Friday, March 28, 2008

Us Silly Protestants (or is it just the whole western Church)

I've had this problem for a while. I love the Church. It's been a problem for a few years. The problem stems from the fact the Church isn't perfect. It never has been. It's a painful problem. It takes up vast amounts of my time and energy. What makes my love for the Church a problem is that just like a close friend you dearly love, you love it so much you can't let it stay in it's less than whole state. I must admit before we go much further that it's in my nature to fix things. That's right, I'm a problem solver. It's a curse but I believe I was made that way for a purpose.
I've been reading again. Eugene Peterson, Thomas Merton. Those have been my recent staples. Merton reminded me today of my love for the Church and my frustrations with it's imperfections.
I've been reading "The Seven Storey Mountain." In it he told of people his father and he boarded with in France. Though only a small amount of time was spent with them he seemed to have received a very lasting impression from them. Their lives were lived as normal lives, with normal professions, and normal actions. Yet, love shined through everything they did. So much so, in fact, that it is really all he remembers of them. Even when they brought up religion the one time, they didn't argue it they only questioned how he could live life without the influence of the Faith.
Shortly thereafter he contrasts these people with his perception of the English (Anglican) Church. This is a rather long quote but it's required to get the point across.
"And, as a matter of fact, the Church of England means all this. It is a class religion, the cult of special society and group, not even of a whole nation, but of the ruling minority in a nation. That is the principal basis for its rather strong coherence up to now. There is certainly not much doctrinal unity, much less a mystical bond between people many of whom have even ceased to believe in grace or Sacraments. The thing that holds them together is the powerful attraction of their own social tradition, and the stubborn tenacity with which they cling to certain social standards and customs, more or less for their own sake. The Church of England depends, for its existence, almost entirely on the solidarity and conservatism of the English ruling class. Its strength is not in anything supernatural, but in the strong social and racial instincts which bind the members of this caste together; and the English cling to their Church the way they cling to their King and to their old schools: because of a big, vague, sweet complex of subjective dispositions regarding the English countryside, old castles and cottages, games of cricket in the long sumer afternoons, tea-parties on the Thames, croquet, roast-beef, pipe-smoking, the Christmas panto, Punch and the London Times and all those other things the mere thought of which produces a kind of a warm and inexpressible ache in the English heart.
I got mixed up in all this as soon as I entered Ripley Court, and it was strong enough in me to blur and naturalize all that might have been supernatural in my attraction to pray and to love God. And consequently the grace that was given me was stifled, not at once, but gradually. As long as I lived in this peaceful hothouse atmosphere of cricket and Eton collars and synthetic childhood, I was pious, perhaps sincerely. But as soon as the frail walls of this illusion broke down again - that is, as soon as I went to a Public School and saw that, underneath their sentimentality, the English were just as brutal as the French - I made no further effort to keep up what seemed to me to be a more or less manifest pretense.
At the time, of course, I was not capable of reasoning about all this. Even if my mind had been sufficiently developed to do so, I would never have found the perspective for it. Besides, all this was going on in my emotions and feelings, rather than in my mind and will - thanks to the vagueness and total unsubstantiality of Anglican doctrine as it gets preached, in practice, from most pulpits.
It is a terrible thing to think of the grace that is wasted in this world, and of the people that are lost. Perhaps one explanation of the sterility and inefficacy of Anglicanism in the moral order is, besides its lack of vital contact with the Mystical Body of the True Church, the social injustice and the class oppression on which it is based: for, since it is mostly a class religion, it contracts the guilt of the class from which it is inseparable. But this is a guess which I am not prepared to argue out."
I think a great deal of the problems of American Protestant Denominationalism is that it divides our beliefs into class religions. We feel the emptiness of being disconnected from the rest of the Body. The many races are divided into separate churches even within denominations. I agree with Merton that we lack the vital contact with the Mystical Body of the True Church, but I would define the True Church across many denominational lines.
I also believe our doctrine is very vague and without depth. We fight over our petty differences on whether we should be allowed to dance, drink, sing hymns or choruses. We've lost touch with an historic commonality. Do we know anything about the saints? The reformists? Those who contributed to the Great Awakenings? Orthodoxy? The Wesleys? What about today's amazing men and women of God? Mother Theresa? Nelson Mandella? Merton? Lewis? Peterson? I could name names all day. Jesus has worked throughout history and we've thrown it out. We're blind because we refuse to look at our pasts and we are leading the blind.
Unity is my prayer. I long for Grace, contact with the body, Love, Justice. I want to be justified by faith, but I want to do Christ's works so my faith isn't dead. I want to follow Jesus and that has never come about by believing and not acting. Do I believe enough to get out of my chair?
I love the Church and because of that I hope we can be reunited. I hope our faults are ironed out of us. Trials must come and we will be strengthened by them. It's for my Saviour to fix but I must, as must we all, be willing instruments.

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