Chapter 4: The Rev. Brian McVey

 As I was reading chapter 4 of Palmer’s book, I was reminded of Abraham Kuyper.  There is a famous quote attributed in many circles to Kuyper: “There is not a single square inch of the universe over which God does not claim sovereignty.”  In the late 1800’s the Netherlands was undergoing a tremendous cultural shift.  Secular humanists were quick to try and drive out all religion from society except in the very private sphere of the lives of its citizens.  Kuyper, in particular, was among those called to lead the Dutch Reformed Church in opposition to this effort to secularize society.  Palmer seems to recognize this trend in the United States, this effort to privatize religion and publicize what passes for reason, to the denigration of not just the public and private lives, but also the political lives of our citizenry in the United States.  Palmer simply and clearly states his thesis for the chapter, “In a society which lacks a healthy public life, both private and political life will struggle,” promising that this chapter will be as “spiritual” as the last chapter. 

 I think oftentimes it must be harder for those outside liturgical church traditions to understand the assumptions made by Palmer that “public and private interact, shape one another, and depend upon each other for their very existence.”  Often those in liturgical traditions are chastised by those in the so-called “public” life but also by those in the private non-liturgical life for their seeming glacial speed of movement on particular  “public” issues.  Churches which function at the best, I think it can be argued, understand that they not only must engage those in the world around them but also those who came before, and those who will follow after them in the faith.  We might say that our very ecclesiastical structures force those of us in liturgical churches to be private, and to be public, in order to worship and serve God well.  I am not a political scientist, but I find it no small wonder that as we have seen explosive growth in congregational and non-denominational churches in the spiritual world around us, we have seen a terrible decline in the country’s political life, as personified by our elected officials in DC.  I do not know that Palmer would agree totally that there is a 1-1 correlation, or a cause and effect relation, but I have no doubt he would be sympathetic as both seem to fall victims of the tyrannies he describes in this chapter. 

 Perhaps not uncoincidentally, Palmer uses as a negative impact on the public and political life the private life tyranny that causes people to focus to the point of obsession on protection of our homes, our properties, and our selves against home invasions.  He calls it a tyranny because those under its “rule” fail to see any way in which the public or the political realms can help with that needed protection.  Yet, if we engaged in the public life (anyone remember when we had neighbors who watched out for neighbors?) and the political life, we could help shape responses which would, in turn, lower our own anxieties and sense of isolation.  That, in turn, could lower our obsessive need for protection and maybe inform any current discussions regarding gun control. 

 Another example of the private tyranny chosen by Palmer is the raising of teenagers.  Again, such an endeavor is thought to be an exclusively private effort.  Yet, as Palmer correctly notes, teenagers are, for all the care and comfort offered in the private circle of those parents who genuinely try to parent their children, trying to discover for themselves where they fit in.  What we think of as teenage rebellion is really an effort on the part of teenagers to try and test themselves and the values which they have been taught, and to test the world against those values. 

 Where I find myself most in agreement with Parker in this chapter is his insistence that society has become therapeutic.  We have become quite adept at treating the symptoms.  Palmer cites Lasch to argue that we are really engaged in a non-stop celebration of the self.  We have become adept at treating the symptoms because we have lost the capacity to address the cause of any particular symptom.  And so we have become a society whose members are covered with band-aids, rather than healed or cured.  Though he may not intend it as such, I find his observation an indictment of the Church. 

 Ultimately, I agree with Palmer that the Church needs to be functioning well in order that the private, public, and political arenas can reach their fullest potential.  At its very best, the Church leads in all three spheres of life, and this should not be surprising.  If our Lord is sovereign over all things, it makes sense that His bride would be well equipped and empowered to engage in those human institutions and relationships which guide all our interactions.  Society loses when she, that is the Church, disengages from any of her responsibilities in these three spheres of human interaction.  We must be mindful, however, that we function in a society which holds dear, though it may not remember why, a separation of Church and State. 

 While the subject of Palmer’s writing may seem on a grand scale, the implementation of any plan to effect change must begin on the local level.  All church is locally expressed, even when it is part of a larger body of denominational expression.  What evils exist in our immediate communities?  Whom do we know in our area engaging in those activities, or being most impacted by those areas?  How can we serve them, or those around them, to God’s glory, that those engaged evil or impacted by the evil of others might turn, repent, and themselves serve God?  Who else locally shares our faith and our vision of honoring God that we might ally ourselves with them to fight the evil we see?  It make take a long time.  It may take an amazing commitment of resources on the part of those whom He has called together to help bring His healing into such lives.  As Palmer ends though, such committed service, such humility, protects the Church from overreaching on Her responsibilities and allows God’s reconciling love to fill the lives of those who make up her body.  In the end, if we truly want to honor God and impact the world around us, the path of the Cross is the most effective witness.  If God truly is sovereign as we claim He has revealed, it remains the best testimony to His love and the amazing reminder that His power is best expressed through the powerlessness of those whom He has called to serve and glorify Him.

