p/c Pierre-August Renoir, ‘The Luncheon of the Boating Party’, circa 1881; courtesy of wikimedia commons
Another entry in our series on church life and parish culture. This time one simple thesis: Avoid church-parties!
Wait, what in the world?! Father Mark, aren’t you supposed to be the guy who loves the Church calendar and all the feast days? Aren’t you something of a liturgical party animal? Why are you against church parties?
Okay, clarification: not those kind of church parties, the other kind of church-party. The ones that have that little all-important hyphen between church and party. Let me explain.
If by “church party” (no hyphen) we mean parties, events, festivities, and feasts thrown by the Church and those within her —awesome! I’m all for it!
But when we mean by “church-party” an intra-parish identification with a certain brand of churchmanship (e.g. “high church” or “low church” or “charismatic” or “anglo-catholic” or “reformed”) which confuses things of tertiary importance (e.g. the arrangement of candles on the altar) with things of first-order importance (e.g. the Scriptures, the Sacraments, the Creeds).
The problem is not that people care about tertiary things, nor that those who care about them have different opinions, it’s not even to say that some of those opinions are correct and others are incorrect. The problem is elevating tertiary values into a kind of “party line” that divides the local body whose Charity in Christ ought to be enough to unite people of varying liturgical and theological sensibilities as a parish.
In C.S. Lewis’ Screwtape Letters a fictive senior demon, named ‘Screwtape’, writes letters of infernal counsel to his young nephew, a low-ranking demon named Wormwood, on his new assignment as a junior tempter.
The book is excellent and masterful. It is one of the best examples of the ways in which fiction can serve as a method for theological inquiry and reflection. I commend the whole thing.
I want, however, to draw unique attention to one special passage from letter 16 in which Screwtape, disappointed to hear that Wormwood has failed to keep his “patient” (i.e. the man that he’s been assigned to tempt) away from the Church, gives him the following advice:
“I think I warned you before that if your patient can’t be kept out of the Church, he ought at least to be violently attached to some party within it. I don’t mean on really doctrinal issues; about those, the more lukewarm he is the better…” (84).
Screwtape’s eschewal of “really doctrinal issues” here is key. There are things that ought to occupy a high place of importance theologically and the local church must ensure that these things are guarded against error and heresy. But it is these things precisely which the devils want their patient to avoid: “it isn’t the doctrines on which we chiefly depend for producing malice.”
Notice, also, that the ultimate infernal aim is not the production of “falsehood” strictly speaking but of malice —enmity against my brother or sister in Christ.
No, what Screwtape wants is a malice-ridden parish whose mission is undercut by deep grievances and suspicions and frustrations due to style and custom and the cultivation of that peculiar sense of superiority that chuckles demeaning at the strangeness of another Christian’s piety. Example Given: “Look at him bowing at the altar, how silly.” Or “Look at her raising her hands, how silly.”
“The real fun is working up a hatred between those who say ‘mass’ and those who say ‘holy communion’ when neither party could possibly state the difference between, say, Hooker’s doctrine and Thomas Aquinas’, in any form which would hold water for five minutes. And all the purley indifferent things —candles and clothes and what not— are an admirable ground for our activities…” (84).
As our church continues to bear fruit we are growing beyond the ability for size and relationality (everyone hangs-out with everyone all the time) alone to do the work of being comfortable with the differences which will continue to increase among us. Styles of vestments, modes of genuflection, head coverings, candles, kneeling or standing at the altar rail, etc. Must not be allowed to become “party issues” markers of who’s in what camp, of who’s truly Anglican, of who’s got it right. No.
And we cannot expect these differences to go away or diminish. As we grow there will be a deepening sense of who we are as a parish but also, paradoxically, as growth in the differences among us. In all of these differences we must be marked by profound charity towards one another. Let our love for our brother or sister be the thing that keeps us one amidst our differences. Homogeneity is, after all, a kind of pseudo-unity; creating a false oneness by squeezing everything into a single shape. Parish life should be, rather, a kind of complementarity; difference unified in love.
Towards the end of the letter Screwtape ruminates:
“We have quite removed from men’s minds what that pestilent fellow Paul used to teach about food and other unessentials —namely, that the human without scruples should always give in to the human with scruples. You would think they could not fail to see the application. You would expect to find the ‘low’ churchman genuflecting and crossing himself lest the weak conscience of his ‘high’ brother should be moved to irreverence, and the ‘high’ one refraining from these exercises lest he should betray his ‘low’ brother into idolatry. And so it would have been but for our ceaseless labour.” (84-85).
The call of this little entry is a call to prove Screwtape, and all the powers he represents, wrong. Let us live in love with one another in such a way that All Saints Honolulu becomes “a positive hotbed of charity and humility” (85). The world will know that we are Christians, Our Lord tells us, not by our homogeneity but by our love for one another (Jn. 13:35).
The local church doesn’t need to spawn little church-parties because the Church Herself is the One Big Party, and Jesus Christ is the Life of it (Jn. 1:4, 14:6).
