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?"