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- Herausgeber: IVP Formatio
- Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
The constraints of the spiritual life, practiced in community, are what set us free. Practicing spiritual disciplines can seem difficult, especially when we undertake them as isolated individuals. But we were never meant to practice them alone. Jared Patrick Boyd reveals how the constraints practiced in Christian community shape us into the way of Christ. He re-anchors the practices of constraint within the ascetic tradition of monasticism, religious orders, and the early church fathers. Boyd writes, "The constraints of a rule of life are what make life together, lived for one another, possible. A rule of life is not meant to be primarily personal, but communal. It's not primarily meant to guide my life. It is meant to describe our way of life together." Constraint is the practice of learning to pay deeper attention to the things in our inner world that prevent us from progressing in the school of love. Discover a deep conversation on freedom and constraint with six core practices of constraint that can form in us a greater freedom to be and become people who love as God loves. Enter into this vision with your local community (in small groups, church leadership teams, or families), and learn to make greater room to experience the love of God.
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FINDINGFREEDOMin CONSTRAINT
Reimagining Spiritual Disciplines as a Communal Way of Life
Foreword by TODD HUNTER
FOR JAIMEWith you, I have learned to love and be loved.
Contents
Foreword
Todd Hunter
Life is sheer gift. But being alive involves us in a mysterious jumble. We experience our actual lives as grace and goodness intertwined with sinning and being sinned against. Beauty and evil stand together knocking on the doors of our heart and our soul. The bad stuff seems louder, campaigning against our will and emotions with a ferocity that would make even a DC lobbyist blush.
This means that having a life—at least having a meaningful, purposeful life directed at God’s good—is often a test, occasionally involving painful trials. We know this by experience.
For many of us, the challenge becomes too much. We find ways to retire from “seeking first the kingdom of God.” We invent ways to no longer hear Jesus’ invitation to “come follow me.” We refuse to look across the road, for we might see a Samaritan in need. We learn that it is easier and culturally normative to reject, despise, or condemn an enemy rather than to love him or her, to actively direct our will to seek their good. This is the broad road that leads to destruction.
But another way stands open before us: following the way of Jesus on the narrow path.
The Jesus way requires seeking, within a participative community, a well-ordered life. These are the great insights Jared Boyd brings together in the Order of the Common Life, a missional monastic order. Having done a postulancy cohort led by Jared, I learned some things about the spiritual growth that comes from a community ordered around spiritual transformation into Christlikeness for the sake of being ambassadors of God’s kingdom, agents of his healing and redemptive love.
Thankfully with the publishing of Finding Freedom in Constraint, you can get both insight into and a taste of the possibilities of a well-ordered life. But be prepared for surprising revelations, for counterintuitive insights along the ancient and sacred path to spirituality in the way of Jesus.
In my postulancy cohort, I was given an environment in which I deepened my ability to notice the love of God and to nurture receptivity to it. I was given the gift of space to reimagine my vocation to follow Jesus for the sake of others. I learned, again, that information and content alone are not transformative, that engaging my will and engaging with a community are vital to real, lasting transformation. I discerned where I felt trapped by an over-full life and discovered an appropriate rhythm of life for someone in their late sixties. I could go on for pages with highlights from my journal.
The power of good questions. The gift of being listened to. The sense of the presence of God. All of this, even when striving to look deeply within, was hopeful and pleasant. It was not a legalistic grind or religious chore. Rather, I found myself being organically more peacefully present to life.
Over our months together as a cohort I found myself wishing that others could experience this too. With the publication of this book, now you can receive an orientation to what a well-ordered life in a community seeking transformation looks and feels like.
Jared is wise. He knows, as Jesus taught, that wheat and weeds grow in the world until the final judgment, and that Jesus is superintending this reality. For our purposes in this book, it is crucial to note that weeds do not just grow in the world outside us, they grow with the good wheat in our hearts and souls too.
This can be frightening. It can lead to lots of harmful self-talk, to dysfunctional feelings of guilt, or worse, to sibilating shame. I want to ask you to trust that God knows what he is doing in your life, just as he knows what is happening in the world. Don’t try to get ahead of God, don’t try to hurry the pace of transformation. God is patient with weeds that remain. Just gently and peacefully keep seeking first Jesus and the kingdom of God.
As you begin to turn the pages to hear Jared’s voice, I want you to relax. A well-ordered life that others experience as for their good awaits you as you practice what Jared teaches: the intelligent, grace-based practices of ancient and anointed Christian spirituality.
