Chapter 9 - Ms. Meg Wagner

Chapter 9 – Hope for the Public

It is fitting that we end our book study on The Company of Strangers with his final chapter, “Hope for the Public” as we enter Holy Week and our Easter season of hope. What does his hope look like now, 31 years later? What does ours look like?

In reflecting on this chapter and the book as a whole, I was drawn back to Lydia’s and others’ thoughts about social media. Lydia and I work with a generation of youth who have a much different view of “public” and “private” than we did growing up – and worlds different than the view our parents had. When grocery store “discount” tags came out that could track food purchases to improve marketing for stores, my father was apoplectic about the invasion of his privacy. Now the public/private line is all but eliminated. Everything from what you are eating, who you are dating and how it is going, who you are mad at, how you are struggling, and what gives you joy is all shared in the public sphere, through social media.

Marketers saw the worth of social media instantly, recognizing that a huge door was opening into potential consumers’ private lives. Churches have been much slower to embrace this way of connecting with parishioners. Facebook and Twitter have actually become huge tools in my ministry, and in many ways they are doorways into several of the things Palmer talks about in Chapter 9.

That “our culture supports spiritual and political forms of self-centeredness” (Palmer, 153) is still very true. What passes for hospitality in our public lives often is rooted in the marketplace, is focused on consumption or entertainment, and is all about what appeals to personal desire, choice, and taste. Between living in subdivisions as opposed to neighborhoods and working longer hours, our homes have increasingly become places of solitude and private retreat instead of hospitality.

How are we called to be the church in the world in a time like this? How do we move beyond society’s practices of hospitality, beyond a consumerist mentality, beyond being bland or generically welcoming or nice, and into a more deep and genuine expression of the ministry of hospitality as part of God’s church here in this place?

I believe that social media can be an important part of how we do that. Because of Facebook and Twitter I have a view into the personal weekday lives of people who go to my church. I know what has happened to people during the week and so I know what to ask about and who may be in crisis. I know who might need meals delivered because a family member is in the hospital, who should be on our prayer list, and whose accomplishments we should be celebrating. The people who use social media at my church remember birthdays and anniversaries, pray for each other, and find little ways to care for each other that they might never have known about had it not been posted online. My experience of church on Sunday is deepened by the engagement I have had with parishioners throughout the week. I see social media as a tool for deeper personal and public engagement and ministry with people, but not a replacement for it.

Palmer discusses solitude and prayer in this chapter and suggests that the church affirm, “vocally and vigorously, that time spent in solitary prayer and contemplation is just as valuable to the church’s mission as time spent meeting with committees or preparing pot-luck suppers” (Palmer, p. 157).  He writes that the church must be a place where the fruits of prayer and contemplation can be shared with each other. I agree and in our digitally connected world, I would push his ideas further. What if we had a vision of church that people felt they could connect to 24/7, that consistently affirmed the importance of personal prayer and contemplation? If the line between solitude and an intimate community of prayer and faith never felt further away from people than their phone or computer?

Our diocesan youth often feel that kind of connection with each other because of technology. Through text, video chat, Snapchat, Facebook, and Twitter they can find support, laughter, and caring community pretty much any time of day. At my son’s high school, a group of boys took that idea even further and they use Twitter to support and encourage their classmates daily and combat bullying. @WestHighBros was featured on Good Morning America recently for their efforts and I’ve been thinking a lot recently about why more of our churches aren’t finding creative ways to minister to people in their daily lives the way these young men have.

Palmer begins and ends the book with Thomas Merton, “whose inward search was guided and formed by a community of faith” (Palmer, 164). My hope is that my church will nurture people’s inward spiritual life by continuing to reach outward, stretching the bounds of that faith community to include all the ways that people connect to each other today in their daily lives. It is what we practice each week in worship as we participate in God’s hospitality and welcome others to the table. We come together, not as individual consumers of worship, but as full participants in the shared work of the liturgy as we pray and sing together, confess our brokenness, pass the peace and share the Eucharist. Together in common worship we are both guests and hosts of God’s abundant welcome. My hope is of a church that carries God’s abundant welcome into the world all the time, and in as many ways as possible.

 

Meg Wagner serves as the Director of Christian Formation at Trinity Episcopal Church in Iowa City and is a postulant for the priesthood in the Diocese of Iowa. She is working on her MDiv through the distributed learning program at Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. 

Chapter 8 - The Rev. Patricia Johnson

So what do I make of Parker Palmer’s message in The Company of Strangers?  First, he lays out in detail the isolation and other negative effects of individualism and consumerism in modern culture, which has resulted in fewer and fewer public spaces where people can meet each other and maintain the sense of relatedness to “the stranger” and to find “comfort and at-homeness in the world”.  He also discusses a Christian spirituality that reflects this increased individualism, a piety and a notion of what it means to be church that compounds the isolation and diminishes our willingness to seek and build community.

Palmer then makes a convincing case that now more than ever, as congregations and people of faith grapple with the future of the church and it’s relevancy in our time, Christians are in a unique position to be a bridge between the private and public realms and to help people walk across that growing gap.  The church could share its vision of discipleship that lives as a gathered community who witnesses not just to the world, but in the world. 

