An Unforgiving Culture

The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel

We are living in an unforgiving era of knee-jerk judgment. Conclusions are reached instantly and opinions transmitted without delay in response to a picture, a video, a brief news report, or a rumor. Social media seems to amplify our conflict, tempt us to simplistic judgements, and provides a constant platform for moral posturing and partisanship. What we need is relational healing and mutual problem solving, yet both are not well suited to our new normal of relating.

The printing press was a crucial ingredient in the Protestant Reformation. This technological revolution allowed for unprecedented literacy, independence from traditional authorities like clergy, and the broadcast of theological debates and partisanship across all of Europe. We embrace the freedom of thought encouraged by this technological advance, even while we cringe at some of the side effects. Reformation debate led to religious warfare, toxic skepticism, and a paralyzing inability to acknowledge and stabilize sources of authority.  

Two people reading and typing on smartphones. Image:Pixabay

Technology is once again outracing and distorting our moral commitments. We need to slow down, take a breath, sort through the sources, and insist on credible media. Much like the slow food movement that invited people to decelerate and enjoy a meal and conversation with friends and family, I think we need a slow conversation movement where we take the time needed for the nuance required by the subjects that challenge us.

Stuck on a long car ride the other day, I had such a conversation with a friend about abortion. This is a very difficult and charged topic but we explored it fully with curiosity, patience, and generosity. We agreed that the subject required a nuanced and careful approach. We agreed that real solutions were inhibited by the nature of the debate. I am grateful for this oddball conversation because I needed to ask some questions to clarify my thoughts, and I cannot do that if I am scared of the response.  

Partisanship distorts moral discourse, reducing any concern into a blunt instrument designed to win. It is no wonder that we cannot claw our way back to compromise and mutual problem-solving when we start at the conclusion.  

Spiritually, our culture is deeply concerning to me. If we cannot receive each other and forgive each other or even sacrifice for each other, then community will dissolve and we will be even more alone. Millennials talk about the social media practice of “cancelling” each other. This means blocking or unfriending someone who falls short of your sense of moral decency. Jesus taught us to forgive 7 x 70 times. For the disciple of Jesus there is a tension here. How do we love the neighbor with whom we disagree profoundly? How do we allow someone to regain our trust after they have made us feel unsafe? A forgiving culture risks turning toward each other with the hope that relationship can be restored.

Blessings,

The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel

Rector

Rethinking Communion

For as long as I have seriously thought about Holy Communion, I have thought about it as a mostly personal portion of the service. The time leading up to Communion is probably the point in church when my focus is most drawn within myself. I spend that time reevaluating my relationship with God, recognizing how more often than not I have fallen short in many ways, and remembering that through Christ and his loving sacrifice on the cross I am offered forgiveness, hope, and a way to do better. Then, as I partake of Communion, I marvel at so much love, grace, and mercy being offered by someone so holy to someone as unholy as me.

That was the sum of my thoughts during Communion until two weeks ago. Two weeks ago, I went away to the Franciscan Spiritual Center for three days to dialogue with a small group of Christians from various theological and geographical places about sexual diversity in the church. After hours of sharing stories, thoughts, laughter, and tears with each other, we ended our last session with Communion.

As our facilitator held the bread and the cup to pass around our seated circle, she explained that before we passed the elements to the next person we were to say a blessing we wished for them to receive when they returned to everyday life. That one unfamiliar act she asked of us—to bless each other as we passed the body and blood of Christ—opened my eyes to a side of Communion I had never seen. Suddenly, Communion wasn’t simply about my relationship with God, it was also about my relationships within the body of Christ. Communion wasn’t simply a moment to consider how I could better reflect Christ, it was also a moment to consider how I had seen Christ reflected in the people around me.

As each person provided an intimate, unique blessing over their neighbor, I felt a sense of deep connection like I had never experienced during Communion. Here were thirteen people from different theological stances and approaches putting those differences temporarily aside in order to love each other, to love God together, and to jointly reconnect to that ultimate love evidenced by Christ on the cross. Here were thirteen people recognizing God at work in the people around them and praying that God would continue to pour into them and fill their needs. Here were thirteen people truly reflecting the body of Christ.

