Reflections of an unabashed political and social progressive, Gen-X poet, and Episcopal Religious…

It is important for us to realize in community that we are not held together by the truths and certainties that we possess, but rather we are bound by what we lack in ourselves and in our finite natures. We are bound together by our common struggle to find meaning and to seek Christ, not because we have found either of them. This is an essential realization if we are to develop an understanding of humility in our lives. We must never claim to have the truth. The nature of religious persecutions, division and disenfranchisement for thousands of years have been the result of one truth claim pitted against another, the followers of each inflicting pain and humiliation, even death, upon one another.

If we make truth claims about our way of life, if we have the truth, we imply that others must not have it. Therefore, we must, with the conviction of duty to that Truth, seek to impose it upon others. Nothing would be more devastating to our way of life. Instead, we make no truth claims about our way of life, but we bear witness to Obedience as a particular means of seeking the Truth.

It is in community that we find ourselves willing to accept and act upon the grace that God provides. We have the visible example, not of those who make truth claims, but of those who have embraced Obedience to the Gospel way as a journey to be taken, with full knowledge that to travel that journey alone is impossible. We have chosen to make our lives an example of service by means of the Rule and of vows. We lead different lives as religious, pointing to a new way of life, making ourselves an acceptable offering before God, a living sacrifice.

One important witness that we provide by living in the world as vowed religious is the witness to Obedience as a way of life. Let’s ask ourselves how comfortable most people we encounter in the church would be with the idea of being obedient to a community (whether the brotherhood, the church), or a Rule of life. Most people would cringe. We live in a world that has come to over-value personal autonomy. To tell an individual in our society that they need to be answerable to anybody but themselves may be perceived as a social crime. As one of our community has noted: “The world will not stop talking long enough to hear the gracious possibility offered to it: the world will not open its ears or turn its eyes to hear or regard anything but its own interests and preoccupations. The world needs a wake up call. If we in the church are faithful in proclaiming the story in word and action, the world may stop its chatter for a moment and overhear; that’s how it worked on Pentecost, and it can again.” We Christians live inside a wonderfully time tested optimism. Obedience promises us a way of hearing and responding to the Gospel call.

We have decided to practice a contextual means of seeking the Gospel way of life and allowing it to unfold in our lives — and we must never assume that we have been ultimately successful. Look at your life, your journey until now, and you will notice how much more you share with a person when standing with them at the beginning of that journey than with those with whom you may stand at the conclusion of it. Our life experiences point strongly to the bonds we have formed with those who acknowledge their own sense of wonder, awe, even inadequacy in the face of those challenges that we ourselves face. We are bound to those with whom we share the same fears, the same anticipations and the same struggles. Yet, even when we look back at all of the shared joys and common struggles, we may find ourselves alone at the journey’s end wondering what will become of us. What truly holds our communal bonds in place is the future, as yet unfulfilled, for which the past and the present but lay the groundwork and prepare us.

Let us look for a moment at the socio-political phenomenon of “political correctness.” The terms and language of this movement often over- emphasize not what brings a person into community, but rather what sets them apart. Our culture has yet to learn the difference between being divisive or being diverse. We name ourselves by our oppressors or those things that victimize us, even if, in some instances, they are our own inherent disorders. Every person claims to name and live by their own personal truths, implying that theirs is the only truth sufficient for themselves and their identification with the world, hence their journey seems to have ended.

What happened to the search for an objective truth? What about the journey to God’s truth? Where is the bond that links a community if one’s personal truth serves only to isolate one from the communal journey? The witness of our lives depends upon our ability to facilitate community by sharing our full humanity with others and allowing them to discover their place within the community. Obedience is one of the ways that we accomplish this. We show forth the fact that there are things in this world that are more important than our sense of independence. That, indeed, if we are to survive, we must find ourselves answerable to something beyond our limited scope of vision and our own desires.

Obedience is an uncommon departure from the cultural norms of today. It is the statement that the community, not autonomy, is the greater value. It does not mean adapting the community to suit one’s individual needs and desires, but rather adapting our needs and desires to fulfill the necessities of the community. Obedience summons the individual to accommodate the community’s need as the priority, while affirming the community’s responsibility to nurture the individual in a common witness.

