CHRIST IN WINTER:
Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter—
Back in the 1960s, I heard Catholic social philosopher Michael Novak say that he could tell if a house guest was Catholic or Protestant by the way they took a bath. A Catholic just went in and took a bath, because their theology was connectional. Your house is my house. A Protestant asked first if they cold take a bath, because their theology was individual. Your house is your house.
When I reported this to Helen, she said, “Theology has nothing to do with it. Catholics grow up in big families. They know that if they get a chance at the bathroom, they have to take it right now.” [1]
All the lonely people? Where do they all belong? That was Paul McCartney’s question in Eleanor Rigby on the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine album back in 1966.
The answer then, and more so now, is “nowhere.” No one belongs anywhere, because we live in an era that does not want connections, because connections mean commitments. So, of course, we are lonely.
It’s always a trade-off, between individual freedom and connectional relationships. Yes, you need both, and you can have both, but it’s very difficult to get the balance right. And when the whole earth tilts toward one or the other, it takes a super-human effort to push it back into alignment.
In theological terms, it’s always a struggle between original sin and original empathy, what John Wesley called “prevenient [preventing] grace.”
When talking about sin, “original” means from the very origin. We are born with the tendency to seek our own good at the expense of others.
Original empathy means we are born with the need to live in cooperative relationships. [“Original empathy” may be a term I just created.]
Right now, and at least since the time of Eleanor Rigby, the whole earth has been tilting toward individual freedom. By earth, I mean not the physical globe, but the overspreading culture of the whole world.
The world’s culture can tilt so quickly anymore because of immediate electronic connections. Those immediate electronic connections allow us to be totally free of real human connections. So, at the same time that we think we are most connected, we are the least connected.
But we are interpreting the absence of connections as freedom, and it really isn’t.
I recall reading William Stringfellow’s Free In Obedience the year I was graduating from seminary. It wasn’t a new idea of course. It goes back at least to Jesus, and was expounded by Paul of the New Testament epistles. But that phrase resonated with me as I started my career. I knew it would be the crux of the next 60 years of my ministry and life. I wanted to be free. And I wanted to be obedient. Could I preach, and live, freedom in obedience?
I see the church as a primary battleground for this conflict between connection and individuality today. So many forces in the world are trying to take our freedom, so we don’t want to be part of a connectional church, have to listen to other Christians who think differently. The flourishing churches are not denominations but congregations that exist in their own little world, where the illusion is that their members are thus free. So, most Christians choose an isolated congregation, or choose to be “free” of the church entirely.
The church is The Body of Christ. It is not primarily an organization or institution. It is a state of grace.
Where are all the lonely people? Where do they belong? They belong in church, that state of grace, with all the other malcontents and misfits and sinners and idiots, free in obedience.
John Robert McFarland
1] I think this was the
beginning of Helen’s famous Home Ec Theology. If she wrote a book, it
would be a best seller. [And turn theology back two thousand years.]
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