Introduction
The goal of Christian spiritual formation is to learn to experience the love of God and to learn to love as God loves. This is the simplest way I know to explain the spiritual journey. But what stands in the way of this journey is often unseen. And what is unseen has formidable strength to keep us in bondage to the things that prevent us from experiencing the love of God and from loving others in the way that God loves them.
The experience of the love of God is at the center of this book.
The love of God is the only thing that empowers real change in our lives.
God is always present to us. And we are often not present to God. We are caught up in an array of distractions, pursuits, and thoughts that draw us away from the experience of God’s love.
An important process in the spiritual formation journey—one that can help free us from the things that keep us bound—is getting a clear view of what prevents us from loving and being loved.
What is in the way? What prevents me from living into all that God is inviting me toward and saying yes to every invitation that God extends?
The answer to this question is different for each person. As Roberta Bondi articulates, “What prevents me from loving may be entirely different than what prevents you from loving.”1
But getting a clear view of the things that disrupt our formation is becoming more difficult. We’ve lost some things along the way that the earliest generations of Christ-followers placed at the center of their way of life. The pursuit of humility, for starters.
This book is a vision for engaging and reimagining the way of life that emerged in those early years. It is meant to allow the way of life early Christians pursued to address the current crises of discipleship. But this isn’t early-church nostalgia. It’s a vision for reimagining a way of life that has bolstered the formation of the Christian person in the way of love since the very beginning.
Our culture increasingly obscures our view of what keeps us in bondage. It is easy for us to grow accustomed to the very things that hold us back from a life devoted to being united to God. Our culture is perfectly designed to keep us distracted, disembodied, and removed from our own self.
We often live in invisible chains, which cause us to settle for a vision of our life that is so much less than the vision offered by God in Christ, who is nonetheless kind and loving and gentle and patient with us.
Some of these invisible chains are built for us by giant computers whose primary job is to learn how to keep our attention on the small black mirror we hold in our hands. The feed on that screen reflects our own desires.
We make other chains all on our own. The first step toward freedom is the willingness to embrace the reality that this is the state of things: there are things hidden from our view that get in the way of what we really want.
We should not be afraid or ashamed of this fact. It’s just true.
But neither should we ignore it.
Many of us live with the assumption that whatever is in the way of a better life—and in the case before us, a better spiritual life—resides outside of us. When we consider why we are not growing spiritually or growing more in our love for God and neighbor—which sums up the whole spiritual journey as described by Jesus—we often assume it has to do with something external to us.
We change churches. We find new podcasts. We buy a new book (this one included). We search for some external thing that will give us what we’re looking for. A conference. A new method. New spiritual practices and workouts. The changes we often seek in order to bolster our spiritual life are primarily external. But the things that keep us bound up and stuck are not external to us. They are within us.
This is what all good spiritual guides have taught us. And it is within the tradition that gave us these guides that I offer this book. The things that bind us can only do so to the extent that they remain hidden to us. But once we see them clearly—those inner masters that rule us and rob us of our freedom—we can join Christ, who is already present doing the slow work of healing us.
This is not a self-help book. It’s an invitation to see the way the love of God is the only thing, in the end, that does the work of transformation.
Addressing the things that hinder our spiritual freedom—the shame, the patterns of personality, the habits that keep us stuck, and the stories we tell about ourselves and others—is becoming easier and more accessible as social scientists and psychologists continue to give us data.
Tools and books for spiritual formation are now ubiquitous in the twenty-first-century Western church. Even in church communities where two decades ago any talk of spiritual formation, contemplation, and spiritual direction were met with great caution (“Aren’t these New Age practices?”), you can now find Enneagram workshops, classes on centering prayer, and even a cadre of pew-sitters who have discovered the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius of Loyola. Brené Brown’s war on shame is becoming household language,2 and others are building on that work.3 Having a therapist, being in a twelve-step recovery program, or pursuing marriage counseling is no longer met with suspicion from the church. The church, it seems, is growing in her capacity to care for souls.
The way of life that I’m inviting you toward is to live in such a way that those unseen things will quite regularly rise to the surface. What is now hidden will be revealed. And the church and the Spirit will guide you toward your freedom, which is your inheritance in Christ.
With all this talk about freedom, perhaps you are wondering how and why this book is also about constraint?
