PROLOGUE TO STEPPING THROUGH THE DOOR

An Agenda for Anglicans

By Mark Harris

Anglicans have available an agenda growing from our common life, an agenda concerning our vocation in the Christian community. This agenda does not arise from party conflict. It is not about one or the other faction within our individual churches, nor about factions within the worldwide fellowship we call the Anglican Communion. It is an agenda that is near at hand, as near as our own awareness of the world around us. It requires only that most difficult vocational stance – an open heart.

This agenda concerns a renewed sense of Christian humility and compassion. It addresses several questions: Can we do other than what we have been taught by our cultures all over the globe? Can we practice a form of humility and compassion for the world and with one another in the face of the world’s practice of hate? Can we live in such confidence of God’s grace that the trauma we experience as our cultures undergo massive change does not lead us to participate in the hate crimes that have made this Century so notable? Can we practice a trust in God’s grace that will take us beyond the limits of socially expressed religious doctrines?

This agenda concerns a vocation to mutuality and compassion. The warnings about "cheap grace" apply to mutuality and compassion as well. There is no easy fix here. Indeed my sense is that Anglicans who accept this vocation will take on an agenda that will put our most cherished doctrinal understandings and moral codes in jeopardy. Mutuality and compassion are fully exhibited personally only when there is a letting go of ego, of our selves, including our identification with particular social constructs of the faith, including church itself. It involves self-emptying, an stance often ascribed to Jesus.

I believe we as Anglicans can have such a vocation, if we take on an agenda whose goals are mutuality and compassion. But in order to respond to such a possibility we must be willing to be transformed. The beginning of this transformation requires that we know our present location, our current sense of self and society. Because ours is a collective vocation, it might be helpful to paint a broad-brush picture of our current situation as people in Christian fellowship, within wider social contexts of modernity.

A somewhat depressing assessment of this Century.

When all is said and done, this century will be known primarily for its hate crimes. What else are we to call the production of immense killing machines and their used by every sort of social system? Or the racial, ethnic and religious ‘cleansing’ practiced in every part of the world? Or our apparent indifference to the obscene concentration of wealth and resources in the hands of a very few, at the expense of great poverty for the huge majority of the world’s people?

This century will be known also as the time when we began to experience the end of modernity, of the confident assumptions placed before us about the relationship between rationality, and in particular scientific knowledge, and meaning. The loss of confidence in the assumptions of modernity have implications for every one regardless of our understanding (or caring about) the concepts. At the core, modernity promised what it could not deliver, a coherent and comprehensive rational system, in which all of nature and human interaction could be understood and the full and good life available to all. Modernity has been a worldwide phenomenon, presented under the guise of ‘progress.’

While we are mostly unaware of the specifics of the causes for our unease about modernity, we are aware of at lest one of its effects. We are beginning to live in a world where complexity and indeed chaos are expected. The physical and human sciences both are caught in this web of complexity, as are all social constructs and religion. The comparatively simple constructions of past scientific, social and religious doctrines are giving way to something more organic and multidimensional. For all of us who lived securely in modernity’s constructs, we are experiencing the trauma of disorientation and loss. It is as if we are losing our bearings. This trauma has led some to a regressive formula for action: Our old assumptions might work if we stepped back from our modern into a classical world with the comfort and predictability of its formulas. It has led others into a "bundling" formula, classically fascist, in which the promise is made that if we all in the lock step of social discipline would set our minds and hearts to the task of making a more perfect world, modernity would work. Modernity has offered us regressive or fascist flowers in its waning days, and too many of us have picked them.

There is good reason to think that these two characteristics of the twentieth century - hate crimes so large that they are called "against humanity" and the trauma that accompanies the end of modernity – are linked. The trauma that accompanies major cultural and worldview shifts grows from an uneasiness, a sense of uncertainty and disorientation.

