A Dinosaur in the Museum

The talk in my circle of colleagues and friends is about "the emerging church." All agree THAT it is, but no one knows WHAT it is, at least what it is in much detail.

Right now it seems to me we are learning what this emerging church is not. It is not like the church of the 1950's that was a pillar of mainstream American culture. If there is any religious force that is mainstream in American culture today it is a strange hybrid of fundamentalism, nostalgia and superstition that is largely anti-intellectual, conservative in the narrow sense of "conserving" ideas and understandings that are actually quite recent. The religious rhetoric that commands most of the airwaves is a far cry from Jesus's message of grace and the dignity of every human being.

The emerging church is not that -- nor is it like the Church that emerged way back when the Roman emperor Constantine combined Christianity and the Roman Empire. Church and state were blended, but the two elements, American culture and Christianity, have begun to break apart like oil and vinegar in a cruet that has sat so long that the always uneasy emulsion has begun to separate. The emerging church will be something other than the marriage of religion and the prevailing culture. Once again, it appears, Christianity is consciously becoming a counter-cultural movement.

But I am deeply committed to "classical Anglicanism," from the creeds to the rubrics of the Book of Common Prayer. Along with the Scriptures, the writing that most speaks to my soul is the poetry of Donne, Herbert, Eliot, Auden and others who give voice to the depth and beauty of the Spiritual Journey walked in the Anglican way. I do not want the leave these things behind.

But I wonder. Am I merely clinging to an older way of thinking and praying and living? Does it really matter that the liturgy begun on Maundy Thursday doesn't really end until the Easter Vigil? Is that just a quaint museum piece and am I dinosaur?

Maybe so. Either way, here is one of my favorite museum exhibits, a bit from John Donne's poem A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning:

Our two souls therefore, which are one,

   Though I must go, endure not yet

A breach, but an expansion,

   Like gold to airy thinness beat.

Never has an image been more apt. Two lovers, though far apart, are not separated, but like pure gold that can be stretched almost infinitely with out breaking, are still connected to each other no matter the distance. Wow. (Notice the cadence of the last line, da-DUM, da-DUM, da-DUM, da-DUM -- like the jeweler's hammer tapping a piece of gold into ever thinner leaf.) Such writing!

And another, from one of Donne's Holy Sonnets:

Batter my heart, three-person'd God, for you

As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;

That I may rise and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend

Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.

I can't imagine the soul's longing to be swept up, overwhelmed, ravished by God finding any greater expression.

Are they baby or bathwater? Am I a dinosaur in a museum? A creature from a different time, who is surrounding himself with relics only? Where is the balance?

"These fragments have I shored up against my ruin." -- T. S. Eliot