Chapter 3 - A Spirituality of Public Life: The Stranger as Spiritual Guide

By Jean McCarthy

Rector, St. Mark’s Church, Des Moines

Former Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold wrote:  “We are baptized into solidarity with those we do not know.”  Parker Palmer explores what that solidarity means – to us personally, to our church, and to the world in The Company of Strangers.   The very recent tragedies at Sandy Hook School and the Aurora, CO movie theatre, as well as a government that seems paralyzed with partisan fighting has brought the urgency of our public conversations, the common good, and how to find our way through the weeds of these thorny issues in our public life.

Palmer names these things as opportunity “for a time like this” when we face the crises around us and see the necessity for a better way of being in this world.  A time like this requires discerning the movement of God in these crises.  A good crisis should never be wasted. 

Perhaps it could be a challenge to us to incorporate these insights into our five-year strategic plan for the Diocese of Iowa.  Who is the stranger for us for a time like this?  And how often do we not see the stranger in our midst?  

Palmer says that when we meet the stranger, we are engaged in public life.  The stranger shakes our everyday perceptions and expectations – and opens us to hear God’s Word, it calls us into newness.    Faith is not about going back to what the world (and often us) imagine to be a safe and secure place, and church is not a fortress to protect us from the world.  We are a pilgrim people, learning together on the journey.  Palmer says that we need the stranger and the stranger needs us.  We set each other free, see with new eyes, from a different perspective  Our public life is the place where God meets us and we find each other.

As a rector, I think about how we are a church in “a time like this”.  We often talk about hospitality at St. Mark’s.  Our American culture understands hospitality as civility, politeness and manners.  We certainly can use more of that, but the ancient meaning of hospitality is much more suited to our public life as a church, because if has to do with life and transformation into God’s life.  Those who live in the desert know that hospitality means life itself:  We cannot survive alone in the desert.  We are tied together not by proving ourselves or “getting with the right program”, but in our humanity.  In our humanity, we gift each other with newness, a fresh way of seeing, that exposes our fears and weaknesses, as well as our gifts and strengths.  It all hinges on a culture of respect and dignity for all persons, our Baptismal covenant.  It is not easy, but it is holy.   

What would church life look like if we learn to see past our differences to find the gift of diversity?  Can we appreciate the stranger (as Palmer defines it) without needing the stranger to become a version of ourselves?  We need respect, not friendship or intimacy.  The spirituality of public life is to call each other into holiness, to create a culture of compassion and love.  Palmer says that authentic public life is the bedrock of the Christian’s call.  Jesus lived this authentic public life.  He was not looking for friends or allies.  The spirituality of public life is to call each other into holiness, to create a culture of compassion and love.  Sounds like the stuff of a vestry retreat – especially in a church that mourns the loss of old-time members and has many strangers from very different places coming in the doors.  Our challenge is to see the humanity that joins us together and the diversity that gifts us.  Change is not always easy, but it is of God.

The public life at St. Mark’s of our Lenten Bible Study took this chapter this week and began to have a conversation about the imagery of the four Servant Songs in Isaiah.  In many ways we are all strangers to each other in this public life of bible study.  In that sharing of our private lives, we each contribute to and help shape our public life.  God is found in the midst of this, and we grow in faith and as a community.  It has already led us in this first week of Lent to new insights and ministry from the public discussion of immigration and the more lament over violence in our culture. 

Lent moves outside the church walls and enters our public life as a nation and as a world.  Never waste a good crisis.  I thank the bishop and diocesan staff for creating this forum and opportunity to meet the stranger in each other and challenge is to find our God and each other in the weeds of the world.  I look forward to unfolding more of the richness of this book in our sharing.

Shalom, Jean

Chapter 2 - Bishop Scarfe blogs

First of all I want to express my gratitude to the Diocesan staff for pursuing an idea I proposed that we use Parker Palmer’s The Company of Strangers as a Diocesan Lenten read. As I was landing in South Sudan, they were pursuing the idea, not letting it drop because I had moved on to something else. Rather they put together the various stages of this interactive blog, which is, I suppose our own Diocesan effort to create greater public space among us. 

