[Sundaycommunity] Thoughts

[Brenda Holtkamp]

An interesting read….

W H Y  S T A Y  I N  T H E  C H U R C H ?
J U L Y 1 2 , 2 0 2 1 - Author - R O N R O L H E I S E R , OMI
Several weeks ago after giving a lecture at a religious conference, the
first question from the audience was this one: How can you continue to stay
in a church that played such a pivotal part in setting up and maintaining
residential schools for the indigenous people of Canada? How can you stay
in a church that did that?
The question is legitimate and important. Both in its history and in its
present, the church has enough sin to legitimize the question. The list of
sins done in the name of the church is long: the Inquisition, its support
for slavery, its role in colonialism, its link to racism, its role in
thwarting women’s rights, and its endless historical and present
compromises with white supremacy, big money, and political power. Its
critics are sometimes excessive and unbalanced, but, for the most part, the
church is guilty as charged.
However, this guilt isn’t unique to the church. The same charges might be
leveled against any of the countries in which we live. How can we stay in a
country that has a history of racism, slavery, colonialism, genocide of some
of its indigenous peoples, radical inequality between its rich and its
poor, one that is callous to desperate refugees on its borders, and one
within which millions of people hate each other? Isn’t it being rather
selective
morally to say that I am ashamed to be a Catholic (or a Christian) when the
nations we live in share the same history and the same sins?
Still, since the church is supposed to be leaven for a society and not just
a mirror of it, the question is valid. Why stay in the church? There are
good apologetic answers on this, but, at the end of the day, for each of
us, the answer has to be a personal one. Why do I stay in the church?
First, because the church is my mother tongue. It gave me the faith, taught
me about God, gave me God’s word, taught me to pray, gave me the
sacraments, showed me what virtue looks like, and put me in contact with
some
living saints. Moreover, despite all its shortcomings, it was for me
authentic enough, altruistic enough, and pure enough to have the moral
authority to ask me to entrust my soul to it, a trust I’ve not given any
other communal
entity. I’m very comfortable worshipping with other religions and sharing
soul with non-believers, but in the church in which I was raised, I
recognize home, my mother tongue.
Second, the church’s history is not univocal. I recognize its sins and
openly acknowledge them, but that’s far from its full reality. The church
is also the church of martyrs, of saints, of infinite generosity, and of
millions of
women and men with big, noble hearts who are my moral exemplars.  I stand
in the darkness of its sins; but I also stand in the light of its grace, of
all the good things it has done in history.
Finally, and most important, I stay in the church because the church is all
we’ve got! There’s no other place to go. I identify with the ambivalent
feeling that rushed through Peter when, just after hearing Jesus say
something
which had everyone else walk away from him, Peter was asked, “do you want
to walk away too?” and he (speaking for all the disciples) replied: “We’d
like to, but we have no place else to go. Besides we recognize that,
despite everything, you still have the words of everlasting life.”
In essence, Peter is saying, “Jesus, we don’t get you, and what we get we
often don’t like. But we know we’re better off not getting it with you than
going any place else. Dark moments notwithstanding, you’re all we’ve got!”
The church is all we’ve got! Where else can we go?  Behind the expression,
I am spiritual, but not religious (however sincerely uttered) lies either
an invincible failure or a culpable reluctance to deal with the necessity of
religious community, to deal with what Dorothy Day called “the asceticism
of church life”. To say, I cannot or will not deal with an impure religious
community is an escape, a self-serving exit, which at the end of the day is
not very helpful, not least for the person saying it. Why? Because for
compassion to be effective it needs to be collective, given the truth that
what we dream alone remains a dream but what we dream with others can
become a reality. I cannot see anything outside the church that can save
this world.
There is no pure church anywhere for us to join, just as there is no pure
country anywhere for us in which to live. This church, for all its
checkered history and compromised present, is all we have. We need to own
its faults
since they are our faults. Its history is our history; its sin, our sin;
and its family, our family – the only lasting family we’ve got.


D
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.integralshift.ca/private.cgi/sundaycommunity-integralshift.ca/attachments/20210806/acf3fe29/attachment-0001.html>