We'll Take What You Can Carry, and We'll Leave the Rest

This Saturday, our priory of the Community of Mary, Mother of the Redeemer had our first monthly day of reflection.  There are five of us here in Columbus, at least for now--we have a half-dozen or so folks who are interested.  In any event, we met for about four hours, mostly just talking about what is going on in our individual and collective lives, as well as a book we are reading together.  In many ways, it was like chapter meetings that have been going on in monasteries and other religious communities for 1600 years.  But, there is was at least one way in which it was different from those chapter meetings.  Among the five of us, only one--me--is a straight man.

In the last 36 hours, I have been trying to put together what I think the significance of this fact is, because I think it is significant, at least on some modest scale.  While we were meeting, we learned that one of the oldest horrors that have stalked Christian and Christian-influenced societies, anti-Jewish pogroms, had respawned in Pittsburgh.  A few days before, Matthew Shepard, God willing, was laid to rest for good in the Washington National Cathedral.  On the other side of world, another promising Synod of Bishops in Rome resulted in another sodden mass of wet cardboard, offering meaningless platitudes about women's leadership (how exactly can women exercise leadership if they cannot be ordained?) and a refusal even to call LGBT people by name.  There is an effort to literally erase trans people, at least from the point of view of the U.S. government.  And we are knee-deep in the season of Kavanaugh and Me-Too and a feminine rage that seems to me to be righteous, inevitable, and long-denied.  That's where we find ourselves.

Into that mix, we are a community that is trying in many ways to be traditionalist.  We wear habits that are basically white Benedictine garb.  We read from the 1st Millennium "Fathers of the Church" every morning.  Our developing liturgical practices are notably old-school, bringing back elements from medieval practices and adding them to the Book of Common Prayer liturgy.  The fundamental theology--the nature of God, Jesus, etc.--of our members is somewhere between pretty traditional and very traditional.

And, yet, we are not traditionalist in the way that traditionalism normally manifests itself.  We can't be--if we were, I would be the only one who could participate.  Traditionalism almost always presents itself as a take-it-or-leave-it package, and the package of Christian traditionalism includes all of the things that I mentioned in the second paragraph.  Presented in this way, many people decide that they want nothing to do with Christianity and Christian traditionalism, and I don't blame them.  If I have to be a misogynist or a homophobe or an anti-Semite in order to be a Christian, then I don't want to be Christian, either.

So, instead, we are picking and choosing the elements of the tradition that we believe to be good and helpful for us going forward, and leaving behind the rest.  And, perhaps more importantly, we are trying to be consistently unapologetic about this picking-and-choosing.  We are not pretending that this is some reclamation of a previous practice that had gotten lost, or wasn't properly understood, or whatever.  No.  While we are building on blocks that have an ancient pedigree, this is a new thing.  We are taking the classic model of religious communities and stripping out the restrictions based on gender and marital status and sexual orientation, making it open to all people--men and women, married and single, gay and straight--without any distinctions or tiers of membership.  This hasn't been done before, and we know it.

By being up front about this, we are in a position to critique the problems and sins of traditional Christianity--especially misogyny and homophobia, but not only those--without qualification and equivocation.  We don't have to "defend the shield" because we are consciously choosing not to play the legitimacy game that is so pervasive in high-church Christianity.  If you have planted your flag in the idea that the only authentic expression of Christianity is one that is unchanged and unchanging, however many provisos and qualifications you place on that premise, then you are stuck with all of the baggage that comes with that.  Think about how much time and mental energy is spent in the universe of Roman Catholicism finding a way to get out from underneath the Crusades and the Borgia Popes and the endemic anti-Judaism of historical Christianity and all of the rest of it.  

Now, I believe that most if not all of this historical fundamentalism is nonsense, as we can't ever reproduce in the present the way things were in the past.   "We are moderns, we have no choice."  But our approach means don't have to waste time with any of that bobbing and weaving--all of that is bad, full stop, and we are repudiating it.  That's not scary or a problem because we are have already accepted the idea that we are doing a new thing.  We don't have to worry about people accusing us of departing from a historical lineage, because we admit it from the outset.  The moment you stop obsessing about your legitimacy is the moment you are free to go where the Spirit is leading you.  Departure from some strict historical norms is a problem only if you make it a problem.

Surely it will be the case that we will screw up a bunch of things, likely different things from what our ancestors in faith screwed up.  And the process of sifting through the massive Christian tradition to find the good and exclude the bad is hard, and there are legitimate disagreements over what parts belong in which bucket.  We have disagreements within our own ranks on these things.  But, again, if you put aside the obsession with being granted the imprimatur of legitimacy by some historically-grounded construct, those things are less fraught and scary and existential.  If it doesn't work, then it doesn't work.  But it is worth trying, and we are trying it.

It is also reasonable for other people, especially people that have been wounded by traditionalist Christianity, to be skeptical of us.  It is our burden to prove that we are different.  We are not owed or entitled to any slack or benefit of the doubt, and we know that.  There are people in our ranks who can speak to what it means to be wounded by traditionalist Christianity in a way that I can only talk about in hypotheticals, and there witness is far more important to this project than whatever I can bring to the table.  But, in the end, we have to prove ourselves, and show what is possible.    

I've talked about how much I love the song "Land of Hope and Dreams," by Springsteen.  Here's the first verse:

Grab your ticket and your suitcase

Thunder's rolling down the tracks

You don't know where you're goin' now

But you know you won't be back

Darlin' if you're weary

Lay your head upon my chest

We'll take what we can carry

And we'll leave the rest

"We'll take what we can carry; and we'll leave the rest."  That's a pretty good motto for this little project of ours.