, Last Rites, and Marriage are all Sacraments that bind us in solidarity more deeply in Christ and with one another in those moments of joy and pain when the curtain between Heaven and Earth seems most translucent. Confession and mission both serve to bring our lives into accord with Christ’s will, draw us closer to one another, commit us to transcending the self, call us to recognize our impact on others, and concomitantly proceed from and engender humility.

Confession and mission patch rents in the human conscience by recalling those places in which we or the human family have failed and can do more to honor God and one another. This creates the space for the Holy Spirit to effect conversions of heart, soul, and mind.  Working out of a theology of Reconciliation, mission efforts may provide a way forward that does not simply transcend nor deny the errors of the past, but baptizes them, making them a point of mutual sharing, growth, and understanding for all parties.

Robert

I continue to struggle to understand the Presiding Bishop’s reluctance to mention Jesus in her feast day messages.  I have written previously on her Christological murkiness at Eastertide and her 2013 Christmas communique continues a trend in which she fails to mention Our Savior in messages around feasts that center on the saving action of Christ.

Whether it is time to consider the Incarnation or the Resurrection, the Presiding Bishop is consistent in her unwillingness to mention the person in whom our whole faith and hope rests.  It takes some effort to avoid using the name of Jesus in an Easter or Christmas message – multiple times.

I offer below the word cloud of her Christmas message for 2013.  Her reference to the name of Christ or even God is striking only in its consistent omission from her messages.  At this point, with repeated messages that omit reference to Christ, it can only seem intentional that she not actually reference the singular significance of the Incarnation and Resurrection of Christ let alone his saving action.

A message that centers on authority and shoulders must be significant to some small portion of our membership yet  the message most needed in these times is for the unique and holy condescension of God’s indwelling among his people in the person of his Son.

There are some number who might welcome this vagueness on the part of the Presiding Bishop to fail to acknowledge the personhood and uniqueness of Christ.  I am not among them.  Our inability to claim the wholeness of God’s saving action in the person of Christ is a missed opportunity.

This kind of theological opacity might be a virtue to a sliver of our membership but it is an unfortunate avoidance of the heart of the Gospel.  The vagueness of the message communicates an unwillingness to proclaim the basic tenets of the faith (this is different from whether she believes them which I believe she does).  Her opacity evinces a lack of comfort with the essential doctrines of the Christian faith and borders on gnosticism.

I use the term gnosticism as her message is so densely worded as to be accessible only to those with an inside knowledge of contemporary theological language.  I long for a leader with clarity who can articulate the abiding power of the Incarnation such that all who hear might be drawn the the Living Christ.

One can only read, contrast, and lament the difference between the Presiding Bishop’s message and the Christological core of the Pope’s recent encyclical, Lumen Fidei, in which he boldly proclaims Christ, faith, and God.

The Pope’s recent selection as Time magazine’s Man of the Year is not based on his lack of clarity but rather on his emphasis on the Gospel of Christ’s love.  Yet, one can see above that his message is not in spite of the uniqueness and decisiveness of Christ but because of that very reality that the Presiding Bishop seems reluctant to proclaim in these feast day messages.

I have followed this post up with some reflections on our current cultural realities that fleshes some of this out a bit more…

Robert

“The Episcopal Church is a church where you can come in without leaving your brain at the door and then have the opportunity to love all of those who managed to come in with their ‘wrong’ ideas.” — The Rt Revd Leo Frade, Bishop of the Diocese of Southeast Florida

“We deeply love the intellectual as well as the spiritual life that is cultivated in our members (‘you don’t need to leave your mind at the door’)” – Progress Report from the Task Force  for Re-Imagining the Church

Yesterday I saw these quotes pop up in two different places.  As I read the report from the Task Force, I had a difficult time reading after the “mind at the door” line.  I found myself thinking, “Is this what we want a reimagined Church to emphasize?”

I get what people are saying when this line is put out there – many of us come from traditions that were overly dogmatic, prescriptive, or even fundamentalist.  Yet I find there to be a sad smugness to our adopting this line as a party platform.

