I love the institutional church. There, I said it.
Fallible, faulty, confused, ineffective, bumbling and sometimes
harmful though it may be, I do love it.
When I was a teenager I hated it. With all the fury of adolescent intolerance
for hypocrisy I denounced the institution for failing to live up to my high
standards for integrity and authenticity.
My spiritual fortress of solitude became books, and especially the books
of Thoreau, Emerson, and Whitman. Here I
found kindred spirits, bold individualists, and sirens of romantic rebellion
for the suburban teen egoist.
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| Detail of a Stained Glass Window at St. Martin's photo by Lucy Baber Photography |
My turn to the Transcendentalist authors – rather than a
bold and mighty ‘yawp’ of self-invention – was a well-worn American path. I simply traded one tradition for another,
one story for another. The
Transcendentalist myth holds that it is possible to find an innocence
outside all culture and tradition, a new
Eden where we are free from all corrupting influences and free to be at unity
with our authentic selves. In this
telling – which is traceable up to and including Ayn Rand – we must tear down all
institutions to protect our sacred individuality.
Hogwash. Whenever I
convince myself that I am above or beyond tradition and culture, I am fooling
myself. In fact, the attempt to “stand
above” and “look down upon” is itself awash in a tradition of privilege.
For example, when I was a teenager I was a fan of the movie
Koyaanisqatsi, which is a visual tone
poem accompanied by the music of Phillip Glass.
Camera angles of humans tend to be from a high angle looking down on
masses of people as they commute to work.
Images of factory production intercut these images of commuting men and
women. The point is not subtle, and has
I have aged I find it arrogant and lacking compassion in the extreme. With no relationship to anyone in the camera
frame they are judged to be automatons and cogs, not people.
Who gains when we throw down the institution? The great baby boomer agitprop was all about
tearing down the institutions and living outside them, especially the God awful
“Institutional Church.”* Certainly, our
society and polity lose when we weaken mediating institutions like the
institutional church. Where is the
organized moral voice to stand up against injustice and oppression? Where is the organized body to respond to
crisis and calamity? Where will the
resources for charity, community-building, and the sacred arts come from? What body will encourage civility, stability, and love of neighbor while resisting consumerism, the hegemony of transactional
culture, and the rising theology of economics?
Most folks who want to tear down the houses of worship have
no replacement strategy. They are
“abstract complainers.” The pleasure
of abstract complaint is that nothing is required of the complainer. No effort, no work, no alternative plan, no
respect for complexity, and no risk!
Whatever vision underlies the complaint is often hopelessly ungrounded,
idealistic, and reactive. The amount of
reflection needed to get the complaint to the point of helpfulness is well
beyond the energy level of the complainer who really has just enough energy to
form an opinion.
Individuals also lose when we tear down the “Institutional
Church.” Relationship and community are
necessary ingredients for spiritual growth, discovery of identity, and discovery
of our soul. In community we learn that
we are a mixed bag of gifted and fallible and we are still loved all the same. Loving community holds up a mirror for us so
we can learn to see ourselves as we really are and grow in the good while
restraining the hurtful. Indeed, in
God’s economy, community is necessary for our growth in love. It is the rub and friction of real, fallible
people who choose to return again and again to relationship, with mutual delight
and forbearance, which grows us in our capacity to love and to know God.
Stability in community cuts across the grain of our
transient, individualistic, abstract, and consumerist society. I would argue
that faith communities are a crucial counter-culture that restrains our dominant
culture from indulging in its worst, most corrosive impulses without
limit. To serve this role we must be
organized and institutional. We must
have power, presence, and a stake in our communities. Whenever a hearty individualist renounces
community for the purity of their own thoughts, they are also leaving behind
all effectiveness for the ghetto of opinion and abstract complaint.
The institution is far from perfect and neither am I or my
family or my pets. Our glory is our
imperfect struggle together, our grace is healing the wounds and alienation
that are also our fault. We follow Jesus
who did not claim the high ground but entered our reality fully in the flesh,
finitude, and vulnerability of humanity. That
is where we live into grace.
*Spiritual but not religious is a species of this
destructive impulse. Lillian Daniel has
challenged SPNR in her wonderful book, When
Spiritual but Not Religious is Not Enough. I have many concerns about SPNR including
lack of accountability, its eerie similarity to consumerism, its self-indulgence
and its rampant colonialism and superficiality.
I was taught Buddhism by a Japanese Buddhist priest. One day someone asked him about, Zen
and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
“It is an interesting book but there is not much Zen in it,” he gently
replied. Zen does not mean ‘mellow.’ I
like to say.