A Way of Life
In the span of about a hundred years, in the middle of the desert of modern-day Turkey and the mountain region outside of Alexandria, Egypt, a peculiar way of life emerged in the late third and early fourth century as a countercultural movement. A man named Athanasius was doing important theological work on the heels of the Council of Nicaea, one of the most important church meetings of all time. He also wrote a “bestseller”—the Life of Anthony, a biography of a peculiar man who spent most of a twenty-year span living alone in a desert. His quiet life of constraint catalyzed a generation of early Christian practice.
This biography of Anthony spread an understanding of this way of life, which was growing at a steady pace and would soon be codified, organized, and shared. The church had already been undergoing a dramatic (and perhaps unfortunate) shift with the conversion of the Roman Emperor Constantine, making Christianity a state-sponsored religion. But outside the seats of power and influence were an increasing number of men and women who quietly shaped the future of Christian spirituality and discipleship. This way of life captured the attention of Saint Augustine, Saint Basil of Caesarea, Saint Macrina the Younger, and to some extent Basil’s younger brother Gregory of Nyssa.
These are the ones whose books and stories you might know. They wrote the historical record and crafted history with their very lives. But countless men and women who had no title or position, many of whom you may have never heard—Pachomius, Saint Scholastica, Evagrius—created Christian community and spiritual formation practices that made the lives of the men and women we read about, and their contribution to the church, possible.
This way of life centered around practices of constraint. It marked out specific rhythms of prayer and work and study. It eventually gave birth to monasticism—men and women living in communities with a shared set of practices—and it became the primary model of intentional spiritual formation for most of the next thirteen hundred years.
As this way of life became institutionalized in those first few centuries, it would radically transform culture. It would inspire men like Benedict of Nursia, who founded the Benedictine communities, which were refined by later generations, who planted Cistercian monasteries like the Abbey of Gethsemani, where Thomas Merton lived and wrote and reimagined what the life of a monk could become.
Mother Teresa also followed in this tradition and way of life, founding her own religious order—the Missionaries of Charity—in 1950 with a singular focus on serving the poor in Calcutta, India.
Saint Francis of Assisi, Saint Ignatius of Loyola, Saint Teresa of Ávila, and Saint John of the Cross all lived and prayed and served the church tethered to a way of life rooted in constraint. More recently Thomas Keating, André Louf, and Frs. Richard Rohr, Ronald Rolheiser, and Basil Pennington have lived and prayed and served the church in this way of life. There are countless brothers and sisters who have kept this spiritual tradition alive, many living quietly enough to go unnoticed but faithful enough to be a ballast in the ship of the church since before our creeds were established.
There have always been men and women who have held and lived this wisdom of constraint, and they have been one of the most overlooked cultural forces in history. You have probably thought little about them. This book is an invitation to move your life toward their way of life—a life of constraint. It is an invitation to the deep formation that is possible when a life of constraint is embraced in community.
A life with some constraints makes a life of freedom possible.
A Rule of Life
The pursuit of freedom through the practice of constraint is a well-worn path. What began in the desert with men like Saint Anthony living alone in caves morphed into men and women practicing the way of constraint together in community. Small communities formed around shared practices, at first out of the simple need to survive. It turns out that being completely alone is much harder than people imagine. Simple practicalities of survival drew these men and women together into shared housing, shared rhythms of prayer and work, and shared resources. This allowed the pursuit of this way of life to flourish in ways that it could not when practiced alone.
Sharing this way of life with others had a multiplying effect. There was more time for prayer when you were not the only one thinking about the food you would eat tomorrow. Within a few short decades the so-called ideal ascetic life of a holy man living in a cave was more or less abandoned. Community and shared common life were the future, even if shorter periods of cave and desert dwelling were permissible.
From these new communities emerged a peculiar form of literature as the monastic “rule of life” took shape.4 It turns out that it isn’t only the case where two or three are gathered together—“there the Lord is.” It turns out that where two or three are gathered together—there also is a great need to write some things down that those two or three can agree upon. Somebody needs to do the dishes.
So already constraint begins its work because agreeing with two or three others on how you should live your life together is an excellent lesson in constraint. There can be no community without particular constraints. Marriage, for example, is the constraint of a certain kind of love to one other person; a family is constrained by both spoken and unspoken rules that govern a household; the people of God are constrained, as the apostle Paul notes, by the love of Christ (2 Cor 5:14).
