Beyond Guilt

   What does it mean to be forgiven? To be absolved? We, the great white Americans, struggle with these questions because we sit on the top. Engulfed in the technological society that we are born into, that rests upon the labour of people we will never meet, we are supremely alienated from those who fund our lives. It is a rare and challenging
thing to confront that privilege and to repent of it.
       There are those who repel against this society, but their rebellion plays to the stage of it, falling into the trap of identity, of self-definition that is just another form of alienation that prevents coming to know “the other,” the one beyond the self. Jacque Ellul, the French theological, has written of how Columbus’ voyage to America has now had such enormous impact across the globe that no one can claim neutrality in the continuing story of colonialism.
       We know this. We know we are not neutral in the World and we yearn for some way in which to passover our guilt for being so intertwined with the collective acts of destruction that our society, day and night, engineers. So paralyzed is the individual in this society that apathy is his only refuge, all holiness becomes profane through the vehicles of South Park and Family Guy; nihilism reigns supreme and we are safe in a meaningless world bent on its destruction.
       The Church feels this heaviness upon itself, and it too is paralyzed in the atmosphere of apathy where our morality is defined negatively, where you are a good person so far as you don’t hurt anybody else and let the guy in the seat next to you listen to his i-thing and remain undisturbed. If you have the good will to take your blue box out to the curb, you’ve broken mold; sainthood is around the corner. Such are our present day standards; the bar is around our knees.
       In Canada where we feel a special burden of guilt is around the residential schools. A collective shame hangs around us. It has become the drunken relative that we refuse to speak of, or when the subject arises it is as projection: something that was done by intuitions that we have no connection or control over and hence bare no responsibility. We are absolved by our non-membership.
       Thus it is with a mixed sense of pride and dread that I can tell you I am proud to belong to a Church that is repenting of its mistakes in the Residential Schools. At the beginning of December I attended one of the Truth and Reconciliation Council meetings that have been ongoing in Canada this past year. At these meetings Residential School survivors, Church folk, and government folk share what they know of the history of residential schools.
       It was a weekend that was spent in the confessional booth; the intimacy and dread hung in the air as we tried to unburden ourselves of past misdoings. It is an exhausting thing to hear confession, to listen with your whole being and allow the other person’s soul to be lightened, but it is part of the joy of service that comes after such trail. And so we heard the stories of men who, in their fifties, were finally able to speak of shame of having been abused by the same pedophile, of a granddaughter who was an alcoholic and who’s brother sexuality assaulted her, inheriting the abuse their father endured at the school, but never spoke off. I saw church men break under the weight of repentance, and glimpses of rage in-between the tears.
       To me the whole gathering was a lesson on the nature of sin, and I say that meaning to go beyond the “naughty list” mentality we carry around us and speaking more towards the other side of sin: that it can be cured by its repentance. Jesus is a rehab councilor: He gives us the knowledge of salvation for the remission of our sins. Now this is not the blank slate mistake where we come out the other side of the confessional and are good for another weekend of debauchery, but rather we are free to go forth and “sin no more,” confident in our forgiveness to do God’s work in the world.
       And what work needs to be done! So much healing needs to take place, and so much needs to be given back. That was one great gift I did get from the weekend: permission to move beyond guilt. To be part of a Church that is working towards its own salvation, engaged in the work of healing drinking from the wellspring of salvation, rather than performing an act of obligation out of W.A.S.P. guilt.
       Let us heartily rejoice in the strength of our salvation, confident of God’s forgiveness for our mistakes, and moving towards the pain that shall lead us to heal

Common Prayer: It's the latest trend

           If there's one thing I find frustrating in worship circles it is reinvented wheels. I am an Anglo-Catholic snob, where I worship there are six candles on the alter, we go through the whole of the Nicene creed, liberal amounts of incense anoint the congregation, and I would not have it any other way. My heart grieves when I listen to the panicked clergy of our day, dismayed by the dwindling numbers in the pews, begin to contemplate incorporating Hip-Hop into their liturgy. So when I heard that the coolest Evangelicals in the New Monasticism movement (it's what all the kids are talking about these days) are remaking the Book of Common Prayer, I got quite excited.
           I first heard of the New Monasticism about two years ago when a friend of mine passed me a copy of Shane Claiborne's The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical. The book is, essentially, his biography of faith chronicling his time in seminary, travelling to Calcutta to work with Mother Teresa, and then joining a Christian Peacemaker Team on tour in Iraq. It is a refreshing read that I would recommend to frustrated Generation X Christians who are looking for models of how to be the Church in these post-modern times.
           The latest model that the New Monastics have pulled together is Common Praise: A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals, the end result of a collaboration of Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, Enuma Okoro, and Shane Claiborne, plus scores of priests, nuns, pastors, and other faithful. In this volume we have the pleasure of witnessing a great return, a return to the ideals of collective worship, of what it means to practice the unity of the Church. Far more than a mere devotional, the book as 365 days of prayer laid out, stringing together a combination of prayers, devotionals, and hymns that span denominational lines from Serbia Orthodox to Anabaptist. Also noting feast and saint days, marking the anniversaries of murders committed by officers of the Salvadoran military, and noting the birthday of Dorothy Day, the book connects the dots between the many facets of the Christian tradition while being grounded in a vision of what the Kingdom of God looks like, and what it doesn't.
           To commemorate the launch of the book Claiborne and company had organized 150 Common Praise Parties taking place across the continent where the book was put into practice, in masse, for the first time. At the end of the CPPs Wilson-Hartgrove thanks us via youtube and leaves us with the image of baton of praise being passed on east to west as the sun travels, so that the whole of time and space are covered by our prays without cease. This is something that I fear is lost on my generation of Anglicans, that the ideal behind the BCP is that we, as a global communion, are praying the psalms with and for each other. By the practice of the daily offices we are conquering the earthly boundaries of space and time and achieving a unity that goes beyond worldly divisions.
           What I love in this is how my stereotypes of Evangelicals are shattered. For long time coming I have rallied against the profound individualism that I ascribed to the bible-thumbing, wailing and flaying, anti-liturgical know-it-alls, who, for all the world, seem stuck on sin rather than our deliverance from it. But I am a repenting snob, who sees in this movement a hungering to recover the idea of us: the Church, the mystical body of Christ in which the individual Christian is magnified beyond the limits that our secular-consumer culture maintains.
            I think there is a great lesson for us High-Church folk to take note of in this, that as we proceed into the 21st century we must return to the root of ourselves. The phrase that the New Monastics use to express this returning is "our ancient future," that was we are hurtled into a time that is propelled by the idea of salvation by technology innovation we must come back to the rituals that bind us to eternity, the space outside of time. It is there that we can meet each other, in prayer and unity.