Podcast Series: A Church Come of Age with Sarah Bachelard

It’s a school of the Lord’s service to borrow ST Benedict’s phrase at one level. Of course, this is what all churches seek or say they seek to be about. But many of us I’m sure have experienced a kind of missing link. Someone I spoke to recently said Christianity promises so much and is so attractive. All that lovely talk of forgiveness, reconciliation, peace, love. But she said, it doesn’t show you how to get there with the result that many christians spend their lives trying hard to be good, policing their thoughts, feeling guilty or inadequate and ultimately often resentful or resigned. The missing link, of course, is the kind of disciplined practice that stills are busy minds, draws us deep into silence and awakens our capacity for God such that we’re able to receive all the fullness, all the love that is being poured out to transform us meditation, the prayer of attention, the prayer of the heart is the center of this disciplined practice and to the extent that is at the center of a church’s life.

It begins to transform and deepen other practices such that they too become increasingly means of beholding and receiving the divine life. The whole liturgy, for example, tends to become more transparent to divine action. It becomes itself contemplative, not just in the sense that there are more pauses and fewer words, but in the sense that it it more fully communicates and enables responsiveness to that prior reality. We’re not making it up or making something happen, but becoming more aware of what is already happening God with us. 

God among us to reconcile and free. Maggie Ross writes beautifully of how good liturgy provides a context in which are subtle senses dulled by daily toil can reawaken, and the right words in the right place at the right time can be crucial here. Good liturgy reminds us that life is a gift and that we belong to the whole.

It allows us to be present. To honestly to name the difficult circumstances of our lives and the truth of ourselves and then bring them into a self forgetful offering that is somehow she says mysteriously returned, made whole in the divine life. When it does its work, the liturgy returns us to our ordinary tasks. And while our lives may not seem altered from day to day over time, we become obliquely aware that something has shifted slightly, that something has been justified in the sense that all are fragments have become slightly better aligned, integrated, infused with the ineffable welcome, we call grace. What’s essential. Of course, if liturgies to perform this kind of function, if it’s to open our lives to this possibility of integrating and ineffable welcome is that it be sourced in and tend to silence, and those who lead liturgy need themselves to be comfortable with silence, always pointing to the reality beyond themselves and to which all are answerable.

If this essential dialogue with silence is refused then our words and our liturgical action become increasingly shallow and cliches. The dialogue with God becomes Maggie Ross says a noisy monologue, and worship a caricature of itself. A contemplative church is one that is unafraid of the kind of silence and truthfulness that enables real presence, trance, figuring, encounter. It’s kind of undefended openness to the prior reality of God, affects also the possibilities of common life in a contemplative community as we know. Contemplative practice deepens our awareness of self, of our habitual patterns and reactive tendencies, our hurts and fears at the same time. And somewhat counter intuitively, it enables a more radical hospitality to self humility and self acceptance beyond the need, the compulsion to justify and defend, I like. well, here I am and this growing awareness and self knowledge can be deepened by reflection and dialogue with others.

And at Benedictus, for example, are contemplative church. There are various contexts in which people gather to reflect on their experience and share their lives. Yet what’s distinctive about these gatherings, I think is not only the honesty and humility of the sharing but the spaciousness of the listening that is emerging instead of having to pretend as happens in some church contexts that we’ve got it more or less together. Well that some of us know what everyone else should be doing and believing there is real non patronising acceptance of the mess and ambiguity of our lives as the theater of God’s transforming work, Rowan Williams writes, responding in a life giving way to what the gospel requires of us means a transforming of our whole self, our feelings and thoughts and imaginings to be converted to the faith does not mean simply acquiring a new set of beliefs, but becoming a new person, a new person in community with God and others through Jesus Christ.

