It’s true; my head was full of images, remorse and confusion about my work in the church these past three decades. Have I been the instrument of destruction instead of something more healing and holy?
Did you ever doubt yourself like that? I don’t mean in the moment but existentially? What a horrid sensation – I almost called it a “feeling” but it was more of a total body possession.
One of my recent critics (an academic) enjoyed ticking off a list of theologians, historians, and scholars I find helpful in my teaching and preaching – people like Elaine Pagels, John Dominic Crossan, Walter Brueggemann, Marcus Borg, Gustavo Gutierrez – and he tried to discredit their work by critiquing their personal faith. Since I have no idea what their personal faith actually was or is, any more than he truly did, his efforts to diminish me in this way had little impact. The recipe for faith he was using is a version of institutional orthodoxy, and he was essentially arguing that if someone does not believe what is contained in that particular jar of faith then they are not Christian. I have never believed in the contents of that jar of faith, not even in childhood as far as can remember.
But somehow this morning, and more likely in the dark night of my dreams, I was surrounded by the weeping and grieving of that orthodoxy. I felt the weight of sorrow the institutional church has hanging around its neck as it sinks into the sea of secular capitalist culture. Like your whole life passing before you in an instant, all my memories of church as it used to be and still tries to be in so many places, passed before me in the moment that I awoke. All the sadness and grief of that passing filled the moment as well. I suddenly felt culpable, as if I have been to blame.
I do not know what irritant worm of ego unleashed that instant of torment, but I do know the grief and sorrow are for real.
There was so much that was wonderful about the institutional church of my childhood and youth in the same way the social and economic cohesion of the 1950’s and 1960’s was wonderful for so many white middle-class people. It causes me to realize that nostalgia for the institutional church of yesterday is also akin to the bitter, rueful resentments of white people’s nostalgia for what we remember or imagine we have lost. Like white economic and social supremacy of the past, the supremacy of institutional orthodoxy may have been great for those inside but disempowering for those outside, and also discrediting to the value of what was offered inside.
The slow and painful passing of institutional orthodoxy and emergence of a widespread and chaotic heterodoxy within Christianity is grievous to anyone with fond memories of how church used to be when it was also a pillar of the economic and social establishment. It is an understandable grief and sorrow, even I feel it and I have been one of the iconoclasts surfing the waves of its destruction.
There is more here than grief. (This is a personal witness so if I can get an “Amen” from out there, it would help to know it is not just personal).
While my faith in the institutional church has shriveled even more than, and ahead of, the rest of the culture I have experienced a corresponding deepening of commitment to Christian spiritual practice and gospel wisdom. It is just the opposite of that academic’s insinuation: my faith in Jesus as my spiritual guide and teacher is more powerful and vibrant now that institutional religion has been brought down to its appropriate and much diminished dimensions.
White privilege, even for those white people that see the subversion of it as a good thing, will have some attendant grief about what gets lost. Power, privilege, and status obviously have advantages that will be missed. The same is true for the lost privilege of institutional religion and Christian orthodoxy; it had some really pleasant and much cherished elements that will be missed. Grieve on.
What you say resonates strongly here. I still “go to church” but it “isn’t what it used to be for me.” In fact, I find more of that feeling when I’m not in church. However, I think maybe because back then, there was a veil of innocence, (probably ignorance), that made things feel good, a feeling of security. That was before the time when things changed. I learned that my life could be changed in an instant, without warning. I learned that not everyone can be helped; that some will refuse to take the help they could use even though it’s right there. I learned so much more that tossed out my earlier assumption about life. Many things that changed the optimism that I had “back then.” Now the structures that I cherished no longer offer the security that I once felt. So what does offer security? Honestly, I don’t know. I am not sure there is security of the kind I dream of. Yet, I believe there’s a mystery of some kind of security lurking that is far stronger than anything I knew. Maybe I’m going to have to call it the Security of the Unknown. Can I accept that?
I know this familiar ground for you, and it sounds like you are still finding new places on it. I think you’re onto something about that mysterious security. I have caught glimpses of it within the terror of surrender.
I’m with you completely(!) on this, Cam. Richard Rohr talks about living on the “edge of the church;” that’s definitely where I am, ordination or no. I find myself angry, frustrated and depressed by the struggle of so many—even of my clergy friends—to return to the old orthodoxy; but I too have to acknowledge the grief.
Well brother, we know we’re not alone. Thanks!
In my lifelong search for a community and a religion I could belong in, or at least not fear, I stumbled upon an epiphany that has shaped my faith ever since: Jesus came for the specific purpose of destroying The Church. God saw that the religion that had built up around His simple commands had become a profit-driven enterprise, controlled by an exclusive elite and oppressive to those it was supposed to defend and uplift. Jesus came to reestablish the direct connection between God and man and eliminate the middlemen who had set themselves up as intermediary gods in His place. He regretted the loss of the edifice and the pageantry, as much as you do now, (Matt 23:37-39 and 24:1-2)but He knew it needed to be done.
And then His followers went and set up another Church in its place, which went on to become and even greater empire, a whole heirarchy of intermediary gods profiting by selling forgiveness and establishing their own rules of pious conduct and moral rectitude, often at variance with one another depending on which faction was dominant at any given time, but which oppressed the very people whom they were supposed to defend and uplift. So we now face the same dilemma all over again.
Religion and faith are not the same, and in fact are mutually exclusive. Religion is the rules of man, a device into which God and the various levels of rectitude and ethnicities and moralities and orientations of the people He creates daily can be pigeonholed, labeled, right-wrong, virtue-sin, worthy-unworthy. Faith is you + God, a personal relationship that has nothing to do with anybody else. There is no profit in it for anyone but the individual in that relationship. And that is why it must continually be repackaged and remarketed as Religion.
I think you critique is right on but applicable to all institutions – it’s more of a human problem than a religion problem. Where I disagree is with the idea that spirituality is individual because I understand it to be communal. Thanks for this thoughtful comment.
As an “on again/off again” seeker, rather than “possessor” of (much) Faith, I’m sincerely interested in what you (or anyone) have experienced of “the profit in it” that you mention.
Thanks in advance for any responses.
Hi. Not sure what you’re asking with reference to “the profit in it”? Let me know and I will be glad to respond – sorry for the delay of this response.
It isn’t missed, nor gone, Cam. Those of you that claim a church continue in a different club format. I have seen it and know it because I am not a member. It is obvious from the outside.
Interesting perspective, as always!