June 20, 2007
Churchiness
The Christian faith is more ironic than it is heroic.* There’s nothing like remembering that to help our stumbling along following the spin off a big church convention like last June 2006.
Irony always exposes pretense and foolishness and shows us the figure of the understated person (or event) that appears to be more than he or she (or it) is. On the other hand, the hero is the larger-than-life person (or event) that appears to be more than the human condition will bear: the champion, the invincible warrior, a lot of us clergy at all levels, the other pompous fools, eg Donald Duck. You can fill in your own list. Church conventions inevitably supply a long one.
On the other hand, the ironic person is given to understatement and is usually more than meets the eye. Think, maybe, Charlie Chaplin or Maya Angelou or Jimmy Carter. Anybody you’ve known whose unpretentiousness is downright annoying, who is a person whose humanity shines through like God’s having a field day, the more, in my opinion, congenial to the Christian faith. Our new PB-elect Katharine Jefferts Schori comes across as this kind of person. It’s no wonder she’s already scaring the purple socks off the pontiffs.
Just keeping these things in mind helps prevent — or maybe just stall — the crazy-making patterns church decisions so often take. Why we have to be so damn serious about ourselves never ceases to amaze me. Of course, it’s not only churchiness that provokes such behavior, it’s mostly everybody at one time or another. One needs only to look around the international geopolitical scene to observe how this so dominates as ultimately to kill thousands, obliterate a lot of real estate, and literally poison the rest of the environment.
The apparently inevitable ecclesiastical puffery that affects us as we go about our daily tasks it is that cripples our vocation to deflate, not to inflate and to contribute to this sort of thing. There’s no better place to start than with an honest look at the gospel’s irony viz-a-viz our own heroicism. The Baptismal Covenant stands on square one ready to lead us into this sort of search.
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*Charles Rice, “Eikon and Eiron: Faith as Imagination,” St Luke Journal of Theology, Sept 1989, pp 249-256
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