A Sound of Sheer Silence

In the past, I have written about the project that I was a part of called the Community of Mary, Mother of the Redeemer .  As of last Thursday, I am no longer part of CMMR.  It still exists, just without me (and other core members).  I would love to be able to say that I have all the confidence in the world that CMMR will grow and flourish, but that would be a lie.  I think the far more likely outcome is that CMMR is heading for a fiery crash of one of a couple different sorts.  And part of me thinks that flourishing, at least of the public sort, would be the worst possible outcome for all concerned. In any event, my participation in CMMR is over, and thus one could say it was a failure.  In fact, I would definitely say it was a failure.  There are some people who want to relativize failure, to say something along the lines of "well, it wasn't a failure because I learned from the experience."  It is good to learn from experiences, to be sure, but ...

1. Last week, I went on a retreat with the CMMR .  We drove to Nazareth, Kentucky, to the mother-house of the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth.  Nazareth, and that part of Kentucky generally, is a really interesting, and kinda strange, place.  The area was settled soon after the Revolutionary War by English Catholics from Maryland and some French Catholics fleeing Napoleon.  As a result, this area of north-central Kentucky (including the bigger towns of Bardstown and Elizabethtown) has this unusual Catholic through-line permeating what is otherwise the normal, rural American South. Likewise, the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth themselves were formed in the U.S. in 1812 to minister to this population, and other similar pockets of Catholics in the South and Midwest.  Thus, they are a uniquely and exclusively American expression of Catholicism.  Sure, they looked to European models for guidance (their rule is that of Vincent de Paul), but they are products...

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 so...

Last night, I became a novice in a brand new religious community of the Episcopal Church, the Community of Mary, Mother of the Redeemer (CMMR).  You can see some pictures of it on our Facebook page --I'm the shorter guy second from the left.  The day before that, the Founders of our community took their first vows, meaning that CMMR has been officially in existence for a grand total of two days.  Still, we have been working on this and praying about it for a while now, and so I figured it was time to talk a bit about this new thing I am a part of and how I understand what I am doing. If there is a Big Idea that shapes the project of CMMR, it comes from Psalm 137: By the rivers of Babylon—    there we sat down and there we wept    when we remembered Zion.  On the willows there    we hung up our harps.  For there our captors    asked us for songs, and our tormentors asked for mirth, saying,    ‘Sing us ...

A quick sort-of digression, and then to my main point.  I am part of the formation of a new religious community within the Episcopal Church, known as the Community of Mary, Mother of the Redeemer (CMMR).  It will be officially founded in September, and I will be saying much more about it in these electronic pages in the coming months.  There are numerous reasons why I am excited about this project, but one of them is how clear the theological vision behind the community is.  If you could summarize the charism for this community down to one sentence, it would be that "a fundamental component of the Christian message is opposition to Empire in all of its forms, and our mission is to equip and form disciples in resistance to Empire." Which of course raises the question--"what do you mean by 'Empire'?"  At the risk of defining something in relation to some other complex concept, I would say that "Empire" is a synonym for Rene Girard's concept of ...