God, Christ, the Holy Spirit, and Church IV

I was a member of the Community United Methodist Church of Guam in the early ’80s. We gathered at a former warehouse of either the Salvation Army or the SDA near the University campus. While there, we were host to all kinds of community assemblies and meetings, including the boys and girls scouts, and the strategy sessions of the teachers’ union while they defined their existence within the public school system. Our doors were never locked from the community, and the community never hesitated to protect our mutual interest in preserving the integrity of the community node.

Two decades later, I visited the Methodist congregation which had then built a million dollar structure in Mangilao, and at the Administrative Council meeting, one of the Church’s luminaries sidled up to me and whispered: “You know, when you were here, the community was a part of how we understood ourselves to be the Church; now, we are devising ways to keep them away from us, ever vigilant in the encroachment of the wily community into our facility.”

Not unlike other churches and religious buildings, the UMC got afflicted with the “edifice complex.” With the advent of litigations against religious bodies for all forms of sexual harassments, the rise of the “ecclesiastical edifice complex,” particularly its defense of its organization and cover-up of the crimes of personnel, intensified.

When we had the Marianas Resource Center in Oleai, we could count on cutting across the San Jose Parish Church to reach Beach Road. It seems that the Parish Council of late had seen it necessary to padlock the gate from pedestrian traffic, which now exists at the mercy of the stray dogs howling in the night.

The Christian Church in its first five centuries was a marriage between the messianic expectations of the Jews and the catholicity of Greco-Roman civilization. As noted earlier, when the court of Constantine favored the Christo Rei image of the emergent ecclesia, the great medieval synthesis of the city of God and the city of man would form the Holy Roman Catholic Church. This structure understood itself to be in possession of an absolute and everlasting truth. It did not fare well in maintaining the authority of authenticity within its wings, and the shifting sands of the dunes made any notion of truth’s infallibility relative.

The winds of change blew swiftly across the surface of Gaia, first with re-imaging the human view of the firmaments through Copernicus and Galileo, then shaking the tectonic social landscape with Darwin and Marx, and the relativity of all perceptions with Einstein and his cohorts. Nationalism in Europe questioned the divine rights of empire; Henry VIII of England and Luther of Germany questioned the primacy of the Roman pontiff. Guttenberg’s printing press saw the emergence of the scriptural paper pope, and the democratization of exegesis ushered the task of theology to the level of supply and demand in the marketplace.

The Bavarian Anschluss found favor with the German church and the Vatican did not pose serious complaints, so the resultant Holocaust rang the death knell of the Basilica across Trastaverde.

An old pontiff named John XXIII impressively opened the doors and windows to drive medieval cobwebs away, let the fresh air of the Rhone and wild winds of the Sahara invigorate the rooms of its internal castles but the structure took one step forward and two steps backward. Theologians like Hans Kung, Edward Schillebeeckx, Charles Curran, Matthew Fox and Leonardo Boff would incur the displeasure of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who is now Pope Benedict XVI. Contemporary female lay theologians like Elisabeth Schussler-Fiorenza, Rosemary Ruether and Uta Ranke-Heinemann were ostracized.

While the Vatican insists on the permanence of truth and its absolute possession of it so that those not in the communion are henceforth no longer to be referred to as “sister churches” or “separated brethren,” the WWII aftermath unleashed a radical rethinking (from head trip to gut sense) of the Christian faith associated with names like Bultmann and Bonhoeffer. Tillich and the Niebuhrs, that pockets of Christian resurgence circles are evolving into seeds of communal faith dedicated to realistic living and the authority of authenticity.

The question these days is not, “What is the Church?” Rather, when one discovers a life-giving process in a crisis of decay, when there is the sprouting of a community of care that broadly sustains a comprehensive regimen of well-being, where compassion is evident from womb to tomb in self to family, tribe to nationality, race to the specie, to the glorious life of the whole of creation—when all of that is evident, there and then one need not hesitate to label the doing and the deed, the Church.

“Church” as a verb, a dynamic activity, has had historic images that have been retained in common piety. The picture of the shepherd and the sheep around the reading of Psalm 23 is still capable of flooding tear ducts at the funerary. The valiant knight protecting the integrity of the manor still attracts the Dulcineas to covenants of service for God, king and country. Onward Christian soldiers still march the patriotism of the young to war. In our time, the picture of the social pioneer, cutting a wedge blade through the morass of social discrimination against ethnic and cultural minorities, and the marginalization of women, youth, same-sex unions, and the disabled, has retained the religious zeal and spiritual fervor of early causes in urban centers and the inner city.

The future calls for the ecozoic facilitator who will enable a planetary care beyond tree-hugging and John Muir’s Sierra Clubs, where the deconstruction of the toxicity of the modern military-industrial complex and its single-minded devotion to commercial corporate structures happens alongside the flowering of random acts of kindness in the creative construction of the verdant new.

It is worth repeating this vision of the paleontologist who said, “The task before us now, if we would not perish, is to shake off our ancient prejudices, and rebuild the earth.” When a group of people are doing that, regardless of the brand of garment they are wearing, I dare call them the Church. In which case, we may declare with the monks of old: Praise the Lord, Christ is Risen! He is risen, indeed!