Finding Our Footing

I took this picture from inside the ruins of a dwelling in Qumran where they discovered the Dead Sea Scrolls. It haunts me because it is like the caves we are in today, staying in but staring out.  It also haunts me because the outer world in the picture looks the same as the inner: dry, barren, beautiful in some ways, but bleak nevertheless.

I don’t want the world – or the Church for that matter – we emerge into to look the same, and I especially don’t want it to look bleak in its sameness.

If there ever was a time to create meaningful change, I think it is now.

The environment, for example, is screaming at us to look at what we have wrought and, at the same time, what new possibilities exist. We have a meat shortage just when the planet and worldwide health and well-being depend on more plant-based economies. We have a glut of oil shuttered away thanks to reduced demand, and the planet’s air and water is growing cleaner and more life-giving every day.  We have more people walking or running or cycling increasing their own, our own, and the planet’s health. No one advocates the suffering in this pandemic, but how much of it could have been prevented or ameliorated by focusing on the sacredness of all life, not just our own?

To begin creating more than just a barren desert in our lives – and our Church – I turned to questions posed by Krista Tippett, host of NPR’s On Being, in an email reply last week on the series ‘Living the Question.’ She noted first all that this virus is “uncovering” (which is the accurate translation of the original Greek word, apocalypse). Along with all the many good acts and amazing kindnesses and monumental courage uncovered, the virus has also exposed “all these holes and flaws and gaps in the web of our relationship to each other and how we have not structured our society around that…It has made the ways in which certain people fall through the cracks, in the way we structure our society, unbearable.” How heartbreakingly true that is.

It is true in a parallel sense, too.

For example, couldn’t, once and for all at this time, people see how this is also true of the Church? Like the desert, it can be beautiful, but it can also be dry, monotone, and barren, so often taking more than it gives. Couldn’t once and for all people see how they, as believers, are part of the priesthood and that it is ridiculous that those male presiders at Mass in front of cold empty pews are not the only ones who can minister, lead, or consecrate? Couldn’t they see that we of all genders bring the warmth and power and glory to the pews, that we are the ones bringing the bread and waters of change to the deserts?

Those are my questions, but back to Krista Tippett’s more profound question. She asks each of one of us to examine ourselves in light of this transition and decide:

“What is it teaching me that I actually want to integrate into the person I am on the other side of this?”

I think answering her question would also help answer our same question about our relationship to the Church and it to us: What have we learned about ourselves that we want to integrate into a new Church for a new day?  I would venture at least one answer: If nothing else, let’s create something new if only to preserve that which is valuable before it, too, is lost forever.