Ironically I was entering a world where the elders and people still meet at the village gate, where clergy and lay leaders when assigned to a parish were expected to live within the compound of their new cure, and where heading to a local soccer game you moved through people’s yards or homesteads greeting them as you went, and even stopping to check on an old woman laying out on her bed mat in the open air because she was not feeling well that day. On leaving church, their custom is for the first out of church ( in our case the bishops) to greet one another then stand in line to greet the next person who then stood next to you to greet the next until a snake line formed around the church yard and everyone had quite literally greeted everyone else. These were people who were not all related, nor had they enjoyed the regular engagement of social interaction which might designate each other as friends, but were strangers of the kind that Parker Palmer describes and enjoyed public life in ways that he calls for us to renew.

Just as the people of Nzara, without running water or electricity, can nevertheless communicate through cell phones and laptops, and, to follow up on Lydia’s comments, even seek to be our Facebook friends. (They obtain electric power from solar cells or generators). So I believe it is not without possibility that we who are surrounded by more energy than we need to consume and have the opportunity for vast technological comforts, even smart homes, can equally learn to recover what our privatized world view has lost from a simpler society. 

Someone who had begun to read along in this diocesan wide Lenten read asked what did Palmer mean by “public life”? He answers that question in this second chapter. “At bottom,” he writes, ”the word public means all the people in a society, without distinction or qualification”.  He contrasts it with the encroaching influence of the ideology of intimacy, whereby even public identity is valued by what makes for warm relationships. This in turn creates in politics and public leadership the cult of personality and is the foundational principle which gives license to the sort of political advertisement and personal attacks disguised as such as we see in our election seasons. The loss of a sense of public life exposes us to a divided society that cannot see any benefit in the other. And in a statement which hits home in the post-Newtown debate on gun control and social violence Parker writes “if we envision the public as nothing more than a battleground between divergent self-interest, we create a dismal self-fulfilling prophecy. Given that image, it is small wonder that fewer and fewer people venture into public without being (figuratively and literally) well- armed”. 

Even as a so called “public figure” or a “person in public life” as your bishop, I am as guilty of sitting behind the isolation of my own private world as the next person. Unlike Lydia I don’t see social media as a way out for me, but I am convinced that only a discipline of public engagement –whether that means walking my neighborhood more often, or attending more public offerings when not “invited” or “expected to attend”, or even just walking the labyrinth at the Cathedral on a busy afternoon, or following my favorite sport with others live rather than only on TV. It is probably concern about the danger of this imbalance and the consequence of disconnect that drew me to the book in the first place.  I also saw some prophetic qualities as I believe Parker Palmer was laying out for us the issues that have now thirty years later turned our democratic process into a kind of stalemate.

The Church and the people of God have a significant part in the restoration of the public life in this full sense. Zechariah dreamed of a time when old men would be able to sit down and converse in open spaces and children could play in the city streets, all around them. We probably need to be creative about how we can make public life together. I think the Cathedral Rain Garden project and our various outdoor land projects offered to the public head in the right direction. But where are our conversation meeting places, and our simple mingling with others for spontaneous entertainment, stimulation, challenge and compassion; for our transfiguration moments when we can say “it was good we were in this place”? How often do we as the people of God get outside our private church dwellings and engage the public as community, and not just individually?

This Sunday we recognize that Jesus spent forty days in isolation preparing for the rest of his days – days which, once removed from the privacy of the wilderness, would be in public life the rest of the way until he would give himself as an offering for all. Public life is perhaps the way of the Cross, or the way God calls us to take up our cross and follow Christ?

+Alan Scarfe

Chapter 1 - Life Among Strangers

By Lydia Kelsey Bucklin

In Chapter 1 of Parker Palmer's The Company of Strangers, Palmer talks about the need for each of us to engage in a public life.  He does not mean a political life, which is the way the term is mostly used these days.  Rather, he is calling us to engage with the strangers among us in daily life.

I wondered, as I began reading, whether this book would be relevant to me.  (After all, it was written when I was still in diapers.)  Palmer reflects on a fragmented society, one where people walk past one another, getting lost in the chaos of the busy street.  He talks about the loneliness of modern life, which at the time was the 1980's.

So... Here we are 30 years later. Have things changed? 