Individuals and larger social organisms have coping mechanisms so that response to such a sense of unease is not overwhelming. Whole societies, however, can easily be turned by those who have a particular political, social or religious agenda to assign this unease to a particular cause. Societal reaction is often to focus our general dis-ease and identify an enemy, a scapegoat, a concrete body of people. This last century has not been different from past centuries in producing those who would assign blame for our dis-ease. It has unfortunately provided increasingly violent means of response. Having been ‘assisted’ in such a focus, we fight the enemy, run from them or freeze. In the study of traumatic stress, these are typical reactions: fight, flight or freeze.

It is hard to not to feel confused in our response to the end of the age that gave us a sense of rational certainty, whose promise was, if not a perfect world, at least a measurably better one. It is hard to deal with the end of conquest religion as faith, for such religions gave us the sense that we belonged to the Truth, and that ours was the true faith beyond which there was no salvation. Yet the emerging sensibility of the post modern world is that scientific inquiry provides only proximate answers and that conquest oriented religions possess only partial truth and certainly not the sought for universal truth. The difficulty in dealing with the collapse of these false hopes provides the breeding ground for large-scale traumatic response.

Here on the edge of these huge swirling waters of world change we Anglicans find ourselves at odds with one another over what seem to be ‘in-house’ matters. They do not seem on the surface to involve or condone violence or reflect trauma. Yet, when we are at odds, these matters have resulted in actions that have taken on both violent and traumatic characteristics. I would submit that how we deal with our own conflicts can be a sign of the extent to which we have indeed overcome, or adapted, the world’s addiction to trauma induced violence.

We may not know what we can do about the great concerns of building a more just and compassionate world except to pray, give and ‘recommend.’ But within the parameters of our common life as Anglicans, we can do something more than play out the traumatic responses of hate so much a part of global life. That is my hope.

Bishop Spong has linked the need for a new Reformation in our theological language with the need for a new Reformation of our ethical grounding, the source for our moral sensibilities. He is correct in this conclusion, whatever we may think of his tactics and even his manners.

He knows, as we do, that the social expression of religious doctrine (teachings) has often served the hatreds rampant in this Century. Doctrines themselves can, and often are, used as regressive and repressive means of ending the trauma of these times by invoking a surer time or stricter purity code. Countering the regressive use of these doctrines requires that we question their veracity as individually conclusive or collectively comprehensive. But more, this effort requires that we look again at how these doctrines are used socially and contextually, for it is there that a regression from modernity is linked to the hate reaction to this time of world wide uncertainty. It is there that Anglican churches have so often failed the hopes and needs of their own members when those members have been shunned or excluded by doctrines that have become unbending and theologically regressive.

We in the Church have sometimes served these regressions and hatreds. We have done so mostly by recommending quiet piety or by supporting doctrines grounded in idolatries, including the idolatry of the sacred text.

Concerning the idolatry of sacred texts. So long as the New Testament is understood to mean that all except those who follow Christ are damned and do not participate in the new creation, there is ample excuse for any and all violence done by Christians in the name of Christ. Ask any Jew or Muslim, and for that matter outcast Protestant, Catholic, suspiciously powerful woman or homosexual. Since modernity is a worldwide phenomenon, the idolatry of sacred texts exists elsewhere too. In a time of insecurity, the ‘fight’ response to the trauma supports all sorts of religious idolatry.

Those who claim absolute exclusive access to the truth by way of sacred texts often claim its parallel, an absolute right to rule. With that dual exclusivity, the ground for spiritual, social and physical violence is well prepared. Those who have been sparked by the anxiety of uncertainty and trauma are prime candidates for binding together selective doctrines and choice readings to justify of control, scapegoating and violence. They can do so because they both believe they possess the Truth, and the Truth gives them peculiar rights and duties. And if these persons claim to be authorized by the certainty of textual (biblical) teaching, there are people desperately seek some clarity of belief who will be quick to follow. Others will work to avoid conflict with them, or freeze in helplessness.