A danger in the church today is that it finds itself seeking to compromise its traditions, doctrines and disciplines in an attempt to be acceptable to all people. We change language and liturgy to be inclusive, which in and of itself is not at all bad, but it has at times been taken to such extremes as to find itself unable to express what it holds to be true. We have people in the church who deny the Resurrection, the Incarnation and decry doctrine as inferior to dialogue, thus reducing the faith to an intellectual enterprise or a set of rational, positive self-affirmations all to make the church more acceptable to all people at all times. Has it never occurred to her that we are a vehicle for changing the lives of people who suffer and are in pain, not the other way around?

In such Christianity, there are no consequences because salvation has become meaningless. No one need fear the power of sin, because sin either does not apply (as in the case of those who have been wounded by misuse of the term), or is just an innocuous “turning away from God” rather than a deliberate, albeit misguided, choice to take wrong and hurtful action against God, others and ourselves and then justify the behavior. The church has allowed people to perceive themselves as exempt from responsibility for sin because they have been oppressed or victimized by the church or society. It has accommodated people’s sense of disenfranchisement by relieving them of the need to accept personal responsibility to overcome resentment and oppression. These secular, cultural forces present the danger of having reduced the Christian faith to irrelevant dictums to make people comfortable with the faith journey. The Christian faith was never meant to be comfortable. It was meant to be dangerous.

The Christian journey calls us away from all of our perceived needs for security and places us into a Gospel way of life directly opposed to the way of the world. As a brother, I rejoice at the fact that I have been able to witness to God’s love for me to others. Life in the brotherhood is a serious and dangerous business. One may be called where one does not want to go. The unknown is often risky. However, it also calls me to live in freedom and to be a good steward of God’s gifts.

To obey means to accept, in prophetic witness, the decisions of the church and the brotherhood even if they impact us directly in ways we do not like. There are few, if any, circumstances where disobedience is appropriate. Likewise, to obey the Gospel calls us to a way of life with which our inner most being is at odds. It asks us to embrace our talents and our gifts, ourselves as part of God’s good creations. But it also demands of us astute observations of our own limitations and shortcomings and a desire to live within the rules of community in spite of those limitations. When we speak about “naming our own truth” we must acknowledge that we are precious in the sight of God, but we should also be willing to direct our objectivity to our own fallenness, our difficulty in achieving successful spiritual development without the grace of God. Our “truth” is nothing more than our own utter dependence upon God. It should have little or nothing to do with our independent successes or individual value assumptions. Our desire needs to be conformity to the will of God as manifest in the directives of the Gospel and as revealed by the Spirit.

We vow Obedience to Jesus Christ, to the Episcopal Church and to the brotherhood. The prophetic witness of Obedience in the world is not an unquestioning, self-abasing obedience to the authority of the church, nor is it a narrow sighted conformity to the minutia of theological detail. Obedience is not intended to diminish our capacity for reasonable engagement of questions of conscience or belief. It is instead a witness to role of the community in the ongoing search for and appropriation of the Gospel way of life and its center in God. It is the deliberate dismantling of self-will and conformity to the will of God. In these contextual circumstances it is to be lived in participation with, in and by community and, in the case of religious life, is structured by a Rule. Our participation in the way of Obedience is necessarily journey centered and not destination oriented. Our goal is outside of the realm of the empirically verifiable truth claim and rests in eternity which we may never know substantively in this lifetime.

Poverty, Chastity and Obedience are our way of seeking God, centered not around autonomy but around participation in and with community. We must never be satisfied that living the vows is the success of our journey — but rather that they are pointers to an objective truth that lies beyond them. They are markers on the journey to God, and we must bear witness in our lives that to seek God and God’s Truth are not only necessary, but that these goals alone are worthy of pursuit.

When we “liturgize” our lives, we come to acknowledge the presence in our lives not of Truth, but a desire to seek the Truth, in a manner opposed to the world which has been very successful at finding only truths that are insufficient to fulfill us. We consecrate our lives and our actions to the pursuit of Truth, taking every opportunity to state by holy living that we cannot succeed apart from God’s guidance. This is our witness as religious.