Community requires constraint.
By the time Saint Benedict came around in the late fifth century, there were several rule-of-life documents representing various approaches, all of which were trying to give shape to both individual and communal life. By the ninth century, more than twenty-five rules of life existed. Saint Benedict’s Rule became the most influential throughout monastic communities, even though most of it was borrowed and liberally modified from a rule known as the Rule of the Master. It was in use well before Benedict arrived on the scene. As Esther de Waal points out, Benedict
was happy to take what was good from the existing monastic heritage, to make it his own, and to colour it with his own personal experience. As he looked round he found various types of monastic life with their own traditions and achievements. There were some forms of life which allowed much scope for individual development and for the life of solitude; others stressed more the value of a corporate life in a settled community. He drew these different strands together.5
Something Is Missing in Our Formational Practices
In the preface to The Spirit of the Disciplines, Dallas Willard lays before us two tasks that are vital if Christianity is to be a guide for humanity:
First, it must take the need for human transformation as seriously as do modern revolutionary movements. The modern negative critique of Christianity arose in the first place because the church was not faithful to its own message—it failed to take human transformation seriously as a real, practical issue to be dealt with in realistic terms.
Second, it needs to clarify and exemplify realistic methods of human transformation. It must show how the ordinary individuals who make up the human race can become, through the grace of Christ, a love-filled, effective, and powerful community.6
I miss Dallas Willard.
He goes on to articulate his vision for the second task, masterfully painting the contours of the spiritual life and demonstrating how our body—that’s right, our body—is a “primary resource for the spiritual life.”7 He writes what has become a classic work on the spiritual disciplines in support of his central claim that we in fact can become like Christ by following him in his lifestyle, which includes “solitude and silence, prayer, simple and sacrificial living, intense study and meditation on God’s Word and God’s ways, and service to others.”8
It would be hard to improve on Willard’s articulation of the spiritual disciplines. And when we combine Willard’s insights with Richard Foster’s Celebration of Discipline, which was published a decade earlier, it seems we have what we need to begin practicing the spiritual disciplines in a way that leads to deeper formation and transformation. Those two books have done tremendous work in guiding people into a new way of living.
Yet nearly everyone who tries on a life of practicing the spiritual disciplines learns quickly that formational practices are difficult to stick to. Practicing forms of spiritual life that require discipline is really hard. We are often missing a key component that I think can make our practices stick. It’s also the primary component of the monastic tradition—the tradition that both Willard and Foster and many others are drawing from. It’s the monastic tradition that has kept this way of life and the practices of spiritual disciplines alive when, as Willard himself concedes, the practice of the disciplines became for all practical purposes lost to us in Western Christianity. I think we need to take up Willard’s first task. We “must take the need for human transformation as seriously as do modern revolutionary movements.”
The problem with leaning into a life of constraint, which is the primary way I will be talking about the spiritual disciplines, is that we almost exclusively have tried to do it alone. We have few living models for what it looks like to do it together. This is an unfortunate and unforeseen consequence of the Reformation, which systematically threw out the “baby” of the religious life of monks and nuns along with the “bathwater” that the Reformers wanted to throw out—however you want to describe that bathwater. What was lost in the Reformation (for those of us who are not Catholic or Orthodox) was the institution of monastic communities bearing witness to a communal way of life that centered on the practice of constraint.
Willard and Foster, and others such as David Benner, Ruth Haley Barton, and Kathleen Norris, have drunk deeply from the life that the monastic tradition has brought us. They’ve gifted us with writing about the riches they themselves have gleaned in conversations with abbots and sisters at retreats in monasteries and convents. But the key component that has been left out in most of our attempts to lean into these practices is a commitment to doing so alongside others in a vulnerable way.
Call it spiritual companionship.
Call it spiritual friendship.
Call it monastic.
But the spiritual disciplines were never meant to be primarily practiced alone. We are meant to share the joys and burdens of the practice of spiritual disciplines with others. The formation that comes from practicing constraint happens mostly when we practice alongside others.
This book is an invitation to practice constraint in community.
