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