Calling

Jim Goodmann

Regional Director, Calling Congregations

LEAVE COMMENTS FOR THIS POST AT BOTTOM OF PAGE

May 12, 2010

Field of Compassion

Judy Cannato’s book of the above title suggests that our being bound to one another is immutable and not even a matter of being local to each other.  Her careful and stunning study intertwines the new physics and a spirituality that takes as necessity the development of another language for our identity in the human condition, that one universal spiritual tradition to which everyone belongs, willingly or un- (Thomas Keating).

This should be good news for Christians who hold to the language of the Creeds and yet also dwell in that space that is open to knowing more than our concepts and even our practice can hold.  Good news because it portends that there is more we can know of God and of God’s work within our humanity, within creation.  That work is a consistent motion toward change—change that is the sign of an organism’s growth.  Drawing on Karl Rahner’s thought Cannato says that the nature of God’s invitation is to “active self-transcendence,” an obedience to “…the Spirit of God working from within creation, compelling it to evolve.”

 The current signs of change and dislocation that we witness in our church and secular cultures can be received as signals from our interior Friend, the Holy Spirit, that what we think we know so well is actually being re-shaped in circumstances that look like upheaval, instability, and the death of our precious notions of the church, of God, of Jesus Christ.  We are, at times, not unlike those characters in C.S. Lewis’s The Last Battle (the Chronicles of Narnia), confined toward the story’s end within a dark stable and believing there is no way out or that the darkness is malevolent.  As they find out, however, another door opens for them in the darkness and the invitation sounds to travel “further in and higher up.”  Further in and higher up to places and company that neither they nor we could anticipate.

 Cannato makes an analogous point when she talks about the “Dark Matter” and “Dark Energy” which comprise “about 96 percent of the universe, with only 4 percent falling into the category we call ‘ordinary matter.’“  Dark energy, she says, is what compels the expansion of the universe.  Similarly, there is a dark energy at work in the changes that we pass through today.  This energy underscores the truth that we are not in ultimate control and that we rely on others to help us to see and make sense of new landscapes.And some of those "others" will not be from our respective households or affinities.

St. John of the Cross says that God is “a ray of darkness,” that is, pure light that passes through us constantly but, because we are unable to see it, we believe that light to be absent or that we have somehow missed it.  Perhaps our darkness is compounded by our expectation.  We want God to relate to us outside of and apart from the other that lives and breathes beside us every day.  But what if that “other,” the one standing beside us (a.k.a. parakletos) is the form that the Holy Spirit is taking right now?  That was the question that Benno Pattison, the rector of my parish, posed to us last Sunday in anticipation of Pentecost and the coming Holy Spirit.  And what if I am called to be an advocate for another in similar fashion?

 This thing called church is possibly less a thing than we think.  It is more like the morphogenic fields Cannato describes in Field of Compassion: where information, habits and memories interact but also where, with the grace and the company of the Spirit new things may be seen and heard, a new creation may be formed.  From each of us there is called a holy listening which cannot help but generate the compassion which begins to heal the world.  Each of our selves are holons: always partial, already whole within the greater Whole; without each of us there is not seeing or hearing.  Our stories are part of that necessary seeing and hearing the church must undertake today.  What is yours?