Is the Tent Collapsing?

Today after lunch, Bishop Joe, Mother Cait and I discussed the nature of God, the identity of matter and energy, and how our first conscious memories color our concept of God.  This evening, Cait is interviewing Joe for her book about their lives for the history of the Celtic Christian Church.  Cait writes like the Bard her heritage has prepared her to be.  And I am happy.  My whole life has been a preparation for this lovely, peaceful season­ of prayer, contemplation and community. 

An examination of the way modern people are attempting to be “spiritual rather than religious” led me to watch a show on Netflix called Wake Up.  I highly recommend it and am preparing a review of it for my other blog, “Critical Eye.”  What I want to mention here is the vision that the young man (Jonas Elrod) had.  He saw an empty big-top-style tent, supported from within by a structure that slowly collapsed, taking the tent down with it.  His eventual understanding of the vision was that the tent was institutional religion.  I would say that was a prophetic dream.

What are we leaving behind and towards what are we moving?  What do we lose if/when the institutional church disappears (either from our lives personally or actually)?  What do we gain if we personally leave the institutions behind? 

For me, the genius of the Celtic Christian Church lies in its monastic orientation.  We can discard buildings without losing community; we can serve upper class, middle class, even gangsta’ class people according to our individual vocations.  With the guidance of our Bishops, we range from academic circle communities to street people communities, to serving at science fiction conventions!  We can support ourselves by working in the real world and still minister according to our gifts, in such diverse places as baseball stadia and radio stations; as spiritual directors and as hospital chaplains. 

We come with an array of backgrounds, from Bishop Joe’s Ph.D. to those who graduated from high school and then went through our formation program.  We come from Roman Catholic, Old Catholic, Independent Catholic, Episcopalian and Baptist traditions, among other things. 

We are a diverse group of married, single, straight, gay, lay, religious and clerical people who love one another in an extraordinary way.  And even if the Celtic Christian Church does not survive the current generation of adults and elders, I believe the Celtic, monastic model will carry on serving the body of Christ because those who fall in love with God simply must share that love by serving others.  Love gives out of its abundance, requiring nothing in return.  “Without money, without price, why should you give your life, except for the Lord.”

In other words, from this point in my journey, it is clear that all will indeed be well.  Alleluia!

The Need For A 21st Century Testament

If you can find a copy of Corpus Reports (September/October 2013), you will see therein a gem:  John Shelby Spong’s address regarding “A Need to Reform Christianity?  A New Language for God.”   My dear Bishop Joe loaned me his copy to read and I must recommend it to anyone who is seeking to reconcile their experience of God and their experience as a 21^st Century human being.  He avers that Christianity is not dying; the explanations of antiquity are dying. 

We have an Old Testament and a New Testament.  What we need is a Current Testament.  The experience of the Christ is not the same thing as a description of that experience.  The descriptions of that experience which we have are rooted in the times they were written.  This is interesting in light of an ongoing discussion regarding the future of the church. 

As a member of a small Independent Catholic Church (the Celtic Christian Church), I sometimes wonder what will happen to us when the present generation of leaders dies.  The roots of the Celtic Church are not buried in the Old Testament, but in the Old Religion, which considered creation as good, and humanity not as fatally flawed, but glorious.  Our leaders are chosen by our members, not imposed by a hierarchy.  Our relationship with God is about relationships and service.  We love one another in a way that others find attractive and want to share.  It is my prayer that we will not lose these characteristics. 

As time moves on, we Christians are beginning to realize that the Christ experience removes all artificial tribal barriers.  Like Paul, we begin to see that in Christ there is no male or female, slave or free, just and unjust, saved and unsaved.  Rather than justifying exclusion, we find the experience demanding the inclusion of all.  A result of the Christ experience is an urgent need to pour out that experience on all who still experience life as suffering, broken, unforgiven and other in any way.  One who has the experience of Christ cannot sit idly by and not feel the injustices of predatory behavior. 

This is my current understanding, at any rate, of the way in which conscious contact with God has changed my life.  It has brought deep peace in the face of my own mortality.  It has brought deep pain in the oneness demanded between myself and the other, who is not truly separate from me, but is another unique expression of the Ground of Being. 

If you find Spong challenging, good!  Keep reading and thinking and most of all, keep on serving God in the People of God.  If you seek the Christ experience, stay in the Silence with the One.  Stay and be loved.  Stay and be changed.  You will find yourself.  And then you will give yourself away.