All Souls Conversation #3-4: The Winds of Change

(If you are a new reader, please read All Souls Conversation #1 for context)

I am sorry for not posting anything last week. It was a combination of laziness, writer’s block and general weariness from work.

If you will remember Doug talked about God’s strategy for the city. God’s end is shalom; His means (or strategy) is a parallel community of believers.

I remember having problems with this idea of parallelism. I experience the word somewhat narrowly. It connotes to me a kind of separation, an exclusivity that I am sure Doug did not intend.

Is salt seperate from the meal? It enhances the flavor of the food. Is leaven worth anything by itself? Actually salt and leaven bring the entire meal or loaf into completion. I think of God's community as an activating, catalytic agency much like salt and leaven.

That is why I struggled with a paralled community? I certainly understand the idea. He took the phrase from Vaclav Havel’s essay, “The Power of the Powerless,” where Havel, from prison I might add, encouraged people, living in oppressive communist Czechoslovakia, to live out a free and open life in small clandestine groups. It was a kind of dress rehearsal for liberation. These meetings allowed people to join together and share their kindness and brilliance with each other as well as their truth. The trappist monk Thomas Merton once commented that, "we make ourselves real by telling the truth." I think that that is what is going on in these groups. Nobody can accept the good news if there is no place to hear the bad news. The slaves did it in small group meetings on plantations in the United States. Liberation movements have practiced the same strategy worldwide. There is something about convincing your “insides” that is integral to making the outside world different.

Tonight Doug focused on “the Community of the Spirit.” This is the parallel community. The only difference is that this “liberation group” also practices presence, presence of the Holy Spirit. Huh? We are the conduit for God’s presence. Now before the “I can’t-stand-Christian-talk” crowd who may also be reading this blog go ballistic I would point them to the music of jazz. Jazz is music of discipline and receptivity. Much the same way that prayer is.

Presence in the Christian world is another word for prayer and prayer is a kind of artistry. That is to say that it requires an agile imagination, alertness and sense of what is to be found.

Some Christians talk about prayer and presence as if it were a matter of hooking up to cable television, consuming it as a right. These people should be completely ignored or dismissed as quacks. (I am being a bit funny here) Prayer takes sensitivity, courage and humility. Prayer is like the great billowing sail of a sailboat moving out into the deep ferocity of the ocean. It is openness to a greater reality, a greater consciousness, a greater love than we can possess individually. It can be dangerous.

And so Christians are a parallel community of people open to the spirit, not for their own gain and edification, but for the wellbeing of the whole city. So the Church is not placed in the city to be an “example” or “model community” but rather as a kind of spiritual infrastructure for the Spirit to reach and move in the city. If we belive that God is our wind of change then there has to be something, someone in place to catch it, hold it and share it.

I may have this all wrong. That’s why I am writing all this out in living color. Tell me what you think. Quit holding back!