Friday Reflection: Mapping the Landscape of Change, Part III
In the words of Episcopal Bishop Barbara Harris, “Church is real when it gets down to the nitty-gritty nub of life where Jesus was in the lives of people.” The Covid-19 crisis challenges the church to become real.
—Kelly Brown Douglas, Dean of the Episcopal Divinity School, at Union Theological Seminary in We Shall be Changed, p.60
“We can begin to look ahead,” Father Howard said. “When we emerge from social distancing, how are we going to come back better? When we emerge from wrestling with policing, how can we be better as a country? Because we can’t be the same.”
—The Reverend Charles L.“Chaz” Howard, University of Pennsylvania, Chaplain and vice president of social equity and community quoted in the Philadelphia Inquirer, Nov. 28, 2020
I. I posted the second essay in my three-part series on the Episcopal Church and change on November 27 and I’m posting the third essay today, Friday December 18. My goal for this third essay is to get to the “nitty gritty” that Barbara Harris speaks about above, the nitty-gritty of the life of the Episcopal Church, and I had planned to do that with the help of the important book I wrote about in the second essay, We Shall be Changed; Questions for the Post-Pandemic Church. But all the reading and thinking I did in preparation for writing this essay kept bringing me back to the pandemic because in talking and writing about change in the Episcopal Church now, it seems everything begins and ends with the pandemic, though the Church’s problems were there all along.
II. Take, for example, the news today.
“The U.S. again stands virtually alone in the severity of its outbreak.”
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“For the second time this year, the United States has fallen behind nearly every country in combating the virus.”
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“The number of new cases [in the U.S.] has risen 51 percent over the past month.”
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“America’s outbreaks, reaching from California to Florida, are the result of the public and the country’s leaders never taking the virus seriously enough and to the extent they did, letting their guard down prematurely.”
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“It’s a situation that didn’t have to be.”
–From The New York Times, December 16, 2020
And then, the two astonishing numbers, as of December 18: More than 310,900 deaths and more than 17,200,000 cases have been reported. (Taken from the Washington Post, December 18, 2020).
III. Yes, we can acknowledge that at the core of the horror and tragedy of COVID-19 is all manner of governmental mismanagement, incompetence and informed and ill-informed indifference in the general population, all of which has resulted in thousands upon thousands of unnecessary deaths and untoward suffering and anguish of families. And then, we consider how many thousands and thousands of health care and hospital professionals have suffered the terrible psychological cost of caring for patients who cannot live because they cannot be saved. And then, think of the devastating economic hardships: people losing jobs, homes, and not having enough money even to eat. And then, even with the vaccines, we are told that things will get much worse long before they get better. We are numb and, in some ways battered and beaten down, sometimes only a few steps from despair as we go in and out of quarantine, fully realizing how many are sick and suffering and so many who are not being cared for are dying. And again and again, the refrain, “will this ever be over.”
IV. We need to discern the important lessons that have come out of COVID-19, especially those having to do with responsibility, opportunity, leadership, competence and commitment. And it should not be a surprise, then, that these —let’s call them—"points of light” for our journey into the post-pandemic world, are actually identified in some way or another in We Shall Be Changed: Questions for the Post-Pandemic Church. There are many other practical points that are to be found in the book. Among them are holding on to questions instead of answers; everything virtual; liturgy and worship; courage; hardening of the old categories and finding new categories; what is “normal;” complacency and indifference; being flexible; who/what are the “people;” money and finances; compassion and empathy; “shaking and pruning;” what is the church and what does membership in it mean? There are many lessons to be taught and learned through these “points of light” and the practical points that follow.
V. These “points of light” and the many practical points and observations make We Shall Be Changed a valuable resource for church leaders: Bishops, clergy, administrators of all kinds, parish leaders, governing boards, as well as the leaders of the national church. Its publication by Church Publishing, the publishing arm of the Episcopal Church, is commendable. We Shall be Changed raises very important questions, a few answers and many lessons, as well. For the most part, they are presented by church leaders of many different kinds who hold a variety of job responsibilities. However, the “voices from the faithful” are less present, as just a few members of the faithful appear in the text. We need to engage with individuals and parishes in transition. Let me enlarge this point with some comments about what we are doing at Saint Stephen’s.
