Not entirely un-related to yesterday’s post from Emergent Village – I offer you this from the Guardian Belief section:
It can’t be claimed that the tendency to break into regional or temperamental units has entirely vanished from contemporary Christianity, but it is easy to forget what a strange phenomenon the Christian church is in crossing racial and national boundaries and asserting a commonality that defies all more natural divisions. . . . We still tend to make it smaller, confuse it with one cultural expression, exclude those who witness in a different idiom and with different emphases. Paul’s fight to make people see past their own insular divisions is still not quite won.
I think we have all seen it at least once – even if you’ve only been in the OC/IC community for a short while. “Bishop” (Grand Pubah) X refuses to even sit down with “Bishop” Y because of some minor technicality of ritual, or because Bishop Y is a woman, or ordains women, or has a more open approach to communion or . . . . you get the idea.
It seems to me that we often fail to appreciate how simple acts of “communion” – friendship, collaboration, a shared idea, goal, or understanding of a single point sets us on the road to greater collegiality among OC/IC communities; similarly one act of pushing another away, of pointing fingers, of judgement or condemnation can widen an already enormous chasm.
I am not a proponent – as some are – of a sweeping unification, or the formation of an orgnised “body” of the OC/IC community. That, to me is not a way forward, rather it is a regressive step, one that will condemn us to repeat the mistakes of our own past, as well as the mistakes of the historical past of the “catholic” tradition. I do think, however, that it is about time that we stop seeing ourselves as isolated individual units, and begin to activly approach one another as collaborative partners in faith.
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