Whatever the church of the future is like, it will need to better understand the many people who are sitting on its margins, or just outside the camp or perhaps further away. Some of these people had years of activity in the church, but not now -- for whatever reason that changed. Others are absent because they think they can’t meet the church’s expectations, whether it’s in doctrine and belief, or in the manner of their lives, or because of something from their past.
A writer I admire is a woman named Doris Grumbach. One day she told her vicar, I have been afflicted with a kind of spiritual inanition... And her letter to him ends with these words: I find the business of the church keeps me from the real enterprise of prayer. While there is still time I must be about the journey I have started on.
What interests me is, first, that what she calls spiritual inanition is a very common thing indeed among mature Christian believers; inanition in the OED denotes “exhaustion resulting from lack of nourishment”; the spirituality term for it is acedia. In Doris Grumbach’s case it flowed from what she calls the business of the church. Acedia, inanition, usually leaves good and involved people feeling weary of it all and bewildered. Secondly, she now sees her way forward in the prayer of silence and stillness and in developing those contemplative disciplines.
More and more teachers of Christian spirituality seem to be saying, one way or another, that the church of the future will need to be contemplative. Its people will need to know how to be still. And that means doing it. It means finding out for ourselves what is personally possible each day for being still, being silent, paying attention to God who is always present. All of this is directly counter to our secular world of consumerism, activism and rampant egoism.
This is deeply inward Christian allegiance. It places at risk a lot that we may have assumed until now. It realigns our priorities. It deepens and clarifies our love for our friends and also our enemies. However, it’s not a very smart idea to start making resolutions about being more contemplative from now on... What we can do is simply to be still and silent now, with the utter simplicity -- what some call the poverty -- of the mantra, yet alive and alert, fully present in the present moment, not asking for anything, in the presence of God who knows us utterly and all our needs.
No comments:
Post a Comment