ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. -- When Shane Claiborne hops to the podium in the meeting room at the Hotel Albuquerque, he looks as stylistically unbounded as his spiritual quest that’s outlined on a bio sheet. He’s long and lanky with a goatee. He looks bookish in dark-rimmed glasses, his thin face framed by dreadlocks held in place by a handkerchief bandana. He projects a kind of urban underbelly chic with an accent as pure as the early days of NASCAR.
He is a product of East Tennessee Protestant evangelical Christianity transplanted to the Northeast, where he engages in a robust version of Catholic Worker-type community, advocating for the poor and for nonviolent solutions to problems.
Franciscan Fr. Richard Rohr speaks of him as a gifted “third-way person.” In the context of the conference on emerging Christianity he is about to address, he serves as a bridge, and a personification of one version of what might be arising out of what is.To talk of an emerging church or emerging Christianity is to speak of something that owes a great deal to tradition but that seeks its shape and bearing in ways not yet formed.
That may be the nature of emergence -- that whatever it is never fully arrives all laid out with clear boundaries and certitude, with clear markers so everyone knows who’s in and who’s out. That may also be why the language of those who take the prospect of emergence seriously is so loaded with movement and an impression of travel. Consider the title of the conference held in April in Albuquerque, at which Claiborne spoke: “Emerging Christianity: How We Get there Determines Where We Arrive.” The journey, then, is the place, and the sojourners don’t expect that all the answers will be waiting, like an award for finishing, at the end of some religious obstacle course.
“I hope whatever emerging Christianity is,” said Fr. Rohr, a featured speaker at the conference, “it’s going to be much more practice-based than doctrine-based. Where has this obsession with believing correct doctrines gotten us? The Roman church is right back into it, although maybe that’s why God is humiliating us, to say: ‘This obsession with being right and having the whole truth, look where it’s gotten you, Roman church,’ ” he said in a not-so-thinly veiled reference to the then-breaking story that the shadow of the clergy sex abuse scandal had darkened the door of the papal palace. “It might well be in the great scheme of God’s grace the only way to bring us to humility, to balancing all of our absolutely certain knowing with a necessary unknowing.”
The conference was sponsored by Rohr’s Center for Action and Contemplation, the second of its kind, and the title suggests an expansion of the idea from last year’s conference, which bore the heading, “The Emerging Church.”
Whether a relative handful of people meeting in the New Mexico desert (some 570 people from 45 U.S. states and five other countries) can be considered a measure of new things emerging, only time will tell. Numbers aside, the discussion was broad enough to cross a range of denominational borders and ideological presumptions, and it wasn’t about easy fixes or the simple overthrow of dogma and traditional practice. In fact, in some instances, the case was quite the opposite.
If Rohr, for Catholics, embodies in many ways whatever is left of the renewal impulses of the Second Vatican Council, he also is a leading advocate today of contemplative life, the ancient discipline that has found a resurgence in some unlikely places.
It is an aspect of Christianity that Rohr thinks has been shortchanged in the church over the centuries. He also believes it holds the key -- “nondualistic thinking” -- to the next level of Christian existence. That level, he said, will be one that goes beyond the mind, beyond rationality, beyond ego. “The mind,” he said, “is never going to get us to a great church. It will always create some moral and doctrinal distinctions because that’s the way the ego operates. The ego prefers the dualistic mind.” In contrast, he said, “the soul prefers to embrace things, not to name things. It is what it is without a name. It is what it is as it is. The soul has a different set of eyes, and my assumption is that the soul sees with contemplative eyes. It sees things without needing to label them up or down.”
Sources include:
http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=8500459074078742992
http://www.thesimpleway.org/shane/bio
http://www.cacradicalgrace.org/aboutus/founder.html
http://www.catholicworker.org/index.cfm
http://advisor401k.info/richard-rohr.html
http://www.cacradicalgrace.org/conferences/2010/emerging-christianity
http://cacradicalgrace.org
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Vatican_Council
No comments:
Post a Comment