But Palmer is not naïve.  It is especially fitting, as we move through these last days of lent, to consider what he has to say about the challenges of reclaiming our place as church in the world, where conflict and risk are not only possible, but guaranteed.  He suggests that a church that ministers in the public realm is “a school of the Spirit” a place where God is continually drawing us out of ourselves into a larger life.  That these places are where the Spirit offers us “holy teachings” intended to show us where life really is.  Faith lived in community contains the paradox of suffering and joy, of death and life.

The book contains examples of how the church might create and support public spaces.  For instance, to work with local leaders to increase green spaces, or start community gardens, areas that will bring the public together.  Or for a congregation to help connect existing institutions, encouraging creative ways to bring people together.  Another is to engage in a neighborhood survey, to begin the work of building stronger relationships right where a church lives.      

It might not sound “like church” at first, or it may seem too difficult a task, especially if you are a congregation with diminishing numbers and resources.  But I wonder if Palmer is correct, that the “school of the Spirit” is leading us into new “holy teachings”. 

I offer a personal story.  Just this past September, a few of us started a local non-profit, The Micah Project.  It was to be a one-stop ministry center where participating congregations could pool their resources to help fill in the gaps by providing emergency financial assistance and resource referral services.  However, before we even opened the doors of the center we discovered that God had a much larger vision. 

In August, with the encouragement of an ELCA Community Developer, the Micah Project hosted a daylong meeting to talk about the growing problem of poverty.  Much to our surprise over 60 leaders representing business, government, social service, and faith-based organizations came together.  The conversation was quite frank and people shared openly.  Two months later we held a second meeting.  Again, they came together, this time to seek solutions to the problems they had identified.  Before the day was over the walls of the meeting space were covered in the “Miracles” they hoped to realize.

Then in January we convened for a third time to develop an action plan based on the “Miracles”.  We knew that community organizing like this was going to require a high level of trust, especially between organizations that often found themselves in competition for scarce resources.  It would also require a willingness to relinquish some things that had been important to each of them.  To our amazement the same community leaders came out again; and with much enthusiasm, and in a very short amount of time, found they had a common vision.  Now, under the banner of Together Siouxland we have a written action plan with the following projects:

• Build more safe, decent, affordable housing
• Design a centralized community resource campus for all social services to reside
• Innovative entrepreneurial and vocational programs
• Development of a coordinated computerized intake / referral system

I share this because over the weeks since Together Siouxland began work on these projects I have thought a lot about what took place.  What was it that brought these people together?  What created the passion and enthusiasm that got them to agreement so quickly?  What did this process of Christian community development have to offer?

It couldn’t have been simply our goal of alleviating poverty.  Most of us had spent our careers addressing poverty.  I believe that what I witnessed was something like what Palmer describes in his book, that these people were seeking a safe place, common ground, where they could express the spirit that had always been present in their day-to-day work.  The Micah Project did nothing more complicated than provide this space and begin a conversation. Yet, the results could not have been more powerful.

As Palmer says, “Perhaps the greatest contribution the church can make to the renewal of our public life is to help people feel the need to revive our sense of commonality, and cultivate the openness of heart which will allow God to raise up a new symbol of that reality in our midst.

Faithfully,

Deacon Pat       

Chapter 5 - The Rev. Kathryn Campbell

Chapter 5

Teaching the Public Life (1):  Scarcity and Abundance

Ironic that I begin writing about our relationship with the public realm by apologizing to the readers of these blogs for writing this piece so late.  I was supposed to submit it by Feb. 27 and it's now March 15.  I'm plenty distressed and embarrassed, and highly apologetic but who else, I wonder, noticed or was distressed?  Who are the readers? 

As Lydia noticed, the electronic public is even more mysterious than the people we meet on the street.  Palmer's delicious critique of the false intimacy with which the media bombard us is accurate, even though he made it in the 80s.  Why should we care or even want to know personal details about entertainers, sports stars, and miscellaneous “celebrities?”  Yet we can hardly escape them.  This is a different world, all right, so how are Christians to respond?

Thinking of the church as a training ground for the public world might be another way of speaking about mission.  Even tiny congregations are not necessarily hotbeds of intimacy, while larger ones clearly are part if their members' public lives.  By extension, the primary public our members meet in our communities could become a training ground for our electronic meetings.  In our communities, our public is present and physical.  If we insult someone we know it immediately because of the look on their face.  Likewise, if we lie, especially in small towns, our face usually betrays us and they probably know the truth anyway.  Or they think they do, which is even tastier.  We don't get away with much

But on line?  New rules may mean that people can get acquainted by lying and knowing that the other person is lying, too.  But when they meet, they sometimes end up marrying well.  Compatibility will out?  Perhaps the truth of the mystery person's nature comes out even in whatever fiction they put on line.  Perhaps their training in their face-to-face public lives carry over.  And that can be shaped by the Church.

