Congregational Development - Means of Grace, Hope of Glory

For the real saint is neither a special creation nor a spiritual freak. He is just a human being in whom has been fulfilled the great aspiration of St. Augustine – “My life shall be a real life, being wholly full of Thee.” And as that real life, the interior union with God grows, so too does the saints’ self-identification with humanity grow. They do not stand aside wrapped in delightful prayers and feeling pure and agreeable to God. They go right down into the mess; and there, right down in the mess, they are able to radiate God because they possess Him. Evelyn Underhill

Today has me thinking about "the mess." Bishop Peter Eaton has been writing a Daily Reflection during these days. Today's was about "the mess." I've lift a few paragraphes to share with you.

It has always seemed to me that for a religion to be up to it, it has to be able to deal with the real mess of living and dying. The true test of religion is not, I have always thought, been in the glory, but in the dirt.

The incarnate God had no home, no income, no security, no safety net, and from the beginning of his participation in this human living he was subject to gratuitous and unpredictable violence: he would escape it as a child, only to have it catch up with him later. And when finally we did the worst to him that we could do, he died the death of suffocation on the cross. “I can’t breathe.”

It is only in this mess that we can see clearly the burden of love. And it is only from the dirt that we can really understand what glory might be. If it has done nothing else, this pandemic has brought clarity to the mess of the life we live, and the need there is for a religion that is up to that mess. Not an “It’s-going-to-be-all-right” religion, because for so many that simply will not be true. But rather an “It-could-get-a-great-deal-worse” religion, in which the valley of the shadow of death seems too long, and the cost too high. A religion that shakes its fist to the heavens, and asks the hard questions.

Bishop Peter comes from the Anglo Catholic stream of the church. He sees "the mess" in relation to that tradition.

A university teacher once said to me that in his view there are only two kinds of religion: Quakerism, with nothing at all, and full-blown, no-holds-barred Anglo-catholicism, with all the fixings. Anything in between just really isn’t worth the time and the money. Having been raised in the Catholic tradition of Anglicanism, and having never really found that tradition wanting, I loved this rather cheeky characterisation, but at its heart it was true for me: the Anglican Catholicism in which I was raised and formed had that grittiness that comes from a real facing of the hard truths of living, and brought to those wounds of knowledge and experience the sublime beauty and elegance of our particular kind of Anglican Catholic worship and devotion. The Bread of Heaven delivered by mangled hands.

I share Bishop Peter's way of approaching these things. My own Catholic take on things was formed at the Church of the Advocate in North Philadelphia, in the civil rights movement, by the inner-city work of Paul Moore and Kilmer Myers, the art of Allan Crite, and in the lives of the slum priests, Frank Weston of Zanzibar, the Memphis Martyrs, Frances Perkins, and Jon Daniels.

Peter closed his reflection with this--

And then a religion that insists on going to church (when it is safe to do so!), putting on cloth of gold, lighting all the candles, firing up the thurible, going about in long processions, singing the music of the ages, ringing the bells, entering the invisible company of the angels and saints, and once again beseeching the Incarnate God into this mess in sacrifice on the throne of the altar, so that all may live.

It's a hope expressed in the stuff of his tradition. It's a hope we all might share in as expressed in the ways of our own parish's tradition. A hope that we might once again gather, be fed by the Body and the Blood, be in the familiar company of people we have shared life and faith with, and celebrate with them and the whole company of heaven.

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Bishop Peter's Daily Reflection -- I asked him how others could get the reflections— "Anyone who wishes can get on our list to receive diocesan mailings, which include anything that I write. Just have them send their email to Eduardo at eduardo@diosef.org and David at david@diosef.org, and they will be on for life. Please encourage people to sign up, The daily reflections will be put on our FB page in the Notes section as soon as Eduardo can get them posted."