We are a sanctifying presence

Humility, balance and listening

It’s the season. Yes, yes, Advent. But also the season in which many parishes experience an increase in people coming and asking for help. It’s cold and dark and many get more depressed and afraid. So, we’ve been preparing a two part article about that. And just now we hear that the rector of our parish is struggling with the same issue. Fr. Kevin wrote this, “For me, the question is: how do we balance our own needs as a Parish with those of the needs of those in need. (Too many needs, but, thems the breaks.) While the Church is to look after those in need (again!) at this point, the services the Church has historically provided are now met by secular agencies that know much more than we do as to how to tackle these things. On one level, it feels like passing the buck. On another level, it seems like an act of humility admitting that we don't have the know-how or resources to meet such needs. The Church isn't a social service organization any more. … This conversation is important. The Spirit frequently speaks through many voices.”

The two of us are Benedictines. So we seek to approach all this with balance and humility and listening. We see all that in Fr. Kevin’s thinking too. We are the two “religious” at St. Clements, that sit in the first pew most Sundays.

We think some of this has to do with how we think about it. For example, Fr. Kevin’s clarity about the parish not being a social service agency is an example of clear thinking. It’s also an issue that requires a pragmatic approach. We’ll begin this conversation looking at one part of how we think about things.

The material below comes from An Energy Not Its Own: The cycles of parish life and the purposes of the parish church. That book suggest that there are three primary purposes of any parish: There are three intrinsic purposes of any parish church. We see them as: 1. The worship of God, 2. The formation of the People of God for the sake of the world and 3. Being a sanctifying presence in the broader community. We’ve lifted, and offer below, most of the material on being a sanctifying presence. The point is — we are a sanctifying presence not a social service agency.

Being a sanctifying presence in the broader community

There is nothing so contagious as holiness, nothing more pervasive than Prayer. This is precisely what the traditional Church means by evangelism and what distinguishes it from recruitment – Martin Thornton

The primary sanctifying relationship of any parish is through the presence of the baptized members scattered into the arenas of daily life—family and friends, workplace, and civic life.

Evelyn Underhill said, “You are the Body of Christ ... That is to say; in you and through you the method and work of the Incarnation must go forward. You are meant to incarnate in your lives the themes of your adoration. You are to be taken, consecrated, broken, and made a means of grace; vehicles of the Eternal Charity.” The people of God are sanctified so they might sanctify the people and institutions they are in relationship with; so, they might be “a means of grace; vehicles of the Eternal Charity.”

Usually when we talk about people being a sanctifying presence, being instruments of God’s love, we focus on the saints or at least those of Apostolic faith and practice. Let’s look at how it may work in the lives of people who are in a different place in their spiritual lives.

Christine and Mark have two children. The boys, Justin and William, are in one of the city’s better high schools. The parents own a deli. It’s a struggle. There are shoplifters and they’ve had employees steal. Mark enjoys the contact with people. He has a dry sense of humor and an easy manner. Christine handles the orders and bookkeeping. They vote mostly for Democrats. That seems to be something of a family heritage going all the way back to FDR’s New Deal. They believe that the government should provide a strong safety net for everyone and take care of public safety. The whole family has been involved with scouting with the parents helping run programs. The boys have been in the program since each was eight years old. They own their home, an older three-bedroom row house. They like their neighbors and host several social gatherings each year for friends and neighbors. Their home is also where the extended family of three generations gets together on Thanksgiving. They attend the Eucharist at Saint Gabriel’s most Sundays. When the children were younger, they would have them say prayers at bedtime.

In terms of Robert’s Shape of the Parish Model, they are of Sacramental faith, stable and productive. That’s been true for both parents for most of their lives. She had been raised an Episcopalian, and he a Roman Catholic. She had strong positive feelings about the Church. He had strong negative feelings about the Roman Catholic Church. They had favorite hymns and Bible passages. There were a couple of Bibles and a Prayer Book in the house. But they didn’t read books on spiritual life or theology. They didn’t talk about their beliefs very much. During the week, Christine and Mark would engage in some forms of personal devotions—grace at meals, a short “God have mercy” when they heard the siren of an emergency vehicle, and spontaneous moments of reflection, usually before falling asleep or in the shower.

