When I was in seminary, I was once confronted by a professor in a worship committee meeting. The professor in question was of a convinced “low church” persuasion and knew that I considered myself to be Anglo-Catholic. At the time, I was leading a weekly Evensong service in the seminary chapel, for which I played organ and conducted a choir. The custom for the Tuesday Evensong service, which had begun before I ever entered seminary, was to pray the Angelus in conjunction with it. In a rather unexpected and argumentative tone, the professor announced to the entire worship committee that at some point in the past, it had been decided by seminary officials that the Angelus would not be recited on campus. This was news to me, and I was surprised by it. But as the organizer of the Evensong service, I became the momentary target in the professor’s verbal attack against practices considered too “Catholic.”
I was a bit embarrassed at the time, to tell the truth. I also felt wounded and unjustly accused. Those were initial, emotional responses. In hindsight, I realized that those responses arose out of an immature self-pity on my part. I later reflected on the incident with the seminary’s liturgy professor, who shared my Catholic persuasion in liturgical and theological matters. In that conversation with him, I suddenly remembered the words of St. Paul in 1 Corinthians 8. In this passage, Paul addresses members of the church in Corinth about divisions over food sacrificed to idols in the pagan temples. Paul acknowledges that, of course, so-called idols have no power over the living God, so eating food sacrificed to idols can’t, in and of itself, be spiritually harmful. But then he goes on to say that there are still some whose conscience is “weak,” who do not fully understand the truth about the harmlessness of all food. Paul says to the Corinthians, “take care that this liberty of yours does not somehow become a stumbling block to the weak. For if others see you, who possess knowledge, eating in the temple of an idol, might they not, since their conscience is weak, be encouraged to the point of eating food sacrificed to idols? So by your knowledge the weak brother or sister for whom Christ died is destroyed. But when you thus sin against brothers and sisters and wound their conscience when it is weak, you sin against Christ. Therefore, if food is a cause of their falling, I will never again eat meat, so that I may not cause one of them to fall” (8:9-13).
Maybe, I told my liturgy professor, that with regard to the recitation of the Angelus at Evensong, I should heed the advice of St. Paul. As much as I loved the Angelus, if its presence in worship offended a brother in Christ for some reason that I couldn’t understand, we should dispense with it. In matters that are adiaphora (not essential to salvation), Christian charity demands sacrificing one’s own desires or comfort for the good of the whole. I tell this story not to laud my own behavior but to bear witness to how the Holy Spirit taught me something in a time when I was feel aggrieved and sorry for myself.
1 Corinthians 8 is classic Pauline theology. We, as members of Christ’s body, are members of one another. When one member of the body grieves, another grieves. When one rejoices, we all rejoice. And yet, there will also be moments when each of us must take the path of discomfort (or even grief) for the good of the whole. In doing so, we choose not a path of self-inflicted suffering, but a path that forms us towards the ultimate Good, which is participation in the life of God. This understanding of the inextricable ties that bind us to one another may be the Church’s great gift to the world.
I am increasingly troubled by the inability (unwillingness?) of those outside the Church to live as though they were bound together in some kind of fellowship and harmony. I recently listened to a radio broadcast in which the interviewer was attempting to have a productive conversation with someone who shared a different perspective, and within a few minutes, the conversation completely broke down. My heart ached over this. A central teaching of Christianity is that we can never become so entrenched in our own beliefs or convictions that we fail to consider those of others who think differently than we do. This is no call to a milquetoast “happy medium,” nor is it a call to make peace with oppression (to use words from our prayer book). It’s quite simply a call to humility in which all of us must be open to the fact that we could be wrong or our views could be expanded or shifted.
In today’s climate of division and rancor, our particular calling as the Church is to be a place where we exist without defenses. The one thing that unites each of us when we are standing before God’s altar is that we have nothing to hide. God knows it all, as the Collect for Purity reminds us. This utter nakedness before God’s majesty is what unites us, not divides us. The Church is not asked to be a club of like-minded people. She is called to be a diverse array of people who may disagree and view the world differently but who practice the Christian virtues of faith, hope, and love. We agree to love, not hate, our enemies and to offer kind words in place of ugly ones and to practice forgiveness instead of resentment. We believe that with God anything is possible and that we have no reason to despair. Our faith lies in God who is far greater than our human brokenness. We may not see eye to eye on all controversial issues, but if the core values of the Gospel are held dear, the Eucharistic sacrament will be our source of unity in Christ. And bit by bit, our hard edges and stubborn ways will be conformed more into the likeness and image of God. That conformity is God’s doing, not our own.
In Christ, there has been a Copernican revolution of the soul, where all our lives revolve around Christ, rather than the other way around. And although we may be united in our focus on the living Lord who comes for our healing and salvation, our differences persist as part of the richness of Christ’s body on earth. May we so strive to live faithfully that our own practices and desires cause no member of the Body to fall. This requires great humility. It requires love. Above all, it requires yearning for the mind of Christ.
Yours in Christ,
Father Kyle