I have chosen this Church over the Roman Church and yet I do not want my Roman Catholic family members and friends to think I chose this Church because they are all leaving their brain at the door when they go to Church.

What does this kind of message say to a single mother who goes to the local Baptist Church because they invite her and her kids to sing in the choir and to be part of the Singing Christmas Tree?  What does it say to the widow who goes to the local Roman Church because it was the last place she felt real peace?  What does it say to the Methodist dentist who goes there because his family has for four generations and they built the church steeple?

The Episcopal Church has enough issues with people perceiving us as a club that is not for them.  Why would we perpetuate that perceived haughtiness by adding yet another perceived barrier – a lack of smarts – to coming to our churches?

As we are undertaking mission work here in Denver, one of our challenges is that there are many who can’t read English or can’t read at all.  I don’t want them to ever think that this is not a place that they could call home.  If the Episcopal Church wants to put up signs that say “All are Welcome” then we need to be prepared for all kinds of people to come through our doors – people who aren’t there to prove that they are smarter than other faithful people.

I wonder what exactly qualifies as checking one’s brain at the door?  If one believes in The Virgin Birth, The bodily Resurrection, the Second Coming, miraculous healings, and the efficacy of relics – has one checked one’s brain?  If one both rejects the death penalty and abortion – has one checked one’s brain at the door?  If one believes that God, indeed, has sent angels to watch over us – has one checked his or her brain at the door?

Much of our culture already thinks that we have checked our brain at the door simply for believing at all.

I have met clergy with shocking gaps in their theological, liturgical, and organizational training.  My own gaps in Scripture, contemporary theologies, and modern music are sources of real distress at times.  In other words, even our seminary trained ministers have lots of learning to do – especially when I talk with Methodists about preaching, Roman Catholics about social doctrine, Baptists about Scripture, and Pentecostals about the power of the Spirit.

Comprehensiveness as a Church must mean that we are open to learning from brothers and sisters of the faith rather than dismissing them as insufficiently smart or lacking in self-awareness.  It is unhelpful for us to position ourselves as the Church that isn’t full of unthinking spiritual drones when there are faithful, kind, and generous people all across Christian traditions.

I recognize that we have methodological differences in interpretation of Scripture and ecclesial differences with regard to authority – and these differences have hurt many – yet every other church out there is not some version or another of Westboro.

Frankly, we’re just not that smart – and thankfully Jesus doesn’t seem to be searching out smart people to share his message.  He looked for those who were least likely to be “in” or even thought of as people let alone who might be smart.  Jesus calls us to the deepest love for one another and a charity of spirit that this kind of language undermines.

I pray that we’ll be careful talking about checking brains at the door lest people just think we’ve decided to check our hearts instead.

Robert

I have been noticing lots of cultural phenomena lately that I often ignore for the rest of the year. The busyness of the holidays often makes one aware of things that you might otherwise simply not be aware of. You go into a bookstore looking for a gift and you suddenly realize the dominance of e-books in their physical space must say something. You are waiting in line and hear pundits on the television or radio decrying this, that, or the next. You have chats with folks, whether distant relatives or casual acquaintances, that you don’t see often and they mention issues and concerns that normally don’t hit your radar.

One of the cultural phenomena is Black Friday. There has been lots of critical coverage in Christian publications and on Facebook – and it is a deplorable thing. The fact that we are now losing Thanksgiving as a national day of rest is extraordinarily depressing and represents another step in national hyper-activity and sensationalism. Yet it is a symptom of a deeper and far sadder condition as the drive to consume is consuming us relentlessly.

It is in the interest of purveyors and peddlers to keep people amped up. Most people, when given space to reflect, will realize that they do not need some new thing. Look at how casinos are organized – no pause in the constant action so that patrons will spend, spend, spend. If someone glances at a clock or sees the light of day go up or down, they might just stop pounding quarters into the machine for a minute. So we stay hyped up, frustrated, and annoyed.

24 hour news, social media, email, smart phones, online shopping, texts, radio, junk mail, spam, and so much more crank up the noise to a level that is nearly unbearable – in fact it is unbearable. Look at the rates of depression, ADHD, and the like. This is not a culture that just sells caffeine or anti-depressants – it needs them to survive.

