Thursday I drove up to Holy Cross Monastery for EfM Mentor training. Our time there was cut bit short by the approaching hurricane so that people who came by train could get home before the system was shut down at noon on Saturday. And the monastery closed the guest house at 2:00 p.m. that afternoon. My neighborhood weathered the storm pretty well, but even now there are many areas that still don't have power restored and others that remain, or are now being, evacuated due to flooding. Irene's effects will be with us for some time to come.
Now that Irene has come and gone and things, at least for me, have pretty much returned to normal, I've had some time to reflect on my time at Holy Cross. I enjoy spending time there. The setting is spectacular, the food excellent, and the hospitality outstanding. I also appreciate this particular mentor training because many of the same people attend every year, and I'm not the only queer person there. As intense as the training can be, it is still very much retreat time, and I come back renewed and ready to start the new year of EfM.
I drove up a little early so I could spend some quiet time at the monastery. For most of the time before training started I sat on the Great Cloister overlooking the Hudson River and worked on one of the prayer shawls. Crochet as meditation. Sometimes I forget how relaxing it can be to just sit and crochet. No TV. No radio. No conversation. Just me, the crochet, the scenery, and my thoughts and prayers.
That afternoon my thoughts drifted to Grace Episcopal Church and the ongoing conversations we've been having about our future. And I had an insight. We need to change the language we've been using in the conversations. We are not dead yet. We're not even DYING. We are STRUGGLING.
How we talk about ourselves affects the way we operate. The parish isn't ready for hospice care just yet. And while I know I need to respect the feelings of those who just wish it were over and the doors closed, I'm not sure they understand that it's more than just turning out the lights and closing the doors. Hospice care involves work. It involves not only taking care of the dying person, it also means taking care of the person's family and friends. And those caring for the patient. It is not a passive process for anyone involved.
So where does the struggle take us? I don't know. I only know that we can't go back to what we once were. Even if the church were full every Sunday and the Sunday School classrooms were bursting at the seams, we still would not be the same church we were in 1950, 1960, 1970, or even 1980. The Church has always been evolving. What we have now looks nothing like the Church of 90, 300, 1000, or 1900. The Church isn't dead yet. It's not even dying. It's just changing as it always has.
As Bishop Curry prayed with us last week: “Dear God what are you calling us to do and be in this new community?”
Jeff, may I pass the link to this post on to the congregation (the ones who have email, at least)? You're allowed to say no.
ReplyDeleteCertainly.
ReplyDeleteJeff-
ReplyDeleteI certainly appreciate your sentiments and to some extent I agree. I think the 'Grace Group' may continue in some form, but Grace is not the church we knew in the 20th century and as such cannot continue to support the structures and accoutraments of a large, growing, and financially sound organization.
It is time to face fiscal realities and make the decisions needed to move on to the next evolution.
..and the next evolution needs ALL of us, and more besides, to make it happen. Thanks Jeff, this is super.
ReplyDeleteI have a companion blog post here: (copy and paste)
ReplyDeletehttp://ramblingswithlois.blogspot.com/2011/08/this-is-true-story-death-and.html
We are moving on to the next evolution. We have been for over two years. It will not look anything like the past, it is true. That is indeed dead. Now, after last week's meeting with the bishop, a plan is evolving. Wait and see!
You're right, Kathy, we can't be what we were in the 20th century. The church is changing. It's part of the reason I'm now unemployed. The institution has to reshape itself into something new, just as it has done over and over again through the centuries.
ReplyDeleteIn many ways Grace Episcopal Church as we knew it is dead. The struggle is to figure out what resurrection looks like.
So what is your vision of Grace Episcopal Church--or any church--in the 2010's? And what do you see yourself doing to make that vision a reality?
Meanwhile, since the meeting with Bp. Curry, when an answer to his question, "What is God doing here?" came back, "multicultural ministry with no money", and that was affirmed by others at that meeting, and it was seen to many to be good, resources have begun to open up, not to save a way of church in which I was brought up and loved and will always remember, but for a new community of faith of those who remain and those new people who have come to live with them. Things will change in response to that stream of resources that have opened up. The changes to which Kathy refers will continue, even increase. There is a place for everyone. It is a matter of trusting God through the all-too-human ones on whom God is counting.
ReplyDeleteThe church has always been changing. Even in its heyday Grace was not the church of ten or twenty or forty years before. No church was. So long as there were lots of people, people to finance the church as it was perceived to be, it was easy to believe everything was the same. It is only through the diminishing attendance and resources that it has become possible to see that God is doing a new thing and it is good. Hard. Painful. Childbirth hard and painful. And good.