Tilting or Toppling?

I’ve seen this painting many times at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and each time it has enthralled me. I look at it and think, this is my church – unsteady, twisted, constricted, shrunken, tired. Then I come another time and think, this is my church – quietly beautiful, a refuge and sanctuary, and, if you look closely at the upper left corner, perhaps a church gently tilting to let in the light of a new day.

I have artist, Robert Delaunay, and his painting of the church of Saint-Séverin to thank for these insights. To go with them, I add a few of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s from Braiding Sweetgrass: “Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy.” I think a wounded Church is doing the same.

Expanding on that last quote, I have found so much of what Kimmerer says about how to effect positive change to our wounded natural world applicable to our wounded Church. She asks us to begin – and I think this applies to attending to the Church as to the natural world – by forestalling despair. “Despair,” Kimmerer says, “is paralysis. It robs us of agency.” It makes us throw up our hands and walk out or away instead of remaining engaged and committed to what she labels as despair’s antidote: Restoration. “Restoration offers concrete means by which humans can once again enter into positive, creative relationship with the more-than-human world (and Church), meeting responsibilities that are simultaneously material and spiritual.”

So many of us, including me, have so often contemplated the Church’s responsibilities, but how about ours?

I love the analogy she uses to describe our tasks. From the natural world (and also from the Church, I proport), she says, we have so often enjoyed a banquet. But now that meal has ended: the table is messy and disordered, and there are only scraps left on our plates. It’s time to do the onerous work of clearing away the debris and washing up the dishes so that new meals, new sources of nourishment and enrichment, can be set out. This clean up part of restoration can, of course, seem daunting, but Kimmerer reminds us: “Doing dishes has gotten a bad rap, but everyone who migrates to the kitchen after a meal knows that that’s where the laughter happens, the good conversations, the friendships. Doing dishes, like doing restoration, forms relationships.”

I substitute “Church” for “land” in this next quote: “As we care for the Church, it can once again care for us. Restoring Church without restoring relationship is an empty exercise. It is relationship that will endure and relationship that will sustain the restored Church.” In restoring by transforming the Church – of all and for all – the people, we could restore our relationship with it as well as with each other. As we begin to champion and appreciate a sense of reciprocity between us and our changing Church born of humility on both sides, we might just gain, not only our long-desired awaking of responsibility on its part toward gender justice and other issues, but a newly created and mutual respect as well.

You can see I, like Robin Kimmerer, unwaveringly “choose joy over despair” … or, if not joy, at least hope. I guess you can also see I am still calling for the established Church and us to be equal but not separate. For now anyway – I may change my mind.

Is the Church, like the one in the painting, actually tilting to let in new light? Are we part of that new light? Joanna Macy says: “Action on behalf of life transforms. Because the relationship between self and the world is reciprocal, it is not a question of first getting enlightened or saved and then acting.” It is, instead, our reciprocal acts to enlighten and save the land – and our Church – that ultimately may enlighten and save us.