For Palmer, our notions of scarcity and abundance are artificial.  Fear of scarcity in one part of the globe leads to hoarding of various kinds by the wealthy which increases the poverty of those who live within scarcity.  The entertainment industry saps individual creativity by manipulating audiences to buy more of their products.  Power and money manipulate and lure us.  “In the midst of material abundance, our lives have become cramped and pinched.”  Everyone loses.

Doubtless Palmer writes with the hope that changing minds and hearts is the way out of the constriction of our lives.  Certainly, overcoming our smallness and fears is a major motive for seeking religious growth.  Call it cramped and pinched life?  Call it weakening of human values?  Call it sin?

But our Lord can and does redeem it all and that is what we are called to live and proclaim.  If we take God's rich gifts to heart, our private and public lives will grow richer and deeper.  Even the social media.

Chapter 7 - The Rev. John Thorpe

The Rev. John Thorpe 

Chapter 7 of Parker Palmer's The Company of Strangers.

Practicing the Public life

Palmer's main point in chapter seven seems to be that the church would be a great deal more useful to the public if it looked less like a family and more like a monastery. 

There are many objections we could make to this: that that familial metaphor has its roots in Holy Scripture, that family is really the place where we are forced to encounter the wild and wooly Other, that the monastery is an impractical model...   

In fact, it seems to me that Palmer succeeds rather in convincing us of the opposite of his point: that the public is useful to the church as the place where we can learn how to be civil toward the stranger, which skill we ought then to apply within the Body of Christ. 

But my chief objection to the main point of chapter seven lies in my objection to the main point of the entire project - I'm not convinced it is the church's function to be useful to the public, nor indeed useful at all. 

We helpfully feed people and give them drink: an Orthodox theologian has said that people may eat and eat and drink and drink and still go to Hell. We serve a Christ who could have been supremely useful to his world, either as a revolutionary, or an ethicist, or a bread-multiplier - yet He consistently resisted these narrow definitions of His mission.   His real usefulness was in his Word and Sacrifice, bread-breaking not bread-making. His real usefulness was in being thrown out as un-useful, mis-recognized as dysfunctional to the world's oppressive systems and the self's oppressive sins. It turns out that the soul, since it is immortal, is more important than the body; that man does not live by bread alone; and that however useful the church may be in rebuilding a sense of healthy public life, we remember from the experience of civic-minded Rome that it will forever also impishly be urging its members to hate father and mother for His sake, eating flesh and drinking blood, and generally creating a prudish inconvenience to the heathen public.

Nevertheless, Palmer's argument has much to recommend it, if he will not mind a taste of his own medicine and allow his content to be scrutinized for its usefulness alone.  In today's Episcopal world, an effort at Palmer's community life would not go amiss. He speaks compellingly of being in community with those not merely with whom we disagree, but whom we positively dislike! He speaks compellingly of the discipline of the majority to honor a minority that it dislikes, and the discipline of the minority to continue to be part of the whole, even if this is an uncomfortable experience for all. 

I particularly appreciate Palmer's discussion of the consensus method of decision-making, how it mirrors the true nature of the Body of Christ much better than a majority-rule system.  In the Spirit of Lenten self-examination, we might consider our own Diocesan diocesan convention as we read this delightful paragraph: 

Consensus means that no decision is made until everyone in the group is willing to go along with it. That definition alone is enough to terrify people who have no experience of the method, for it sounds time-consuming, laborious, and ultimately impossible. How much more efficient to line up the votes and count the winning side! But such objections to consensus are rooted in an assumption that the church must make decisions, no matter what the cost; that somehow "decisions" are products which the church must turn out. Again, I suggest the image of the church as a "school of the Spirit." Consensus may result in fewer decisions more slowly taken, but in the process people will learn more about themselves, each other, and the God in our midst...

Think now of our Convention several years ago, when a resolution about the Judicial Retention vote was brought to the floor (just one example of many that could be brought). Our diocese actually has much to be proud of in the respectful debate that happened that day, and the way that relationships were maintained and even strengthened because of it. But, in the end, a resolution was passed by the "efficient" method of "lining up the votes" and declaring a winning "side", ostensibly speaking with the prophetic voice of the whole. The majority could happily turn its attention elsewhere, but the minority's conscience had to remain violated. Some of the minority quietly wondered why we even try (would Palmer say that is healthy?). If we have such profound (and it really is) personal charity toward each other, could we not find some way, when the prophetic voice of the whole Body in theology or politics is at stake, to create a more charitable process along the lines of what Palmer suggests? 

Budgets and such need to be passed in efficient ways, perhaps - we need to pay bills and salaries.  But when we are discerning the voice of the Spirit through us as a body, ought we to speak with anything less than the whole Body? 

Ought we to use majority rule and do violence to the consciences of our own? How often in Holy Scripture does the Spirit speak through the majority, and how often through the one or the two? Granted, if we used the consensus method, we would make fewer such pronouncements: but the ones we make would be absolutely, from top to bottom, the 100% authentic discernment of the Episcopal Diocese of Iowa.   

Could we be comfortable with the slower pace of change this would bring, if it came with greater charity? Could we be comfortable in the "school of the Spirit?"