Read this wonderful, provocative conversation with Sara Miles, an Episcopal writer. There’s much to ponder here. I find the section excerpted below to be particularly thought-provoking. Several of the folks at St. Gregory Nyssa, the parish where Miles works (and where she came to faith), occasionally teach workshops on liturgy. When I attended one in 2006, one idea I carried away was that church should be “safe but not comfortable.” Church should be a safe space, where all our questions, our gifts, our wounds, our personality quirks and our noisy children are welcomed and loved – but comfort means nothing is challenging us or changing us. I’m sure Miles has that idea in mind here, as she talks about the danger in aiming to make our churches comfortable.
People want to change and people don’t to change. People profoundly want to be made new, and people profoundly want to be clothed in Christ, to be born again. And they profoundly want to cling to everything old – about the world, and about themselves.
The thing is, that church, as it’s set up, is not usually a way to change; it’s a way to cling to the way things are. I just read an article about a set of emerging renewed churches, two churches, actually, and one synagogue. And it was all about how we’re making churches that aren’t like those old-fashioned ones, they’re places where we can feel comfortable. But of course that’s the impulse shared by members of the most conservative old-school parish, where you just mumble your way through the mass. Church is a place where you’re comfortable. And it’s a place that certainly replicates class structures and racial structures. You go where you feel you belong…
Of course I understand that people want to feel at home…. You want a place that feels authentic and real and where you can be yourself. But what I see over and over again is this inability to tell the difference between tradition and nostalgia.
And so, whereas I think there’s incredible power in trying to recuperate tradition and reflect on it and consciously appropriate it, there’s also this individual and social psychology of clinging to tradition, and “if we just keep doing the same things over and over again we’ll be okay.” Which is, of course, idolatry.
Hi,
I’ve heard the Episcopalian liturgy a number of times. It seems to me that the Great Thanksgiving and what follows is incendiary enough to blow the roof off of any unhelpful conceptions of ourselves and others we might have.
But it may be as the Lord said: if they don’t hear Moses and the prophets, they’re not going to hear anything even if somebody was raised from the dead (cf. the rich man and Lazarus).
I think all of us as human beings have what we need. It’s just that we don’t live what we know to be true. I’m not sure liturgical revision is going to do much. I think what we need is consistent, persistent emphasis on teaching how to live the virtues: humility (above all), giving place to others, not insisting on our own way… the whole “love” thing from Cor. 13.
What do you think?