Walking alongside, walking wounded.

April 20, 2009 by Pastor Dan.

A few days ago I began thinking more seriously about how to walk alongside those who are either wounded, disaffected, or keeping their distance from the faith in which they once made a home. In my ministry, most often this is the Catholic church. Will they ever again find a home in which Christian discipleship can be lived out.

This is especially true for LGBT people who are often brutally harmed by the Christian church. But they are not the only ones. I meet a large number of other people, for a variety of issues and reasons— divorce and remarriage, abortion, abuse of church authority, refusal to ordain women, or too many questions with condescending or absolutist answers— have felt estranged from the church. Later, some feel drawn to find a faith expression, a spiritual home, but are at a loss. Complex social studies and entire books deal with this. But as a pastor in a local church, “book learning” about the disaffected usually is not really helpful to me.

I have learned simply to listen— and hopefully to listen well, so that what I have to offer neither offends or frightens those who are drawn by the spirit of God. And most often, people need to be heard, more than to be told the perfect word or ideal teaching or doctrine or even word of welcome. They have life experiences which have shaped both their spirituality and their sense of alienation or estrangement, but traditional religious structures have not always made room, or opened up, or offered to listen. Because I care, when I hear these stories, I try to walk with or walk alongside those who are at a distance, or outside of the faith community which I serve.

Servant of God Archbishop Oscar Romero, “San Romero” to the people of El Salvador.  The process of beatification was begun for him in 1997.

Lately I have found a word from another church context— “accompaniment,” which probably dates back to Archbishop Oscar Romero in El Salvador. (See, for example, this article by Jim Barnett, O.P.) In accompanying, especially disaffected Catholics (or other Christians— fundamentalist or Missouri Synod Lutheran or Jehovah’s Witnesses or whatever) I learned quickly that I cannot erase the pain or dissolve the hypocrisy, straighten the contorted view, or re-work the hierarchical logic that has been imposed on people’s real lives and contributed to their alienation. I cannot make the Catholic church whole and well anymore than I can fix what is wrong with the Lutheran Church. And in my own heart I too hurt because these Christian communities, in particular, are not one church community, but many. When it comes to Lutheran and Catholic— although progress has been made, these two world communions have “dinked around” almost my entire adult life trying to find delicate and respectful ways to talk to each other. They have affixed important signatures to well-written and carefully nuanced documents.

But in Jesus’ high priestly prayer of John 17, he prays that his followers will be one. He didn’t say “Take a thousand years to get pissed with one another, and the next thousand years to consider kissing and making up.” What part of be one don’t we get?

So my accompaniment is to walk alongside those who express to me that they are wounded by their experiences, and if appropriate, to welcome them into the temporary sanctuary of an evangelical catholic community which believes itself to be “involuntarily and only temporarily separated” from the one universal church (“Evangelical Catholic?” April 14).

Regardless of the snail’s progress of Lutheran-Catholic Dialogue, or Lutheran-Anything Dialogue, the truth of one’s spiritual system comes down to how we accompany one another at the community and personal level, not at scholarly international conferences. I make no claim to be an ecumenical expert or an important theologian, but I think that the contribution of my ministry is every bit as important as that of the greater minds appointed by councils or a church magisterium to represent formal positions and historic points of view.

What comes to mind is the Gospel reading for the Third Sunday of Easter, April 26, taken from Luke 24:

Classic scene of the road to Emmaus by Robert Zund

This text amazes me. It is beautifully composed to help the reader see Jesus in the Eucharist – that sign of oneness in Christ and in one another that is really only a reality at the local community level. But I also find something quite personal in this passage which scholars don’t tend to notice: One of these two disciples is named Cleopas. He and his companion invited Jesus to stay with them for the night in the village of Emmaus to which they were walking, and he agreed.

Emmaus by Velasquez

The scriptures give us no other information about the identity of Cleopas (he was not one of The Twelve). Since it appears that Cleopas and the other man shared a home, to which they were returning when they met Jesus on the way, and where they shared a common table and would both spend the night, I cannot help wondering if, well, … you know. Were they “a couple”?

Another interpretation of the Emmaus moment.

But would the Apostles back in Jerusalem have approved of this? Did they even know? Would the presence of Cleopas and his friend in the community of disciples have caused a huge controversy, a “split”? Would the Apostles have called an entire collegial assembly to decide whether it was okay for two disciples to share a home, or spend a night together under one roof?

Luke’s treatment here, and throughout the Acts of the Apostles, seems to indicate that the earliest church did not hold its members back until an official council could vote on things. Individual believers just moved forward (like “street prophets“?), and after the fact, the Apostles and the church as a whole didn’t vote these movements up or down. What they did was recognize the presence and power of the Holy Spirit as active in the situation, and on that basis gave their blessing and assent.

Why must we be so constrained by the magisterium, the structure and institution (can it ever really be “infallible”?), that individual Christians feel they must move out of one household and into another to be prophetic or just nurtured or to live out discipleship? Or feel they must leave all faith behind for good? Why must any of us suffer the spiritual catastrophe of being a “recovering” Christian of any label? Or ex-Christians for life?

It is a cliché that “the Church is the only army that shoots its own wounded.” But who is walking with the wounded?

— Pastor Dan Hooper, Los Angeles

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