June 21, 2005
Regime
When the people in the world of the Bible experienced what they called principalities and powers, they were discerning the actual spirituality at the center of the political, economic, and cultural institutions of their time.
Few today ever consider spirituality either that way or in those places as anything other than a vacuous synonym for religion, a more or less irrelevant matter left to its practitioners. A further phenomenon is to presume that if it’s spiritual, it must therefore be good, thus to overlook the daemons that lurk not only in our societies, but also in ourselves, for they, too, are “spiritual.” That we allow all this to happen is to our ultimate peril.
But we allow it anyway, even encourage it in our public education systems with their disdain for the libraries and the humanities and the arts and the world’s religions. That we do so has perhaps never been more obvious and recklessly careless than it is today.
All this leaves an empty space in the way we live, a space into which rush the daemons of denial and grandiosity, pleasure and distraction, and whatever else is at hand, thus rendering impotent the possibility of any creative stewardship of our lives.
Something of that order is happening now not only in the Middle East but in our own midst, as well. A vast miasma is emploding around us, and we seem helpless to know what, if anything, to do about it, save respond in violence. This, I suspect, is a result not only of our misunderstanding, just plain ignorance, and, even worse, indifference to how these spiritual energies, these principalities and powers, work in all societies.
Will we, as do so many, surrender to the usual crippled understanding of spirituality as merely another organized and irrelevant religion? Or will we welcome God’s Holy Spirit to renew us again as church, letting that presence fill the space in our lives, feed our energies, spur our enthusiasm, encourage and direct us, give us confidence and hope? We can stand here in our religious puffery or we can embrace Holy Spirit in hand and heart. Then go out into the marketplace, into the crowd, into the swirl of pilgrims seeking God. The Spirit did not fashion for the disciples a nest, where they would feel safe and comfortable. The Spirit set them on fire and drove them into the wilderness of the streets.
Dan Corrigan was one of our church’s more devoted and exciting bishops. In the old 1928 prayer book days, there was no “dismissal” at the end of the Eucharist. So he would stand at the altar, pronounce the closing Blessing in all its solemnity, pause for a moment, and then, in his great, booming voice, literally shout at us what we need so to hear today, “Get up! Get out! And get lost!”