[Sundaycommunity] Thoughts

[Mr. Gillis]

Thank you Brenda, a fantastic reminder in this age of cynicism!  We too are
all complicit in sin. All we have to do is look at the climate emergency.
Once again a deep call to humility and metanoia!

Peace


Greg


On Fri, Aug 6, 2021 at 2:14 PM Dave Snelgrove via Sundaycommunity <
sundaycommunity at lists.integralshift.ca> wrote:

> A terrific read!!  Worth re-reading.  Thank you, all responsible.
> Rosemary Gray-Snelgrove
>
> On Fri, Aug 6, 2021 at 8:30 AM Brenda Holtkamp via Sundaycommunity <
> sundaycommunity at lists.integralshift.ca> wrote:
>
>> 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
>> _______________________________________________
>> Sundaycommunity mailing list
>> Sundaycommunity at lists.integralshift.ca
>>
>> http://lists.integralshift.ca/listinfo.cgi/sundaycommunity-integralshift.ca
>>
> _______________________________________________
> Sundaycommunity mailing list
> Sundaycommunity at lists.integralshift.ca
> http://lists.integralshift.ca/listinfo.cgi/sundaycommunity-integralshift.ca
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.integralshift.ca/private.cgi/sundaycommunity-integralshift.ca/attachments/20210806/0caf8e45/attachment.html>