From the Rector

Dear Friends in Christ,

Something I ask myself periodically, when I see one news article or another (especially about the Church) is this: Is that my story? What I often find is that what’s being said or reported just doesn’t square with my experience of life.

Now let me say quickly, that my experience of life is privileged as far as such things are thought of these days in terms of gender, race, and the like. I’d contend that there are many more ways of thinking about privilege than those but I’ll put that out there.

Now, back to the story. I’ll see some post or article that is just vicious about some group or another. Liberals want only this. Conservatives only care about that. Americans are this. Police are that. Immigrants are this. Palestine is that. Everybody has strong opinions about everything it seems.

But when I take half a step back, I think to myself: that’s not what I see. The individuals in my life who, perhaps, fall into these broad categories don’t fit the easy stereotypes that we love. I think we love them for three reasons. First, we like patterns. Second, we are tribal. Third, we’re just lazy.

We like to make sense of what we see. We like patterns. I often say that wisdom is simply pattern recognition. You acquire a sense of how things work and you develop the wisdom to see patterns forming before others do. So then you become a consultant and get to do TED Talks.

But, for many of us, our pattern recognition gets broken because we don’t have enough pieces to accurately see the pattern. It gets back to my earlier point about privilege. I don’t have the life experience to have much wisdom about how to navigate the Church as an ordained woman, for example. I can see some patterns but I don’t have all the pieces necessary to know if the pattern I think I discern is actually true.

This is one reason we need one another, as the Church, because our call is to seek Truth together. Doing so, seeing the patterns of what’s true and what isn’t, necessarily means that we need one another’s pieces of the mosaic that is truth. To see the whole picture, we need others to lend us their sight and wisdom.

However, because we are tribal, we too quickly discount or disregard the wisdom of others. We place our experience above theirs or discount what they bring to the table because what they bring will change what we need to bring—perhaps even change who we need to be. We’re tribal but we often know one another about as well as the folks thought they knew Samaritans or Galileans. That’s why Jesus’s stories of crossing the boundaries between these tribes was so scandalous.

People knew you couldn’t trust those people. All they had been told, the patterns they knew so well, could not account for a Good Samaritan. Jesus challenged them with the notion that the tribe might be bigger. He was saying that the whole human family is a tribe that shares one Father in Heaven and they all have Christ for a brother. That’s how we learned the Lord’s Prayer.

However, to seek new patterns and to break out of tribal structures requires a kind of energy we just don’t have sometimes. It takes active engagement with the world and with other people and news sources and knowledge and stories for us to get those new pieces of information and experiences that will shape our wisdom—open our perception of patterns—and help us leave behind tribal identities for something more.

Is that my story? That’s the question we have to ask ourselves again and again when we’re retreated into our corners and away from one another. Politicians, media, and more profit from our division.

But it’s in our refusal to be bound by tribe, our insistence on seeing all people as bound together under one Heavenly Father, our commitment to be a people of patient wisdom, and our willingness to do the hard work of loving reconciliation that mark us as something different than the world would have us be.

Christ calls us to seek and serve him, and we will find him in all people and in all places. The call to pattern our lives on him forces us into some uncomfortable truths about ourselves and the world.

The most uncomfortable truth may just be that we are all one. That’s our story.

Yours in Christ,

—Fr Robert