So, the primary formative activity was Sunday worship—being in community, the readings, a sermon, moments of silence, hymns, and prayers that had lodged themselves in heart and mind. Sacramental faith.

As with all the baptized, to the extent they received the gifts of the Spirit, they were salt and light with each other, their neighbors and friends, customers and employees, in their voting and volunteering. Neither parent could have articulated that reality. But it is what they lived.

The second most common sanctifying relationship is by the parish as a body with the community of people living in the area of the parish—a city neighborhood, a small town, a sprawling suburban community. There are other relationships with external communities for many parishes. Some churches are “destination parishes” that attract people from all over the region because of their liturgy, preaching, witness, or history. Others have a connection with a vocational community such as the performing arts, the medical practitioners, or the volunteer fire department.

These are communities the parish interacts with, has a relationship with. Sometimes there are a few people in the parish who are part of those communities. Robert was once vicar of a parish that had a strong relationship with the jazz and performing arts communities. Michelle was a member of a parish that became a haven for people suffering and dying during the AIDS crisis. There are churches connected to the volunteer fire company and others to the medical community. Most churches have an impact on the neighborhood in which they sit. When Robert was vicar of an inner- city Philadelphia parish in the ’70s, he would hear stories from neighbors about how during the Depression that parish used its endowment fund to provide coals for those without heat. Forty years later, those stories were still alive in that neighborhood.

That parish offered another aspect of “sanctified presence.” There was something of an uproar when some new people in the neighborhood tried to get the city to order the church not to ring the bells in the morning. There were petitions and letters to the editor all to the effect of, “Leave our bells alone.” For most, the sound of the bells sanctified life. In a parish with a relationship with the jazz community when the priest would stop in at one of the jazz clubs, musicians would wander over to say a few words about their lives. “My mother died last week,” “Marge has cancer,” “I’m going to be playing at the Tavern tomorrow, why don’t you stop in?” In the middle of a jazz Mass, the bass player had tears flowing down his face; asked about it later he said, “I never felt my music being accepted by God before today.”

How is your parish a blessing for some community outside itself? A witness to the Gospel—“So this would be more about the fact that, at the center of things, there’s a secret or mystery, and it is joyful.”[1] Here, in this neighborhood there is the Joyful Mystery. How does your parish church embody that?

Saint Mary the Virgin in New York City has a flood of people coming to the church on Ash Wednesday to be reminded that they are dust. Many bless pets on the Feast of Saint Francis. Some parishes process through the streets on Palm Sunday and the parish’s patronal feast day.

It may be useful to think of this sanctifying presence in terms of relationship rather than service. Too many parishes have a semiconscious image of themselves as service providers. Religious social workers. It’s as though doing for others legitimates their existence. Relationship seems a more accurate word. In as much as the parish is a people and place of prayer, a people and place in relationship with God, that will flow into the parish’s relationship with the neighborhood or town or other external community of people. It may be just a legend, but we have heard of a Philadelphia priest whose vestry consisted of people he’d met while hanging out in an art student bar. We’ve had the experience of processing through the streets of London with the people of All Saints Margaret Street on the Feast of the Assumption. Incense drifting above, a band playing, clergy vested and carrying the Blessed Sacrament as the People of God walked the city’s streets. The crowded sidewalks of Oxford Street with its stores and restaurants brought looks of curiosity, enchantment, and occasional hostility.

A second way of thinking that helps is to focus on listening, not assuming what others need or want from the church. Bishop Peter Eaton wrote this in a reflection in 2020: “Archbishop William Temple: The Church exists primarily for the sake of those who are still outside it. In my experience as a parish priest, our most effective special ministries emerged not when we decided what our wider community needed, but when we got to know that wider community, listened, and then found ways in which we could be partners in service. Then the ministry really worked. When clergy and lay leaders know and are known by the local mayor and council, service agencies, social justice advocacy groups, neighboring schools and colleges, nearby hospitals, and (yes) even the police and fire departments, all kinds of partnerships become possible, and our contribution is so much more effective. And in my experience, welcome.”

Those relationships may be organic or created, seen or unseen. The parish’s task is always about knowing the people as being in the Divine Image, and so, as being worthy of respect and reverence. Those parishes that process through the streets on their feast day are engaged in this sanctifying relationship. The incense of such processions is the acknowledgment of God’s presence in that community. They are a mix of solemnity and friendly banter; waves to strangers and friends, ancient hymns sung on modern streets.