But to undertake this work of holistic transformation in the context of a community. Presupposes a certain level of maturity and trustworthiness in the community itself, and this is in turn reliant on the growing capacity of its members to be still to listen beyond their initial reactivity, to be unthreatened by what looks unresolved and painful, all fruits of contemplative practice. So what I’m trying to sketch is a sense of what a contemplative church more fully is. It’s a church where the disciplined and regular practice of silence and stillness responds to the prior reality of God and informs the whole life of the community, the ways it gathers the hospitality of listening, its openness to transformation and adventure. Of course, it isn’t, and doesn’t claim to be perfect that indeed is part of the point. But this maturing of persons and of the community as a whole is what constitutes an authentically countercultural church in this sense, it is not of the world.

Yeah, but it is still worldly in the good sense, bahnhof for intends in that it is deeply engaged with and connected to the commitments and solidarity’s the ambiguities and crises that comprise our lives. It’s not seeking to draw people out of the world so as to prop up an ecclesial institution, but to release them to participate in the work of reconciliation and love in every sphere of life. But this brings us to an important question for a contemplative church. It’s the question of how other than through its prayer and the transformation of individual members how such a community is properly related, properly engaged with a world come of age, what if any, is its contribution as church to the public square and the life of the world? In previous talks, I’ve said that christian faith is responsive to the God, who is in no sense competing for space in the world or in rivalry with it.

The direct corollary is that the church called to witness to this God must be similarly self dispossessing. The church is not an end in itself and does not exist to secure itself in being. This may come as a surprise. Yeah, this is a key theme in bonn Hofer’s prison letters, and he considers the unfaithfulness of his church in this regard to be a primary source of its loss of authority. He writes Our church, which has been fighting in these years only for its self preservation, as though that were an end in itself, is incapable of taking the word of reconciliation and redemption to the world. Our earlier words are therefore bound to lose their force and cease well in our time. The revelation of churches covering up accusations of child sexual abuse so as to preserve their power and reputation, has had a similarly devastating effect.

And more generally, the self obsession of a church, desperate about its own survival means that it looks a little different from many purely human institutions, anxious, Izzy, competitive and controlling nothing to inspiring about that. Of course, the Church is a visible social unit. It occupies real space in the world and jostles up against other forms, but just as Jesus gives himself to the world, not to displace or conquer it, but to love and reconnected to the source of its fullest life. So, the Church must be not to displace or conquer the world, but to reconnect it to the source of its fullest life. It exists only for the sake of deepening the world’s integrity. By enabling its connection to and transformation by the life of God, summarizing this line of thought. Williams has said that the Church is fundamental challenge, is to occupy space in the world solely for the sake of the world’s s scatological solidarity.

That is for the sake of the world’s final reconciliation and fullness in the Book of Revelation. There is no temple at the end of all things, There isn’t the Church, it’s dissolved because all things are reconciled. That’s that’s this idea of scatological solidarity. What does this look like? It’s all very well to talk of a self dispossessing church, But what’s the difference between a church that refuses to compete for space power and relevance and one that is unworldly in Bahnhof is bad sense. That is as a privatised spiritualist enclave, pushed out of the world’s affairs altogether A church that simply given up on its vocation to show up or to offer something for the whole. Well, let me start with the question of the contribution we think we might be in reflections written for the day of his God’s son’s baptism.

Bahnhof for expressed the view that it would be a long time before the church could once again play a role in world affairs because of the church’s failings there was no listening for what christians might have to say. And in any case, these same failings indicated that the church had nothing to say. It had lost real and vital contact with the truth. It professed Raymond Gator, an Australian philosopher, once said that we say of some people that they have something to say on moral or spiritual matters, but we do not mean they have information to impart or a theory or a doctrine to propound. We mean, among other things that we judge them to have attained wisdom to have attained a depth in their life and thought and because of that, we judge their words on such matters to have authority. Mhm. As gator remarks, we would not seek moral advice from someone we judged or new to be jaded corrupt, shallow or self preoccupied, since in bahnhof is judgment, his church had to a significant extent become corrupt and shallow.

A long process of conversion and purification would be required before it would know again its own truth, let alone become capable of uttering the word of God. Such that the world will be changed and renewed by it. Until that time he said, the christian calls will be a silent and hidden affair And are being Christians today will be limited to two things prayer and righteous action. Well, the sense that a condition of the church’s engagement with the life of the world requires having something vital and real to offer is clearly part of john main’s understanding too. Hence his sense of the significance of a contemplative Christianity, capable of reconnecting those who practice meditation with the deep truth of God in creation and in human experience. It’s not enough In fact, it’s meaningless just to mouth the old forms of words and exhort belief or even values or bible based behavior.