In a way, of course, we are more connected because of the advances in technology.  I have more than 1,000 friends on Facebook, most I have met, maybe even for just a few minutes.  Classmates from the past 30 years, a young woman from Israel who my husband and I met on the airplane flying back from our honeymoon, the woman who sells me shoes at Von Maur, and those people whom I admire and want to feel connected to even if I may never meet them.  In my generation it is totally culturally acceptable to "friend" strangers, and it happens all the time. 

I had a strange encounter recently when I was in the hotel bar at a conference and was introduced to someone who I was already friends with on Facebook.  Has that ever happened to you?  It's really kind of bizarre, because I feel as though I know a lot about this person, but really am just meeting her for the first time. 

I went back and forth in my head as to whether to tell her we were already "friends," because I got the feeling she had no idea that we were.  Ultimately I chickened out.  I felt uncomfortable, because when it came down to it, I didn't actually know her.  Until that night at the bar I didn't know her mannerisms, or her laugh, or that she swore like a sailor (even before having a couple of cocktails).  But she'd been in my prayers.  When I heard about the loss of her dear friend through a Facebook feed months back I had intentionally held her in prayer. 

It's a strange public life we now interact with.

A few of my Facebook friends have posted that they're checking out of Facebook for Lent.  "See you in 40 days," they write.  And I know that giving up Facebook for them is a major sacrifice.  Perhaps it's what they feel called to do this holy season of Lent.  It's not my choice though.  Instead, I plan to embrace it more fully.   When people ask for positive thoughts or even prayer, I will be more intentional about reaching out and letting them know that I take that seriously.  The line between friend and stranger is getting a bit blurry as we move into this new way of being.   And I think that's a good thing.

An Introduction to the Book Study

In Bishop Alan Scarfe's February column in Iowa Connections, he called for members of the Episcopal Diocese of Iowa to join him in a Lenten book study of Parker Palmer's The Company of Strangers.  Here's Bishop Scarfe's reflection:

With Lent coming quickly upon us, I wonder if we could not do something special together this year?

We all have different ways of using this time for our inner spiritual renewal. It may be attending to a more regular worship or prayer schedule; it may mean participating in a local study group or deepening your Christian formation through group work or personal reading. But what if this year we took up the idea from the Diocesan Lifelong Learning Oversight Committee and shared one book across the Diocese for the forty days?

They called it “a Bishop’s book”, something suggested by me for us all.  I have such a book, and think it fits precisely with our theme of “Being God’s Witnesses in Iowa”.

It is probably no surprise to those of you who have been reading my writing recently because I have mentioned it several times, particularly in relation to the public violence of late. I refer of course to Parker Palmer’s The Company of Strangers.

Palmer writing in 1981 manages to outline the dangers of losing our vision of the public. Public is where the company of strangers encounter one another, and learn from our differences and our strangeness to one another. He contrasts this with a society bent on fear and flight, everyone retreating to their own private corners and creating a resultant objectification which sees the stranger more often as enemy or threat. He depicts how this is a vicious cycle that actually leads to real danger and vulnerability. Religion and government are privatized along with our social lives, and our communities are just a private as any other part of us. Intimacy is a good goal in our personal lives, but when this is also expected of our  institutions as well, we limit our boundaries and erode our capacity to engage the other with respect and openness.

To my mind he makes a lot of sense about our current social dynamics. His challenge is to the Church as one institution to regain its public place, a place which has always had from Old and New Testament witness a place for the gathering of strangers, and the recognition that even enemies are to be loved. So I invite you to read along with me as Lent begins. Will you join me? I am sure our communications people on staff can find a way for us to engage publicly in conversation together as we go along.

It so happens that I will be beginning my re-reading in South Sudan as we prepare to come home after a week’s visit to Nzara.

A small team from Iowa forms this first official visit of our new companionship. It is made up of my wife Donna, our Standing Committee Chair, Kathleen Milligan, and Torey Lightcap, chair of the Lifelong  Learning Committee of which I spoke.

Bishop Peni sees one benefit of the companionship to be our potential for mutual education. So he has asked us to share in his Lenten study for the clergy – the meaning of the imposition of ashes, and other resources for understanding the season of Lent. In turn of course, I realize that I am asking us to study what he and his people have not lost – that sense of public role as the people of God. I ask for your prayers for our journey, both to the South Sudan, and to our own public place and our company of strangers.  + Alan

Each week during Lent we will have a guest blogger, discussing sections of the book.  We encourage you to read along and add your own comments.

Look for the first post on Ash Wednesday, February 13.