Over the past ten years, I have been slowly trying to reimagine the tradition that has carried the communal practice of constraint in monasteries and religious orders. I believe that monasticism and religious orders as institutions of the church will have a resurgence in the days ahead. The result of that reimagining work, and my own contribution to that hoped-for future, is the Order of the Common Life—an ecumenical religious order for the twenty-first century.9 Since the middle of the twentieth century there have been several men and women living in monastic communities or as part of a traditional Catholic religious order who have made it clear that, unless this tradition is reimagined and rearticulated, it will die. Thomas Merton spent much of his own monastic vocation thinking and writing about what is at the core of this tradition. Merton himself wondered how we might authentically carry it—reimagine it—for the sake of the church.
I’ve committed the rest of my life to the same question that Merton was asking: How do we authentically continue this tradition? We have invited men and women from around the world to consider and discern whether or not they have what has been traditionally referred to as a religious vocation. We lead people through a multi-year discernment process around our own rule of life. Our primary charism (gift) that we offer the world is the work of helping people notice and nurture the work of God in their lives and in the lives of others. We believe that the most important human experience is the experience of the love of God. You can explore more about our dispersed community and read our rule of life at www.orderofthecommonlife.org.
The six commitments of constraint in the second half of this book are drawn from our last decade of trying to work this out with others. And, while these commitments alone do not constitute a rule of life, they offer an introduction to a way of life for you and your community, church, or family. If these practices resonate with you, I invite you to consider wading in a little deeper through our dispersed community of the Order of the Common Life.
An Overview
In this book, I offer three meditations, a practical overview, six practices of constraint meant to be done in community, and a very short invitation. I have just one hope for you: that you can begin a journey of finding freedom through the practice of constraint, sustained by the presence of others who are on the journey with you.
This book centers around the practice of constraint, but at the center of it all is the ability to see a greater degree of the love of God. Most of us are not actively looking for ways for our life to be constrained. When I first mentioned this project to a friend and got to the part about challenging people to take on some constraint, his honest response was “That sounds terrible.” I offer a vision of why we need constraint, and I hope that you will welcome more constraint than you ever thought possible.
Freedom is a theme that we’re all aware of, particularly for those living in America. And yet the freedom I’m advocating for is entirely different from the freedom we hear about in our cultural context. The freedom that the best guides of the contemplative tradition talk about has little to do with getting what you want. In fact, it has more to do with not getting what you want than it has to do with almost anything else.
In parts two and three, I offer six practices of constraint. I could have chosen others, of course. These six shouldn’t necessarily have priority over other practices—with the exception of silence and solitude, which is foundational to any contemplative work. I don’t believe any real discipleship can happen apart from the practice of silence and solitude. It’s why these practices show up in nearly every book on spiritual disciplines. I’ll offer some basic guidance for practicing the practices, but I’m more interested in helping us understand why silence and solitude do so much heavy lifting in the contemplative and formational stream. We learn silence and solitude through practice. My goal is to help us desire the gift that they can bring.
If you find yourself struggling to work through some of these constraints, you are in good company. I have a lot of hope for the church to lean in this direction, but it is a hope tempered by reality. I have been trying to live a way of life with some constraints at the center for nearly a decade. There has been a lot of ego and fear and a host of things that have needed to receive the healing love of God in my life as I have leaned into some of these practices. The way of life that I’m inviting you into is full of struggle. But the struggle is actually part of the work. We have rarely created spaces to talk about the struggle of these practices; I’m trying to change that.
Finally, this book is meant to be a guide for communities of formation, primarily as a resource in the local church, for ordinary people like you and me, living ordinary lives, learning how to love through practicing together a way of life in community, sharing commitments to practices that will deepen our capacity to love one another.
As you work your way through this book in community, I hope what begins to surface is a vision for how this way of life might be lived together within your local church. I’ve created additional resources for you that can be accessed at www.jaredpatrickboyd.com.
For now, I invite you to notice and nurture the work that God does in you while you read this book. Discuss it with others. Try on some practices. Keep a journal. Set aside time to pray.
But please do not read this book alone.
This book is meant to be discussed and its practices are meant to be practiced alongside others. Visit www.orderofthecommonlife.org for guidance on how to form a conversation group around this book in your local church or join a group online. There will be plenty of opportunities to do this work together.
But don’t be a hermit in a cave.
CHAPTER ONE
RIVER, the WOMB,and HEARTH
A Meditation on the Constraints of the Church
Some tear away from her and attack her and break her established rules. They abandon the maternal womb and the sweet nourishment of the church.
The church in America is having a moment. Some of our difficulties have been made more poignant by the Covid-19 pandemic, political divisions, and the emergence of #ChurchToo stories of sexual abuse and cover up. We are in the middle of a reckoning. But none of the challenges the church has seen in the past few years are the cause of the reckoning.
