The Sauntering Pilgrim

Here’s a game that might make your Lent a little more interesting. It’s called “Purgatory,” named for the waiting room where, some Christians believe, your sins are purged and your soul is purified before entering heaven. The way the game’s inventor imagined it, people with contradictory views of life would be paired with each other until they resolved their differences. Only then would they be allowed into heaven. Wouldn’t you like to see that game of purgatory played out in Washington?

I’d like to pair St. Paul, the great evangelist and church builder of the Western world, in that waiting room with St. Peter, the great defender of the church in Jerusalem. One of the most important issues St. Paul addressed was the competition for territory and dominance between the churches he founded and the church in Jerusalem. The churches Paul founded were eventually swallowed up by the Jerusalem church. But the heart of Paul’s vision remained, the vision of unity that led him to write, “so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another” (Rom. 12:5).

The radical presence of heaven on earth, that it’s here and now or nowhere and never, was the essential gospel of both Jesus (e.g., Luke 14:15-24) and Paul (e.g., 2 Cor. 5:17), and it’s a presence the earliest Christians struggled to embody – literally, in Paul’s sense that we are inseparably connected with one another in a single, unified spiritual body, regardless of our differences and disagreements, each of us dependent upon everyone else for our health and wholeness. It’s a vision that seems very far from the reality in which we live today.

A decade ago, the Pew Research Center saw what we easily see today, that partisan division in the U.S., in politics and in everyday life, is deeper and more extensive than at any time since the late 1990s, and it’s growing worse. Animosity between Democrats and Republicans has grown substantially during the last thirty years, and most people with the greatest partisan loyalty believe the other party’s policies are so misguided that they threaten the nation’s well-being. The “middle,” where common ground on contentious issues could sometimes be found, has vanished.

Those divisions are also found among those who identify as Christian, driving us not toward reconciliation, which is the gospel of Christ, but further into division. For example, many Americans look at the Jan. 6 insurrection and think a lot of crazy people acted out. But it was far more organized than that, and it wasn’t only Trump and his organization that sparked the insurrection. What united many people and groups was a shared belief that there should be no separation between their version of Christianity and civic life, and that true Americans are White, culturally conservative, and natural-born citizens.

We need to hear St. Paul’s message, and we need to repeat it loudly and clearly, that we who are members of the body of Christ are also members of one another, inseparably united in a living whole. Instead of lobbing fragments of truth at each other like hand grenades, trying to suppress or eliminate differing opinions, we need to surrender our most dearly held individual identities and our favorite illusions about life and its Creator, and so take up our cross. We need to value one another not merely as brothers and sisters but as the hand values the arm, as the ear values the eye, as the head values the feet.

The church is not where we learn right beliefs about God, where true is separated from false and good from bad. The church is what St. Benedict called “a school of the Lord’s service.” It is a laboratory where we work out experimentally our authentic relationship with the source of all life and where we are reconciled into our original integrity. It is where we learn to value one another as the persons God is creating us to be, with all our graceful eccentricities.

We need to stay at the table with those with whom we deeply disagree about essential matters and demonstrate that we value one another enough to speak openly and really listen to one another – with love.

There are many ways of not staying at the table with each other. Some leave physically when they encounter differences they don’t know how to handle in a health way, moving to a different congregation or faith community. Some leave emotionally, refusing to acknowledge and discuss their differences, devolving into factions that lead to division and the crucifixion of Christ all over again. We need to dwell in the connection that unites us in the flow of love from one heart to another so that all illusions of separateness and independence disappear.

This is difficult to absorb, so maybe a short story will bring it home.

There’s a story about a rabbi testing her students on the fine points of Jewish law who asked how they could tell when night ends and day begins – an important point in scheduling times for prayer, for example. One student answered, “You can tell when night has ended and day has begun when you can look across the valley and tell the difference between an olive tree and a fig tree.” “Wrong,” said the rabbi. Another student answered, “You can tell when night has ended and day has begun when you can look into the next pasture and tell the difference between a sheep and a goat.” “Wrong,” the rabbi said. After a moment of thought, a third student said, “You can tell when night has ended and day begun when you can shoot an arrow into the air and see where it lands.” “Wrong again!” said the rabbi.

After that, no one ventured an answer, and there was silence, until one student asked, “So tell us, rabbi, how can you tell when night becomes day?” “When you can look into the eyes of any person you meet,” the rabbi said, “and recognize that person as your brother or sister, then you will know that night has ended, and day has begun.” Then we will know the promise of the reign of God has been fulfilled. ▪