VI. Our little band of pilgrims—we six who are working to shape a life for NOW at Saint Stephen’s and take us into the future—will begin our pilgrimage by reading We Shall be Changed together and discussing it in ZOOM sessions. We take the book seriously and know we can learn from it. But we also know that the voice of We Shall be Changed does not resonate with the full meaning and texture of the “nitty-gritty nub of life where Jesus was in the lives of people” Barbara Harris identified above. We HAVE learned a great deal in the last three years at Saint Stephen’s and we know what Barbara Harris is getting at, namely there are voices not heard and perspectives not considered.
VII. We see the church building as a sacred place, infused with a holy presence. We do not see Saint Stephen’s as just another church building that has had a mostly admirable and interesting past.
(Our engagement with our archives and the written word has revealed the details of the “admirable and interesting.”) The “present” of the church building, the sacred place, is something we are still creating and affirming because in that present are the foundations—I think here of Paul Tillich’s “Shaking the Foundations”—the building blocks of Saint Stephen’s future. The Furness Burial Cloister (from the present) is one of those building blocks because it connects past, present and future. What we believe is that the very idea of church is the idea of place, just as we believe that the church, as sacred place, is here to serve the people who come to it.
VIII. What we have recognized both pre-pandemic and now is the need for community. And what that means for us is that it is through spiritual formation and the cultivation of a spiritual life which we believe infuses the sacred place of Saint Stephen’s, that a community can be formed and shaped. For us, the spiritual can flourish in our sacred place if we have intimate daily worship, pastoral presence, care of the soul, all with the aim to be constantly in the presence of God and in the presence of God in one another. Rather than seeing a “congregation,” we need to try to see a changing community of faithful souls. Said another way, we want to be a holy teaching and caring community founded on the spirituality of its “members,” a community that welcomes both searchers and servants. For us, it is spiritual formation and the cultivation of a spiritual life that are the foundation for now, this time of the pandemic, and the foundation for living faithfully and knowingly in the time after the pandemic.
IX. In all of this, we are asking ourselves at Saint Stephen’s how we define and fulfill our ministry, how we serve the “real” community of God’s presence. What we have learned in the last few months, is that we can enlarge the community we serve by going outside and welcoming into our sacred place those people Jesus would welcome, namely the poor, the indigent, the unhealthy, the hungry and sometimes, the homeless. But like Jesus, we want to welcome ALL those who want to be nourished in some way. And what we now so clearly know is the services we can offer—worship, prayer, caring for the soul and pastoral care—can enhance and be enhanced by services we wish to embrace—a food, nutrition, and clothes program, a transitional medical program for physical and mental health, a place for social services and referrals and a place of shelter and solace. We have come to the realization that this full picture is, for us, the work of the church and its sacred mission. The sacred space that is our sanctuary becomes even more sacred through what we would do and whom we would serve.
X. This is precisely the “what” of the church that the authors of We Shall be Changed” have tried to articulate and affirm for the post-pandemic. Theirs is a message of “no going back,” as was the October presentation of the 2019 Parochial Reports and their data. There has been lots of talk about a “new normal” but We Shall be Changed strongly suggests that there will be no “new normal” because it could lead us to regress to the patterns of the “old normal.” And this is where we come face-to-face again with COVID-19, and what this virus will have taught us for years and years to come: To ignore, to do nothing, to stay the same, is to die.
XI. So perhaps we have come full circle back to the introductory paragraph from Samuel Wells (in the Christian Century) which began our first essay: I’ve sometimes described ministry as creating the right spaces and letting the Holy Spirit do the rest. With the help of the Holy Spirit AND the lessons of the pandemic, we know, whether we like it or not, that we cannot be the same. The psalmist (Psalm 84) says, “Blessed are those who have set their hearts on pilgrimage.” We have lots of work to do and we at Saint Stephen’s are ready to undertake the pilgrimage and do the work that comes with it.
—Father Peter Kountz