The things in our life that we cannot see have great power. Sometimes we get a look at what lies beneath slowly over time through practices of paying deeper attention, and sometimes it just surfaces all at once. The church in America is having an all-at-once moment. We are clearly learning that our way of life—our way of being the church—has not produced the kind of Jesus-followers we have hoped for. Even some who were tasked with leading, pastoring, and caring for us have proven unreliable.
My prayer for the church is that this moment be more than a reckoning. Perhaps it could be another Reformation. But first we have to be honest about what is actually happening. We have to deal with reality.
We are living through a moment when many are deconstructing their Christian faith and abandoning, as Hildegard von Bingen called it, “the maternal womb and the sweet nourishment of the church.”1 I can’t necessarily fault them. The carnage and misunderstanding around the so-called deconstruction project only illustrates the point that has led to so many people walking away from church: it has not been a safe place for those who have questions about doctrine, anger about cover ups, and little hope that we will ever be able to detox from the power, money, and exploitation that is woven into the fabric of the church in America.
As I write, I wonder how a book on constraint and spiritual practices could begin to be helpful, given how much of the deconstruction conversation centers around the unhelpful (to some) and unhealthy (real or perceived) constraints and rigidity of certain pockets of the church.
I have hope and a vision for a church that leans into spiritual practices in healthy ways—ways that invite people into deeper commitment. We can learn how to invite people into deeper practice without exerting power over them.
But first we need to bind up some wounds.
This chapter is both for those who love the church and for those leaving it. Most particularly, it is for those who think that by leaving the church they are loving it more. I believe we are living in a moment of reformation. This is my invitation for you to stay in the church—perhaps in some creative ways. It’s also meant to be a pushback on church leaders who are dismissive of those wanting to leave it.
If you are wondering if a metaphor can save your faith (or maybe your faith in the church)—I have three of them that I think could, at the very least, be helpful.
The Church as River—and the Banks of Deconstruction
There is a river in Peru that you have probably never heard of. It’s the main headstream of the Amazon River, which you certainly have heard of. The Ucayali River has received some attention recently from geologists because we are now able to see how the surface of the earth is changing and how those changes—in vegetation, glacial melting, and even the emergence of new cities—impact the flow of rivers. The shape of the Ucayali River is changing at an impressive speed and through thirty years of satellite images, scientists are able to visualize and predict those changes and look closer at the “meander migration rate” of the river whose waters eventually flow into the Amazon.2
The banks of the river give way to its surroundings and the river spills out and forms new bends and necks and chutes. The flow of the river in general is constrained by the banks of the river, and the banks of the river respond to the surrounding changes. And yet the river never stops flowing. Some new bends disappear and dry up. Some old banks get eroded. But the direction of the river does not change. The waters end up flowing more or less along the same path.
The church is a river that started as a small stream, birthed by the Spirit, on the day of Pentecost. We are meant to be, as the psalmist says, “a river whose streams make glad the city of God” (Ps 46:4). We are meant to be the place where the presence of God dwells. We carry the water of life, which is the Holy Spirit, and that water nourishes trees of life, which bear all kinds of fruit. The leaves of those trees are for the healing of the nations (Rev 22:2). This is the glorious vision given to us in the revelation of John and, long before him, through a vision in Ezekiel (Ezek 47)—a vision of water spilling out of the temple (which we now know to be both the body of Christ and his church), flowing under the threshold and expanding into the whole world, where every living creature who comes in contact with it will have life abundant.
But what happens when the banks of the river begin to collapse due to weakness? Or the waters of the river become so strong that they spill out and begin to bend the river in a new direction? You might fear that the banks of the river—the strong constraints of the church—are crumbling. People are asking questions about long-held doctrines and teachings of the church and many others are walking through a process of deconstruction. Few pastors know what to do with it all. The once-sturdy banks that held the water of faith for many are shifting in some places. And the questions people are asking and the conclusions they are coming to feel incongruent with the story as it has been told thus far. Theologians and laypeople alike are standing in the waters of the river, which seem to be cresting the banks and overflowing the constraints the church has provided.
