This lovely, clunky, untidy vehicle of the Eternal Charity
We have been called together as friends to see this project through.
This is the homily Sister Michelle offered on May 8 during the retreat of the Order of the Ascension. It may offer some richness and detail to this morning’s article The Order of the Ascension.
Over this week focused on friendship, I keep coming back to two related ideas. The first is that I think our vocation as friends in the Order begins with our shared Promise - our Promise to seek Christ in the people, things, and circumstances of life through stability, obedience, and conversion of life. I want to suggest that our friendship exists for and is nurtured by that Promise. And that it is through God’s grace that we’ve found both one another and this lovely, and also sometimes clunky and a bit untidy, vehicle of the Eternal Charity we call the Order of the Ascension.
The second idea is that both the Order itself, and our charism - our focus on parish development and revitalization – those are our common project. And it’s a project that is best nurtured and strengthened when we give our hearts and minds to it. Our charism requires broad understanding of complex issues, an abiding curiosity about ourselves and other people, and a deep and persistent relationship with God. All of these things affect the others. And all of them require a kind of fearlessness – or at least a willingness to manage our fear; a willingness to forgive and to be forgiven; and a focus on the example set by Christ. We are blessed – and sometimes cursed – to be able to practice and develop these things in community, with our friends, with those who share our vocation.
So going back to the first idea, what does it mean that our friendship is grounded in our vocation and not the other way around? As C. S. Lewis said,
…for a Christian, there are, strictly speaking, no chances. A secret Master of Ceremonies has been at work. Christ, who said to the disciples, ‘Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you,’ can truly say to every group of Christian friends, ‘You have not chosen one another but I have chosen you for one another.’ The friendship is not a reward for our discrimination and good taste in finding one another out. It is the instrument by which God reveals to each the beauties of all the others.
Lewis believed that real and abiding friendship is found in what he called “seeing the same truth,” or at least caring about the same important questions, even if you come up with different answers. He saw friendship as directing a shared vision toward a common project. For us, the project is the Order. We may have particular friends outside the Order who care about the Episcopal Church or faith or religious life, and they can be critically important companions on the journey. We may even enjoy these other friends more, or spend more time with them than we do with one another. But the friendship we find in the Order is not mostly about our personal affection for one another. It is that we recognize and are recognized by fellow seekers who perceive and care about the same truth. We have been called together as friends to see this project through.
Of course, affection arises through the proximity Brother Poulson talked about yesterday – we come to know each other, be familiar with one another, and naturally to care about one another. Affection arises, too, because the very fact of seeing the same truth provides a sense of affinity, of relief at being understood. But for us the friendship itself rests first on an obvious deeper commitment, since we take lifelong vows with this particular community of people and its own expression of purpose. The friendship is sustained by our common commitment to what the Order is up to, not by how much we like one another personally.
It's an important part of our history that we made a decision in around 2011 to shift our retreat from a beach vacation in which we got to hang out together, make dinner, and enjoy one another’s company. I loved the beach vacations. And yet we moved away from those, to wearing the habit, to meeting at a religious house, to consciously understanding and deepening our life as Religious. That wasn’t so we can play at being monks. That was so we could live more fully into our vocation.
And I believe it is no accident that turning our attention from relationships to vocation deepened both. The reverse isn’t true: by focusing on how much I like your company, or the fact that we like some of the same bands, or what we know about each other’s childhood or marriage – none of that on its own will further our charism. But when we aim purposely at our vocation, we also organically come to know more about the unique gifts, experiences, foibles, insights, and challenges of our brothers and sisters. We come to love one another.
Which brings us back to my second point. That our vocation is deepened by giving ourselves to this common project, and that a big part of that common project is grounding our lives in the Promise, and opening our hearts and minds to both God and to one another. Relationships matter. We are shaped by our life in this particular community.
We all know that parishes are places of intense longing, hope, despair, and joy. They are places that bring out the most extreme emotions and some of the best and worst of human behavior. Parish development depends on a complex mash-up of prayer, theory, and self- and group-awareness. To lead parish systems we must understand those systems, and we must understand ourselves. We must seek to recognize the Holy Spirit moving among us; we must ourselves imitate Christ; and we must be a non-anxious presence despite (and even because of) the anxiety that swirls all around us. And we will never get all of it right. We are called over and over again to make mistakes and then try again. We are called to learn from what works and from what doesn’t. We are called over and over again to seek forgiveness, and we are called over and over again to forgive ourselves and others.
All of that is hard work, and we are lucky that we have both our friendship with God and our friendships in the Order to sustain us. I want to tag onto Brother Lowell’s sermon about dragons, and Sister Susan’s that touched on how the Order provokes us to love and good deeds. Both of those homilies point toward some of the challenges of our life together, as well as the compassion and grace we find here.
Dragons are scary – though usually slayable and sometimes only metaphorical. I know my own dragon-like behavior mostly covers up fear or uncertainty and becomes much less fiery when I see that, at the end of the day, I’m loved and accepted even when I fall significantly short of the mark. I keep finding that acceptance in the Order.
And we also provoke one another. Provocation takes energy and persistence. That’s true when it’s the negative kind of accidental or insensitive or just plain nasty provocation that leads to anger or resentment. In that case, we’re called to manage our own feelings, to bring ourselves back into role. Sometimes it requires us to give skillful feedback when we’d rather lash out or walk away. Always, we need help to remember the compassionate, crucified Lord we serve. I keep finding that help in the Order.
And even the positive kinds of provocation – those that stir us to love, kindness, service, or courage – those sorts of provocation demand a kind of continual reflection and response. What am I called to do here, in this place, at this time, with these people? That ongoing work of reflection is part of our vocation and we depend upon one another to keep at it, to accept the challenges of this common project, to shore up our flagging resolve or to be a counterbalance when any one of us is reluctant to do the work we’ve been given to do.
As we welcome D.J. and Jennifer into our life and vocation, I want to end with something from our Rule:
We trust, by grace, that God takes us and we take one another as companions, even friends. This is a specific form of being taken. Does God intend this for each of us now? In this manner? Corporately and individually we seek to discern an acceptable answer. What we seek, in this path and others, is to allow God to take us fully. To withhold nothing of ourselves from the claims of this vocation. We know ourselves blessed in the vows offered and lived. We seek a blessing in this way of living our baptismal and priestly identity and purpose. In this path we are broken. We die. In the sacrifice, compassion, and repentance necessary for our common life and parish ministry, we find ourselves drawn more fully into the image of the broken one. Our anxiety, brokenness and death is finally placed into the hands of God. Our own weakness accepted, we find our strength in the crucified Lord. We may then, and only then, be fit to be used.
This abides,
Sister Michelle, OA Presiding Sister
A PDF of the homily