It is knowing that the neighborhood or city partakes in the sanctity of the Holy City. So, we intercede for them. In the Eucharist we offer a special intention for that relationship. We live as a community of daily prayer in the midst of them. Still, our work is more than praying for the city and for the neighborhood. The church prays in the same sense that a school soccer team plays on behalf of the school. The parish engages in the offering of Eucharist, Office, and reflection on behalf of the neighborhood. We pray in the place of all who don’t know how to pray, all who don’t want to pray, all who see themselves as too busy to pray.

Being a sanctifying presence can be seen as one expression of Vicarious faith. They may only come to the Eucharist when there is a jazz Mass because they like jazz. They may spend every Monday night in the parish hall drinking coffee and acknowledging their addiction. Their children get sent to the summer day camp. They are in line for food vouchers each week. They look forward to the ringing of the bells at noon.

The church building is another sanctifying presence in a community. Some years ago, St. Brendan’s Church on Deer Isle, Maine, took great pride in renting space for the Sunday Eucharist from other churches. That allowed them to give away funds to support a variety of good causes including many on the island. Apart from the logistical difficulties created by time of worship and the possibilities for social and educational functions, they discovered that many of the long-term residents on the island didn’t see them as being a real part of the island community. Some of that is the Maine thing about “people from away.” But another part had to do with not owning property. They were seen as not having the same stake in the community as others. They now own their own building, which we see as an acknowledgment of the sacramental nature of life.

Another facet of property is seen in the impact on communities and neighborhoods when a church closes. It’s much the same when cities close libraries and schools or consolidate firehouses. There are, of course, reasons for taking such action. But all too often the decision-making process fails to consider the devastating impact on that community. The sense of loss and decline. Feelings of frustration and abandonment. All too often we get driven by economic concerns and fail to see the anti-sacramental message we are sending. [2]

We’re fond of this quote by Sydney Evans, onetime Dean of Salisbury Cathedral. He was speaking about the rationale for cathedrals, but his words apply to all church buildings.

And all this built to provide a canopy over the acts of a worshipping community of believers, an organization of space in which movement and music, word and sacrament, can be presented with dignity befitting an action which is nothing less than a celebration of the Christian understanding of the meaning and mystery of being alive and being human. A cathedral is a theatre for a kind of liturgical dance to the music of time and the hidden harmonies of God. A cathedral is both a protest and a proclamation. ... a protest against all ideologies and political systems which deny or diminish the spirituality, dignity and true liberty of human persons, and a proclamation of the Christian Way as an invitation to pilgrimage, an offered route by which human beings can find help in their search for the answer to their fundamental questions: “Who am I?” “What may I hope?” “What should I do?”

At the heart of it is the parish’s life of prayer. The relationship is sanctified because the parish is a place and people of prayer. Martin Thornton wrote, “There is nothing so contagious as holiness, nothing more pervasive than Prayer. This is precisely what the traditional Church means by evangelism and what distinguishes it from recruitment.” The stream of redemptive power flows out from the parish in its life of prayer and service. The organic nature of that was noted by Father Kenneth Leech who wrote of the parish as a “disciplined, prayerful, listening Christian community.” That Apostolic center grounds the church in the pathways of grace. And that in turn makes the service offered the community something deeper and more real than church social work.

More in the next few days.

This abides,

Sister Michelle, OA and Brother Robert, OA

About Brother Robert, OA & Sister Michelle, OA

Notes

[1] Laura Miller, “Susanna Clarke’s Fantasy World of Interiors,” The New Yorker, September 14, 2020.

[2] The Episcopal Church fled many of our cities between 1940 and 1990. The rationale was largely economic. And there is some truth in that which had to be faced. We believe what was more significant was a failure of virtue. We lacked the humility, patience, courage, and persistence necessary to stay in the city. We lacked “an inquiring and discerning heart, the courage to will and to persevere, a spirit to know and to love (God) and the gift of joy and wonder in all (God’s) works” (from Holy Baptism BCP p. 308). In Philadelphia, for example, the Episcopal Church closed an average of one parish a year between 1940 and 1980. You can find that story here at www.orderoftheascension.org/stay-in-the-city.