Maybe you are looking for ways for the banks to be reshaped so the water can overflow them. Perhaps you see something on the horizon that others are unable to see. You have prayerfully reached conclusions that make others uncomfortable, and you wonder if the church can hold space for the questions you are asking and the tentative conclusions you are reaching. You hold big questions about last things and eternal places. You wonder how the death of Christ brings salvation and healing. And you have questions about human sexuality and the authority of Scripture—and how to think about these in relation to your queer friends and gay neighbors. You might feel frustrated by the slowness of change. You’ve probably thought about leaving the church. Or perhaps you have already done so.
This moment is one of incredible tension. The river is rushing, the rapids are churning, and we are either headed for a giant flood or damming barrier or bifurcation. The tension is between strict and sturdy banks and the waters that overflow them (as they sometimes should). But this is not a new phenomenon within the church. This is what the church has always been. It has always been a river whose banks are being defined and redefined in an ongoing process of discernment. At our best, we have done this alongside the Spirit, interpreting the Scriptures, living in and responding to the world around us, while loving one another. At our worst, we have done it with a tremendous exertion of power over people.
However the future unfolds, I pray that we not exert power over one another during this season of deconstruction and reformation. If you are a church leader or pastor, I invite you to consider a constraint on your exertion of power over others.
The Early Years
When we think about the early years of the church, we often sigh with relief when we come to the first ecumenical council at Nicaea, where the sturdy banks of the river began to be formed. The Nicene Creed, which eventually provided a benchmark for orthodoxy, was the primary artifact that emerged from the council. In it we find a sense of settledness around important doctrines that we now simply take for granted.
What we often overlook is that coming to some final conclusions around some of the words that would make it into the creed was quite tumultuous for the church. There were some “conservatives” who did not want to accept the wording about Jesus being “one in being with the Father.” It took another 350 years for the turbulent waters of the river to settle and the doctrinal banks of the river to stabilize. For much of the fifth, sixth, and seventh centuries, the battles over the nature of Christ—his humanity, his divinity, and how those two could be held together in one body—splintered the church. The waters sometimes overflowed the banks. And sometimes they receded. Friendships were lost, men were murdered, and emperors were conscripted into doctrinal battles.
Maximus the Confessor lived most of his life as a monk in prayer, study, and constraint. He became connected with the theological traditions that informed those early formulations of the nature of Christ that we find in those first creeds. This issue was highly significant for the early church fathers, and it became important for Maximus, who courageously inserted himself into the debate when it became clear that the majority view was not aligned with what was penned at that first council and ratified at the second. Whatever sturdy banks existed at the end of the fourth century were on the verge of collapse. Maximus could not remain silent, so around the year 640, he began to speak out against a popular view that was held by the majority of those in power. He did so in a time when speaking out against those with ecclesial and political power could get you “canceled” in ways that we can’t even begin to understand. People were sent to islands to die for not conforming.
For nearly fifteen years Maximus quietly opposed some of the theological changes that were making the rounds. He argued for a return to orthodoxy as established by the first and second ecumenical councils. Whatever this new bend in the river was, for Maximus it was taking the whole river in a dangerous direction. In 655 he was arrested, brought to trial for treason, and accused of heresy. Every attempt to persuade Maximus of the truth of the “emerging view” failed. He was brought to Constantinople where he was tortured for his “heresy.” They cut out his tongue to prevent him from speaking, and they cut off his right hand so that he could not write to defend his position. He was exiled to a distant place where he died nearly a decade later with two disciples by his side. Within twenty years of his death, the teaching for which he had given his life was vindicated at the sixth ecumenical council. The “majority opinion” in Maximus’s world turned out to be wrong.
Where do we fit into this story? It’s a good question for us to think about, particularly if we find ourselves in the midst of chipping away at the banks of the river on the one hand, or trying to keep the water at bay on the other. This analogy of the church as a river, moving in a particular direction, whose banks and boundaries are in flux gives us at least two things to consider as we move forward.
First, some riverbanks are negotiable, and the church’s task is ongoing discernment. Discernment of the Scriptures keeps the river flowing, and this has always been done as a collective people in ongoing presence to one another and love for one another. This process is often slow, and we can allow this slow process to constrain us.
Sometimes the banks of the river are held in place by the institution of the church. And sometimes that same institutional structure keeps a bank intact that later generations find unnecessary. We live in the church, and the church is a place of contradiction because, for example, in some parts women can preach and in other parts they are not allowed to preach. From early on the church has convened councils, appointed leaders, commissioned preachers, discerned theological necessities, and drawn boundaries in various places. All have shaped the flow of the river.