For the first time in my life, taking Communion was both deeply personal and deeply communal, and the more I think about it, the more I feel that is how Communion was meant to be. Personal, communal, and utterly sacred.

- Angelique Gravely

Don’t Take, Don’t Eat: A Case for Adoration

For our 20^th Anniversary my wife and I went to New York City and indulged in a few of our favorite things. We ate good food, spent an evening at the Metropolitan Opera, and immersed ourselves in art museums. My wife and I have the same approach to art museums. Our pace is lugubrious; we spend up to 10 or 15 minutes with a single painting, relating to it from different distances and angles. Our attitude is reverent and our experience is a quiet form of ecstasy, a communion with God mediated by beauty. Just try to pry me away from a Rothko.

What was new for us on this pilgrimage to MOMA was the inability of our peers to also be present in the moment with the art. We were shocked by the number of people recording the art with cameras and phones. There in front of Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” patron after patron stopped only long enough to take a ‘selfie’* with the masterpiece. Others stalked the gallery and only observed the painting through their view finders. 

The new cultural practice on display seemed profoundly sad to me. Why record your presence with this great artistry if you were never present to it in the first place? The cultural practices of consumerism and individualism had decidedly invaded the place. The point of viewing art had been transformed from a perspective of revelation from beyond ourselves that draws us into a new space of thought, feeling, and spirit to a perspective of documenting the fact that “I was present here,” and “I saw this” and “I have this to take home.”

The goal was to take and to have. The significance came from showing I was present to an absent audience. 

Maybe I am a premature curmudgeon, but I found this behavior appalling and deeply concerning. When a man took video of Monet’s “Water Lilies” by panning across the room-sized panels, I said to myself, “Do you know what you are missing?” Others in the room were slowed down and almost forced to sit in awe of Monet’s rendering of time and eternity, heavens and earth comingled on the radiant surface of his pond at Giverney.  

The room with the “Water Lilies” was a thin place of transcendent possibility. There is no taking or having or inserting self, there is no capturing, not even in words or music. There is experiencing, being present, being captured by the art and taken away by it, beyond ourselves.

This is adoration. Adoration is a form of prayer where we are pulled from our pre-occupation with self and occupied with love and awe for what gestures toward God. In the Church of the Middle Ages the consecrated bread and wine of communion were often reserved for adoration and most regular folk only adored the host and did not consume it all. Being in relationship with the gift Christ gave – the gift of his life – was enough inspiration and nurture for the adoring soul.

Now, this path of adoration was fairly alien to me until I had my experience at MOMA, where taking and consuming had become the dominant patterns of relating. It made me think; what if adoration is good medicine for our consumption-sick souls and society? We certainly need alternative ways of behaving that are not so fiercely desirous of satisfaction by possession and which almost always cause us to feel emptier in the end.

There is that brief moment where taking and having give us a great rush of pleasure. Our will to power is effective and builds up our ego. Almost always the feeling wears off as one more form of false transcendence. Indeed, the possessing often becomes a burden or only is reactivated as a pleasure when another person notices what we own and gives us a flash of pride.

Don’t take, don’t eat. Jesus says the opposite when he offers himself to us in the meal that remembers his sacrifice for us. He says, “Take, Eat, this is given for you.” We are blessed to take and eat every Sunday and to be fed by Christ, reminded that our life is a gift given and not our possession. However, just as I am suspicious of middle class/bourgeois folks claiming, “God is with me” in an easy way, I am suspicious of folks addicted to consumption adding Christ to the list of things we consume. What if the path and prayer of adoration – not taking, not eating – could be a corrective spiritual path for what ails us?

- The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel

*A ‘selfie’ is when you extend your camera out from your body and take a picture of yourself with another person, alone, or in a special place.