What’s needed, he said, are those capable of breaking the spell of materialism and restoring the spirit of wisdom to the institutions of society and for this a much more radical conversion is required prayer then, as it was for Bahnhof, for is understood to be at the heart of the church’s vocation. John Mayne wrote only and he wrote a monastics is, but I’m saying only a contemplative church, vitalized by a return to its essential task of seeking God in pure prayer, can re establish a useful relationship with the modern world. This relationship is a release and transmission of spiritual energy. But what then are we returned to the view that the primary contribution of a contemplative church is the transformation of individuals who may then contribute to their various spheres in a certain spirit out of a certain death Is there any sense in which such a church might as church speak to the world’s crises and confusions?

Well, of course, there’s no single answer to this question It all depends on context, an opportunity gifting and coal, as I think about this. For myself though, a couple of points seem worth drawing out first in a world whose public conversation seems increasingly slogan driven, ideological and banal. There is something different about contemplative lee grounded truth, telling a wonderful illustration of this. I’m going to quote Robin Williams again. People at Benedicta Snow. I cannot preach a sermon more or less without quoting Rohan You’ve had a lot of Rohan, but here he is. Again, a wonderful illustration of this was the easter sermon he preached in 2000 and three, which treated in part the debate that was then surrounding the war in Iraq which hadn’t yet begun in these remarks, Williams did not explore directly the case for or against the war.

Rather, he pointed to something in the public discourse that was inimical to mature moral thinking and shared accountability He invited the transformation of the debate itself and so of its participants and potential outcome. He began by naming what was evident in the public conversation pointing out the mutual mishearing the distortions that follow the determination of all involved to occupy the high moral ground, Easy accusations of warmongering and greed from one side of appeasement and indifference to tyranny on the other. Might remember that he brought to the surface something in the very tone of the conversation that was affecting people’s thinking, but that not that had not been generally recognized or admitted He said that both sides are afraid of acknowledging that they have something in common with what they are resisting. And that acknowledgement ought to lead to some kind of adult admission that even in pursuing good ends are flawed, humanity creates new difficulties.

This determination. We all want to be the ones who are right that’s what we have in common, and that’s what we’re resisting in each other. Well, it’s not clear that any other critic or commentator could have made this kind of contribution. His authority was not just to do with intellectual or positional power, but spiritual depth. And what made this an instance of contemplative truth telling was, I think its emergence from and it’s invitation to humility, Williams was publicly inviting all to a kind of repentance and into the possibility of shared responsibility and vulnerability in the face of a complex moral reality. He spoke of the necessity of turning our eyes away from the seductive image of a righteous settled soul with nothing more to learn or repent. This was speech that was prophetically critical, and yet in solidarity, it opened up a vision for a new way of being and talking together.

And it’s an example for me of how a contemplative church might seek to be of service for the life of the world a second and related kind of contribution concerns the enabling of spaces for authentic engagement on issues that divide groups or societies. 

A key question for our world today concerns how we work for justice without making polarization worse without contributing to the very divisions we yearn to see reconciled part of the risk in activism is that your identity gets wrapped up in your cause, your righteousness becomes if not an end in itself. Then at some level, an impediment to deep, generous and transformative listening. How do I learn really to engage with climate deniers for example, or with those I consider racist, irresponsibly populist homophobic and so on. How my context for truthful and potentially reconciling kinds of conversation be offered many today. No, the necessity of a revitalized and authentically public culture where difference can be engaged without hostility and pre hardened arteries I think of those promoting town hall and kitchen table conversations and of practices such as listening or talking circles, circles of trust, open space technology restorative justice processes and the art of hosting some of which you may be familiar with and all of which are approach is seeking to foster more generous listening the possibility of people hearing one another into deeper speech and so discovering more of a common or shared good.