One of our dogs, Penelope, has a little red light that she plays with – chases around. If I let her play with the red light, she will chase it until she literally cannot walk. She will lay on her belly and crawl toward the light when she is too worn out to chase it anymore. Even when she is exhausted, if I put away the red light, she will whine, beg, and plead for it to come back out so that she can chase it until exhausted again. She will ignore other toys and even treats if the red light has been played with recently because she can only think of that light. Penelope is addicted to the laser light.

Our whole culture is addicted. If something is not entertaining, fast, or distracting enough we start to whine and beg for something else – something new.

Yet the burnout is happening – even faster than we realize. There was an article on millenials and the search for meaning in the New York Times last week. The thrust of the article was this, “Millennials have been forced to reconsider what a successful life constitutes. By focusing on making a positive difference in the lives of others, rather than on more materialistic markers of success, they are setting themselves up for the meaningful life they yearn to have…” The rise of intentional communities, slow food movements, and the like are rational responses to an irrational system of hyper-stimulation and marketing.

The deeper need is for something real – something that is beautiful and not just pretty. Something that brings true joy and not just momentary happiness. Something that forms who we are and doesn’t just let us escape for a while.

This is where the Church has much to offer. Death, scarcity, competition, and avarice are the signs of a profoundly disordered society rooted in the notion that suffering and conflictive daily existence are somehow parts of God’s plan. Yet, the Trinity is the embodiment of difference as cooperative movement rather than something to be overcome. It is at once a response to unity and a call to it. The Trinity is not the completion, but the infinite act of ongoing completion in harmony and beauty.

That is a bit of theological denseness that simply means that the Church can offer a vision of wholeness and completion that does not rest on individual struggle over and against but on the deepest longing of God for each of us to know wholeness and meaning poured out in God’s own act of constant creative generosity and love. The key to knowing this ongoing act of beauty is found in the definitive act of love offered in Christ.

There cannot be a Christian conception of beauty without understanding the compelling a transcendent beauty of lives lived fully in the service of Christ and the whole of humanity. For beauty is necessarily transcendent, and fundamentally calls us out of ourselves into the world and to greater service and purpose. The Christian life is an act of beauty for it reflects the ongoing transcendent love of Christ in the world and through his people.

Beauty is not about prettiness. It is really about survival. That which is beautiful gives life and offers a picture of that which is in balance and harmony. It is an essential quality of the Church’s offering to the world. We offer the beautiful revealed in the most common of things – a vision of the Divine made known in human form.

There is a fundamental difference between a work of art and a reproduction. The Church cannot offer only reproduction whether it is of the past, of the culture around us, or of some anticipated future. The Church offers a vision of the here and now that is full of delight and decay, joy and regret, inspiration and despair. We worship a God who is the fullness of Presence and the source of beauty in its many forms.

Yet all of this beauty is ultimately not about our worship, architecture, or artwork – it is about the rapt awe we feel when we see someone living an essentially Christian life. It is why so many are fascinated by the new pope – we are given a vision of authenticity and therein lies beauty. We are dying for examples of coherence in which the inner life and the outer are in alignment – examples that give people a meaning and hope that lift them out of the conflictual busyness in which we are all too often mired into something holy and sustainable.

It is shocking when we see such examples and breaks, just for a second, the hold of addictive freneticism such that new possibilities are revealed.

We cannot offer just an alternative to cultural expectations and demands but a wholly other way of being that forms how we engage that culture. Christ, our model, came challenging the culture of his day but loving with fierce compassion those all around him. The Church has the power to be an agent of such compassion, such beauty, and such joy that we can help others find a new way of being that is utterly present and authentic because it finds its heart in the way of Christ.

Those who criticize the Church are doing us a profound favor because they are holding up for us a mirror so that we can see exactly where and how we are failing. Until we offer with clarity and conviction an authentic, present, vibrant, real faith we will continue to wonder at the busyness of the world around us and marvel that people don’t come and see. The challenge for us is not to figure out how to get others to come and see but to figure out how to go and show.

Robert