“Compassion is the sometimes fatal capacity for feeling what it is like to live inside somebody else’s skin,” writes Frederick Buechner. “It’s the knowledge that there can never really be any peace and joy for me until there is peace and joy finally for you too.”
What if?
What if churches and Christian organizations had a vision to be “countercultural” in truly meaningful ways?
What if we woke up and realized that all our talk about “changing the culture” is empty because we are just as culture-bound as anyone?
What if we realized that ideas don’t matter as much as we think they do, and that practices mean a whole lot more?
What if we understood that the power of God’s Word doesn’t depend on us talking all the time, that expressing our opinions and judgments is not the same thing as letting God’s Word loose in the world?
What if we stood against the busyness, noisiness, activism, do-gooderism, media-saturated, virtual reality style of our contemporary world and instead offered churches as places of true sanctuary, true humanity, quiet, and peace?
What if our consistent invitation was: “Come to a quiet place and find rest”? What if we saw it as a primary contribution to our world to provide sacred times and spaces where weary, exhausted people could find true solace and retreat?
What if our church campuses were no longer dominated by functional buildings designed to be busy beehives of activity and pep rally enthusiasm? What if, instead, we cultivated gardens and glades, created walking paths and forest trails, developed lakeside amphitheaters for regular outdoor worship gatherings and church buildings that were essentially glass houses designed for contemplation of God’s works?
What if we, as congregations, refused to have any church programs other than providing opportunities for retreat and holding regular worship gatherings?
What if we sent people out at the end of worship with the simple admonition, “Go in peace. Be Christians!” and then just let everyone go live their lives?
What if pastors and “leaders” in the church saw their duty in terms of presiding over worship, and then spending the rest of the week out there in the midst of daily life with people, listening and encouraging, apprenticing them in the life of Christ, and caring for the poor and sick?
What if, as the monks understand, we taught each Christian that his/her whole duty was “Ora et Labora” — prayer and work — in the love of God, to bless the world?
What if we told believers that they shouldn’t wait for “the church” to develop “ministries” to help their neighbors, but that they are free to work with others in the community to formulate ideas, strategies, and programs for the common good?
What if we prioritized slowness, quietness, listening, contemplation, prayer, minding our own business yet being sensitive and available to those in need around us, a devotion to serious study and thoughtfulness, a charitable spirit, respect for all people and a willingness to engage all people in love and service?
What if?
Posted by Internet Monk 1-10-17
Our vocation is not a sphinx’s riddle, which we must solve in one guess or else perish. Some people find, in the end, that they have made many wrong guesses and that their paradoxical vocation is to go through life guessing wrong. It takes them a long time to find out that they are happier that way.
Thomas Merton
For some reason, most Christian theology seems to start with Genesis 3—which features Adam and Eve—what Augustine would centuries later call “original That is not what Franciscans and many other Christians believe. And this is notsomething the loving Abba Jesus would do. Because the belief in substitutionary atonement is so common and so problematic, we will explore its alternative—at-one-ment—in depth later this year. When you start with the negative or with a problem, it’s not surprising that you end with Armageddon and Apocalypse. When you start with a punitive, critical, exclusionary God, it’s not surprising that you see the crucifixion as “substitutionary atonement” where Jesus takes the punishment that this angry God intended for us.
Why did Jesus come? Jesus did not come to change the mind of God abouthumanity. It didn’t need changing. God has organically, inherently loved what God created from the moment God created it. Jesus came to change the mind of humanity about God.
As our image of God changes, our image of God’s creation, including ourselves, changes as well. Jesus shows us what it looks like for God to be incarnate in humanity. He holds together the human and the divine so that we might follow him and do the same.
I am currently reading a paper I “accidentally” came across. Written by Peter Block, it is entitled Civic Engagement and the Restoration of Community – Changing the Nature of the Conversation. It is a challenging read and contains some really powerful ideas about community, leadership and conversation, to name a few. Although civic engagement is not my immediate concern, I am finding his ideas are also relevant to spiritual community engagement. Though all the content is not likely directly transferable to a spiritual community context, there appears to be some important ideas that can be relevant.
For example, the citation below on Conversation and Transformation is personally painful. As I read it, I realized the conversations to be avoided or postponed, are conversations I mostly engage in when in a small group setting. Since transformation is high on my agenda, and my conversations aren’t contributing to transformation, my interest in the article has increased significantly. Hopefully, I will be able to gain some insights into the kind of conversations through which transformation occurs.
Certain conversations are satisfying and true yet have no power and no accountability. For example, the conversations we want to avoid or postpone are:
- Telling the history of how we got here
- Giving explanations and opinions
- Blaming and complaining
- Making reports and descriptions
- Carefully defining terms and conditions
- Retelling your story again and again
- Seeking quick action
- Talking about people not in the room
These conversations characterize most meetings, conferences, press releases, trainings, master plans, summits and the call for more studies and expertise. They are well intentioned and valid, but hold little power.
These help us get connected, they increase our understanding of who we are, and most of all they are our habit; they are so ingrained in the social convention of our culture that they cannot be easily dismissed or disrespected. They just do not, however, contribute to a transformation.
Transformation is a change in the nature of things, not simply an improvement. More clarity, more arguments, more waiting for others to change does not change anything. If transformation occurs primarily in language, then a different kind of conversation is the vehicle through which transformation occurs. And the transformational language that is restorative is the one where accountability and commitment become viral and endemic.