Everywhere people are traumatized by the uncertainty of these times, and no one wants to be thought an accessory to chaos. Those who produce an agenda of Christian stability lay claim on the moral high ground, and bind themselves to the biblical texts in idolatrous ways. Those who do not follow are shamed to silence as supporters of chaos and evil. But their idolatry is no less than that of those who idolize them, or of those who make other graven images.

Concerning quiet piety and escape into the texts: Others traumatized by the horrors of this century or the uncertainties of these times, and who are not idolatrous in their use of texts as weapons for battle, have escaped into quite piety and use texts as a means of avoidance or flight. These are the persons who choose to look the other way, who attempt to avoid the hatred of the age by claiming that they attend to higher spiritual concerns. These persons may quietly cringe when blacks are lynched or dragged behind cars. When Jews are dragged from the streets, they do not see. When fellow Rwandans are taken away, they hide. When Palestinians have their homes razed they say nothing, but continue to make pilgrimage to the Holy Sites. When Homosexuals are beaten or burned, they don’t want to hear about Queer bashing and Faggots for the fire. And as a last refuge they say that it doesn’t happen any more, or it doesn’t happen in their community. They don’t see, or hear or attend because they have averted their eyes and closed their ears. Denial changes what we see and know. Selected texts of noble thoughts become a hiding place.

Concerning being numbed: There are those who, in the face of trauma, simply freeze in place. Regrettably, this reminds us of a damning statement about Episcopalians, that we are "God’s frozen people." Because they do not allow themselves the distress of seeking and understanding, they do not have to respond. This is the response of those who carefully walk through and around the carnage of the hateful.

The idolatrous use of sacred texts for fight or flight, and the helplessness of freezing make us particularly susceptible prey to those who would tempt us with the vision of an ancient stable faith, made new and universal. The tendency to freezing has stilled much of the indignation these idolatries ought to have produced. It was so in the past. There is no reason to think it will be otherwise in the present or future.

The hatreds that grew out of idolatry to text, for fight or flight, or our frozenness is such that we must seriously consider the charge about the enormity of the Christian contribution to this Century’s hate crimes. That contribution grows first from a great arrogance. Our arrogance is our belief that with the help of the Biblical word we are a righteous people, equipped to judge, able to find peace in a monstrously broken world, or able to rise above it all. Anglicans have been no slouches in this arrogance, although at the end of the century there are outcroppings of hopeful signs that we are resisting the recourse to the religious arrogance of the past. However, we must be careful that our resistance does not assume its own righteous rigidity. We must understand why it is so compelling to claim a special grasp of the Truth in the face of great uncertainties, and to avert our eyes from seeing the suffering to which our collective fear and arrogance contributes.

If Anglicans are to help lead the way into a postmodern world for faithful people, we must become a community of resistance against the arrogance of regressive and fascist tendencies implicit in the end of modernity. This will not be easy. These are uncertain times, and we long for some sort of certainty. Religions exist in part precisely because life can be brutal mean and short. The violence of this time is not the direct product of religion. Rather it is the product of the arrogance of those who use religion as a means of both providing a quick fix and affirming that there is ONE truth, for which both true religion and correct political virtue are critical.

Put positively, we must witness to the Bible as an incarnation of the Word of God rather than simply "the Word of God." The idolatry of biblical texts would propose that the Bible is the Word of God. But we know that can not be the whole truth. Jesus said, "I am the Word." The Word is known as it is incarnated, and not only as words either on a page or in the memory. Incarnation is as the Spirit dictates, not as we understand or interpret. We know Jesus as the Word, and the Bible as the Word. We can read God in the stars and the workings of our hearts, and in the mulch of our gardens. If this is true, we can move from the idolatry of the text to a worship of the Holy One present in the Biblical text, in other texts, and also read the Word as well in the map of creation.

Put positively, we must witness to Compassion as an incarnation of God’s reign, rather than some Kingdom, as if order were the issue. Much of what nations and churches do is look away: from the carnage and from the trauma both. But compassion begins by being true witnesses, by looking and seeing what is really present, making it our own and responding from the depths of our hearts, our spiritual selves. Compassion then is in some wonderful way the incarnation of God’s reign. Compassion sees violence as it really is, and moves to overcome violence with love. Compassion breaks the cycle of violence, and becomes a window into a new creation.

