Wednesday, November 17, 2004

The Pause that refreshes

Honest disagreement shows that the people involved have truly listened to and heard one another, and so, come to a mutual realization that, on a certain matter, they will not be of one mind. If this happens often enough, though, the matters around which disagreement exists come to overwhelm commonality, and the final agreement is to part ways. So, perhaps better not to acknowledge our disagreement unless absolutely forced to do so? What to do?

At the risk of oversimplification, let me recall the process Jesus described for his first followers, those bound together by love of Christ. They were to begin with a private conversation between the party injured and the injuring party. If this failed to resolve the matter, there would follow another conversation that would include a fellow member or two of the family of faith, parties not disinterested, but also not as passionately invested in the disagreement as the original participants. If this also failed to achieve a resolution, the next move would bring the wider community of the Church into the matter, presumably to see if the moral weight of the Church could mediate a resolution. Failing this, the presumably righteous contender should, Jesus said, regard the offender as ‘a Gentile or tax-collector;’ i.e., as an undesirable; which is to say, someone outside the fellowship.For people who have gathered together in the Name, to turn from one another is also to turn from the Christ who was among them when they had gathered.


And so, it’s a painful thing to imagine splitting, a painful thing to experience. The pain that we began to realize a year ago over our disagreements around sex and love, and also the pain resurrected around women and ordination and revision of the Prayer Book, is so harsh that we seem to be working very hard to avoid it. Currently awaiting the ‘findings’ and recommendations of the Lambeth (Eames) Commission, we’re trying not to put too much hope in them, lest we be bitterly disappointed. All the while, we’re hoping for a miracle, that the Commission will somehow offer up something more than a temporary delay to the necessity of our dealing with our painful disagreements more substantively that we’ve done so far.

It appears the Church has yet to take authentically the first step in ‘the Jesus process of reconciliation.’ Instead, the injured party, or the injuring, depending on one’s perspective, decides to meet together in like-minded wounded-ness, contributing to the disagreement only more like-spirited wounding. However, the greatest observable response to our disagreements seems to be that our conversations are becoming increasingly limited to friends and allies, increasingly self-restricted to environments in which participants find comfort in the knowledge that all, or most, present already largely agree.

It seems to me that we’re almost daring God to fix everything for us while we ourselves refuse to endure the pain of coming together again, and again, and again, to reconcile with one another in authenticity. We seem willing to suffer only the illusion that reconciliation with God need not involve reconciliation with one another. We pretend together that our disagreement will not soon again raise its hydra head. We make believe that a recommendation from the Lambeth Commission will settle hostilities that it cannot possibly resolve. More locally, we pretend not to notice that Diocesan Council is just around the corner.

Sooner, not later, we’ll all awake from this recent pause. Hopefully we’ll be refreshed enough to listen, to break out of hiding, and to extend ourselves to our least like-minded spiritual kin. Hard? Yes, indeed; else everybody would be doing it! But when we think about it in light of our day-to-day busy-ness, urgencies, and emergencies, I think we begin to recall what a holy sacrifice it is to come together at all, much less to do so in Christ’s Name. The blessing of course, is that when we do come together with one another, we do discover our appreciation for one another, which God’s presence brings into our midst. The point is, we’ll realize this blessing sooner, once we’re able to admit that we’re precisely where God has called to be: struggling painfully, sacrificially, determinedly to draw toward one another again, yet nearer the beginning of this process than the end.

Jim +

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