Sometimes we look back at earlier decisions and see where the church has made adjustments. We widen the banks in places and counteract erosion in others. Sometimes we can see more clearly than those who came before us, and sometimes our vision has become less clear and we must return to the foundation that has come before us. Navigating this process has always been one of the tasks of the church. This has happened in areas of theology (have you recently met a Monophysite?), worship (the iconoclast debate raged for centuries), and even social and ethical teachings (the first church institution to give a thumbs up to any form of contraception was the Anglican Church in 1930). The church has been at the task of negotiation and discernment from the very beginning.
What we need is patience.
But we also sometimes need impatience. Yes, there are places in this negotiation process where we need to allow things to unfold slowly. But there are other places where we need voices (particularly ones that have been suppressed) to speak loudly and disruptively and to cause conflict.
We find ourselves in a moment where there is a great temptation to hang on to power (if we have it) or exercise the only last freedom we believe we have (if we don’t have power)—which is the freedom to leave. The gift of constraint is that we can both constrain our power (if we have it) and allow ourselves to be constrained by the church (if we do not have the power to change it) so that when the time is right, we are still in the river when it shifts in the direction guided by the Spirit.
We can learn to relinquish that particular kind of power that can become toxic and controlling. We can make more room for the marginalized voices of those who can see what others may not yet be able to see. We can stay in the river and do the hard work of confrontation. I’m inspired by the many people who are doing this while not giving up on the church.
This does not mean that anyone should stay in a section of the river that has become toxic. There are traditions and teachings within the church that are harmful and will soon dry up. There are systems and leaders that are toxic. If this is where you are, find a boat and row for fresher waters. If you want to row out of the boundaries of a particular denominational structure, this doesn’t mean you have to leave the broader constraints of the historic church. The river is wide and is fed by fresh springs in so many places. Find a church that you can heal in, but please stay in the waters.
Second, the negotiation process goes better with humility—both in those who want to keep everything the same and those who want to bend the banks in a particular direction.
So many of the issues we face today over contentious topics are difficult to talk about without producing a dumpster fire on Twitter. Issues of human sexuality and identity, the role of women in the church and feminism, critical race theory and racial justice, to name just a few, are not going away—we will continue to need to navigate these issues. I hope this process is one where we do not cut out tongues and chop off hands. We have our own culturally bound ways of succumbing to this behavior. This doesn’t mean that we can’t say what we think and draw boundaries and articulate how we read the Scriptures, but I hope we can do so with a greater degree of humility.
The constraints of the church—the historic creeds, the traditions of reading the Scriptures, care for the poor, and the shared commitment to the praise of God—provide basic boundaries for the river of God’s unending love to flow into the world. It’s a mess of a river right now, but stay in it—part of that mess may help us grow into what we were always intended to be.
The Church as Womb
There are a lot of metaphors in Scripture for the work of the church. One of the earliest is the church as mother and ourselves as preborn babies. We are within the church’s womb being formed into what we were always meant to become—human beings.
I learned of this metaphor in a graduate course with Orthodox theologian Fr. John Behr. It has nudged me toward an imaginative framework where I can, at least in a thought experiment, begin with the possibility that I am not yet a human but am on my way toward becoming one through the nourishment of the church. The most beautiful thing about this image, as Fr. Behr points out, is that we are the recipients of care and nourishment.
So much of our talk about following Jesus is framed in terms of mission. We are enfolded into a great family spread across time and place, and we have a job to do. The family business is mission. This, of course, is all true. The church is joining God on mission to the world, which is why we often gravitate to sermons and books that help teach us how to enact our faith outwardly and join God on God’s mission.
But the vision of the church as a mother helps us grow deeper into the reality that the totality of our Christian experience is not focused on accomplishing a task. What we often overlook in our pursuit of the mission is that something is happening to us. And this work of formation is ongoing until we are born again at our death, in resurrection, when the fullness of time and maturation is complete. We typically think of ourselves as already being human; being “born again” happens at baptism when we receive the Holy Spirit. But let’s consider that everything that is happening in our life and all the ways we are learning to love and forgive, rejoice and grieve, hold on to and let go of, are happening within the womb. The church is our mother.3
Spiritual formation is not a solo expedition. It is primarily communal. The people of the church are the womb of our formation. And, of course, when those people gather together, leadership is required, and so we have people and an institution.