In a time of worldwide shift away from modernity to we-know-not-what compassion needs to be our constant incarnational companion, teaching us to open our eyes and warm our hearts. The Bible must become an incarnation of God’s Word, teaching us how to find and be found by the Holy One in the context of our complex world.

An agenda for Anglicans might then include this:

Anglicans ought to practice a mutuality that does no violence, and that is not arrogant. We must practice incarnational awareness, seeing in others and in all creation the presence of God. What would this mean in the violent, mutually exclusive controversies of our fellowship concerning inclusion of gay and lesbian persons, of women, and cultures not our own?

Anglicans ought to practice compassion that does not avert the eyes, but sees the suffering, and in that responds with the heart of Love. We must practice compassionate presence. How would this influence our care and respect for one another in the fields of the dead plowed by the world’s hatreds?

To these I would add yet another bit of agenda. Unlike the first two, whose need is self evident in a heartless time, this one is the agenda of our dreams. Lest it seem an odd agenda item, think on how the practice of mutuality and compassion is to be reflected in our liturgies, our thanksgivings, our little rituals of life. Where will the words and songs and thoughts and even silence come from? I believe the answer is found in the cultivation of poetic sensibility.

Anglicans might serve the faith well if it were to become a community of poetic sensibility. By this I envision Anglicans as having a Christian vocation to understand the Word, Biblical and otherwise, and compassionate action from a poetic standpoint, expressing their meaning in ways that open for our imagination the new world for which they are the signs. The poetic sensibility will be vital if we are to carry the Good News in Jesus Christ into the postmodern world.

It is a primarily poetic task to point the way to new languages, new words, new idiomatic phrasing, for faith. Those who take on that task are involved in a vocation to provide us a way out of the inherently violent, exclusive, text bound and pious, theological languages we have produced. We can see it in the cross cultural efforts to say something more about faith than what was brought by the first bearers of the Gospel to our lands. I believe this vocation can find a home in the Anglican fellowship and can prosper there, to the benefit of the whole Christian community.

There is, of course, a problem with poetic sensibility. Its practitioners are those we call poets, singers, prophets and visionaries. When worldviews are stable and seemingly comprehensive, these people are interesting or merely troublesome. When our sense of things is changing their visions can be unsettling and they be dangerous. They pry open the door so that we might look beyond the limits of the normal. This normality is always culturally, intellectually and religiously bound by the instruments of successful states who embrace an established worldview. Poets, prophets, singers and visionaries are therefore always suspected of being abnormal, irrelevant or immoral. At times of serious disjunction in societies they are often considered revolutionary or as anarchists. From the standpoint of the status quo, this may be a correct assessment. But it is always the society that is falling that thinks this; it is the court of the condemned that most strongly condemns.

Anglicans, gathered in fellowship, locally, nationally and worldwide have a vocation to include precisely such people and such voices. We too will be tempted to find them troublesome. But let the reader understand: We must resist. We must find new ways to label the dysfunction of these traumatic times and find ways to move into new incarnational possibilities. We must become a community of resistance against the arrogance of our own sense of the truth, particularly as that arrogance plays itself out in our own household. If we draw this poetic vocation into ourselves, with a mutuality and compassion that is self-emptying, we will discover that these poets and artists will be important resources as were the prophets, the wise and the visionaries of old.

It is a great hope: that Anglicans might become a Christian fellowship of mutuality, compassion and poetic sensibility. Such a vocation stands, in God’s grace, as a support in moving beyond the disorientation and confusion of this time, and against the terrors of this age. It sets the agenda for an exploration that will exhaust our old selves and make us new.

• Louie Crew's Anglican pages: http://newark.rutgers.edu/~lcrew/rel.html
• Louie Crew's home page: http://newark.rutgers.edu/~lcrew
• Send mail to: lcrew@newark.rutgers.edu

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