Last week I began a series addressing the dynamics of church growth and parish culture. I’ll continue doing so for a good portion of this fall and winter as we enter into makahiki and Advent. It is critical, I believe, in this season of our life together as we grow that we labor intentionally so that our growth is in the direction of life and flourishing for the Kingdom.
This week I want to consider a lie, a kind of perfidious falsehood which settles like fallout on those who believe its speech, that runs something like “Do I belong in this church? There’s no one else like me here…”
Perhaps you’ve heard the same lie, perhaps you've fallen under its thrall, or perhaps you’ve heard a similar falsehood under differing words. Maybe by narrow margins of grace you’ve escaped ever being ensnared by such lies and have no idea what I am talking about —blest and merry are you. But it is important, for all of us at All Saints, to mark the way the lie works. It is pernicious in a community even if one is not susceptible to it himself.
And here I offer just a few notes exposing the spell before getting to the antidote:
Well of course no one else is like me! There’s only one of me ever in all the wideness of God’s Story. Long has he labored, as it were, bent over the craftsman’s table of genetics, heredity, culture, transoceanic transport of my ancestors, birth-rates, coefficiencies of economics and gestation, memories, traumas, wounds my parents did and did not pass on to me. God has labored to make me the perfect me, with all my glowing strengths and with all my devastating weaknesses, in which to bring forth “Christ in Mark the hope of glory” (cf. Col. 1:27). The same is true for you.
What the lie does is militate the goodness of my individuality against my God-designed need for belonging in a community. I am made to me with others who are simultaneously similar to and different from me.
The joy of marriage, as one intense example, is precisely this rejoicing in the union of similar difference. Two radically different persons, male and female, become “one flesh.” Self and other become unified under the banner of us.
This is, actually, what the word “individual” means. As a Latin word it emerges as medieval theologians describe the relations of the Persons of the Trinity. They are at once distinct Persons while also being individual —meaning not being able to be divided or broken into parts or constituents. The Father is not the Son nor is He the Spirit, but one cannot divide Father from Son neither can He be divded from Spirit.
We are made in this Image —of the individual Trinity. I am not like others, though they are similar to me (by varying degrees), but this longing I have for real loving union with others in the body, here-and-now, is not a fluke. It is the goal, the telos, the purpose for which I am made.
This exposes the grossness of the lie: I do not actually want to be surrounded by a bunch of other Fathermarkbrianses. Yuck! One is more than enough, thank-you; the one Mark that I am gives me enough problems already… and, moreover, isn’t it this desire to move beyond oneself and toward another precisely what I want when I declare my loneliness? More things “just like me” are not the answer.
Just so, the cure for Adam’s loneliness was neither in the beasts (dissimilar otherness) nor in another Adam (undifferentiated identicality) but in the radicality of Eve (similar difference). And so God liberates Adam from what Byung-Chul Han calls “the inferno of the same.”
All Saints Honolulu is this radical mixture of similar difference: military // local; haole // Hawaiian; immigrant // native-born; here-for-the-long-term // moving-in-under-a-year. And we are becoming more this way. Praise God!
Amidst such growth —growth in number and growth in difference— it is easy to feel, ironically, alone. As above so here I offer a few notes in the direction of remedy:
Stand in who you are. You are you for the gory of the Lord. A more holy and a more perfected and a more sanctified you does not look like you becoming more like someone else; it looks like you becoming a more holy and perfect and sanctified you.
Stand in the difference you are. It is not good for Adam to be alone. So also it is not good for All Saints Honolulu to be alone without the difference you bring. We need that difference. it is more glorious with your alterity than without it. The more real the statement “there’s no one like me here” is the better it is that you are among us.
Press-into unity. There will be those among whom you feel “these are those among whom I feel known and embraced in our similarity.” Amen! I’m glad of it. Finding that other friend who is in the same season of life or similar kind of person is a true joy. A church that is filled with life and unity is also a church that has ample room for close friendships. Cultivate those.
Press-into difference. At the same time and without contradiction we need also to press into the relationships in which we feel more acutely the “difference” in my similar difference. We are a church of multiple generations, multiple age groups and ethnicities, multiple needs and desires, and a variety of experiences and gifts. These are also things for me to enjoy and suffer alongside and glory in.
It is easy, alongside a lie like “I’m all alone, there’s no one else like me…” to look over at others and think an equally perfidious falsehood, “Look at them, everyone’s just like them.” To which, and in closing, I offer myself as an example:
“Oh, Fr. Mark probably is never lonely, he’s surrounded by people who are just like him…”
Oh really?… I am sitting here right now, at a Starbucks in Kapolei, with a stack of books on the table (Caryll Houselander, Byung-Chul Han, Charles Baudelaire), the scribbles of my planner looking to all passersby like the frenzied scrawl of a fin de siècle poet in an opium den. I am wearing a clerical collar on which one of the pockets is safety-pinned in place, a bent-spoon ring sits on my left ring-finger, my great-great-grandfather’s union ring from a Michigan steel plant sits on my right. I am listening to a live recording of The Gloaming’s song “Fainleog” (to which I always cry) and I am thinking about dinner tonight with my seven small children (“I wonder if we’re doing tacos or bi-bim-bap?”). There are things in our parish life that weigh heavy on my heart about which I cannot write here, a few friends on the mainland whose churches are going through a lot, and I need to call Alaskan airlines with some adjustments for an upcoming missions trip to Japan. I have taught Latin and am learning Hebrew but can’t speak any living langauge other than English. If you check my browsing history you will find a search for “what is difference between running back and tight end?” so I can understand what Dcn. Dawson and my sons were talking about on Sunday… I could go on, but I think you get the point. Who else is like this?
No one. But there are others who, for all our difference, are similar. In that tension is where we find the life of the Church.
Our hope is not in finding “someone just like me” —that wasn’t Adam’s salvation and neither is it ours. My hope, and your hope, is finding Christ magnified in the uniqueness of our lives and rejoicing at both the similarity and the difference in the lives in our parish in which Christ is likewise being magnified.
