Yesterday I wrote that the church is a political structure. Today I'd like to dwell on that idea a bit more in conversation with another writer, William Stringfellow, a lawyer and theologian working in America in the mid 20th C.

In an essay titled, The Orthodoxy of Radical Involvement, he writes,

"There is no such thing as neutrality about any public issue... Every citizen and every institution is involved in one way or another, either by intention or default. Those who suppose they can withdraw only deceive themselves, because deliberate abstinence or asserted neutrality are themselves forms of involvement in politics."

The Church, as a part of society, has a responsibility to confront the social issues of its day. Attempts to stay out of them are still, as Stringfellow notes, a form of involvement. This why there is no such thing as being apolitical.

In another essay, Poverty, Property, and People, he writes,

“The beginning of conscience, in a Christian sense, is realizing that every action or omission, even those which seem routine and trivial, is consequentially related to the lives of all other human beings on the face of the earth.”

Politics gets at this interconnection of all things and what it means to try and form a shared life together. As an institution, the church is gathering people and forming them with values and purpose that will play a role in forging their relationship to the world around them. These things have political consequences—whether we recognize it or not.

A Good Friday reflection.

It's been a while since I've attended a church service. Usually this isn't something that I think about but today it weighs a bit more heavily. My reasons for distancing myself from the structural church are complicated. They're also not special. I respect those who stay in it as much as I understand those who leave and I don't think either choice makes someone better or worse. My feelings about it are my own and I also don't claim any sort of finality to them.

What I can say is that my convictions and my faith have tended to lead me on the path of societal progressive change. I try to follow that, wherever it leads—and for the moment that has led me outside the church(†). Christianity has always rung most true for me as a socio-economic and political project working in solidarity with the poor and oppressed. And I guess this is the thing for me. The church is a political structure and it's naive to suggest it isn't. Attempts to try and frame it as a-political or somehow existing outside of that are lazy at best and disingenuous at worst, perpetuating the suffering we should be working against. What I see in the church (at least in much of the current North American expression of it) has been a commitment to a politic I simply do not find resonance with.

So today, as the Church gathers to remember and reflect upon the death of Jesus, I call to mind the writing of Tissa Balasuriya, a Sri Lanken priest and theologian who struggled deeply with the role of the church in relation to the suffering of people.

"The Eucharist is spiritual food insofar as it leads to greater love, self-unity, and communion among persons and groups. Today this requires love among persons and effective action for justice. The Eucharist must also lead us to a response to the suffering of the masses, often caused by people who take a prominent part in the Eucharist. Unless there is this twofold dimension of personal love and societal action, the Eucharist can be a sacrilege."

(from the Eucharist and Human Liberation)

† I am talking about being outside the structural or institutional church as opposed to the traditions and community.

Reading a book this morning on Christian history from a global perspective that I picked up a while ago and never got around to reading. The focus of the author is to highlight the role of mission and how the tradition grew and formed in its various contexts; as opposed to the usual Eurocentric view that has tended to dominate Christian history. I'll try to layer in some interesting ideas as they emerge.

The major takeaway up front is to be reminded that there is no single, clear trajectory of the Christian tradition; it is something fluid, constantly evolving and recontextualizing for every new time and place. It emerges from lived experience, responses to challenges and controversies, and interactions with other cultural forces. Contextualizing, more than preserving, is the more accurate understanding of the tradition.

What's more, for the first few centuries at least, belonging to the church (in a universal sense) was about relationship rather than adherence to rules or doctrines. Bishops, were meant to be those who could trace their lineage of appointment back to the apostles; sort of like an apprenticeship model that lent credibility to one's leadership. Cyprian's famous quip, "outside the church there is no salvation," is a response to the question of rebaptism by those who were not baptized by bishops who carried the proper lineage credentials.

I guess what I'm getting at here is that we spend a lot of time arguing about what set of beliefs or practices constitute the right version of Christianity but history is rarely that neat and tidy.

Been consuming a bunch of Sinead O'Connor content over the last few days. She was such an absolutely remarkable spirit and it's tragic to see her gone. But I came across this interview with Alyson McCabe, who recently wrote a book about why Sinead O'Connor matters. It was a really good conversation but there was something that stood out to me. At one point McCabe said that Sinead O'Connor had almost no career self-preservation. Repeatedly she would let her ideals and her values override the conventional wisdom for celebrity success.

In an interview that O'Connor did in 2021, she herself said,

“I don’t define success by how much money you make. I define success, personally, by [asking myself] did I keep the contract I made when I made my holy communion and my confirmation? Which was to stay true to the very Christian beliefs that were drilled into me by the Catholic Church, which were the rejection of the material world in favour of truth. So I was just being me. I was just being a punk.”

As someone who has at times had a similar lack of career self-preservation because of my ideals, I resonated with all of this. I had a mentor who used to say, don't smoke your own supply. That is, don't buy into the hype of what people say about you -- good or bad. This seemed to be what Sinead O'Connor lived by. Do what seems right to you based on the values you try to live by, not aligning yourself to other people's expectations. That's not to say you shouldn't reflect on those values often, but let that be your measure of success; not status or money or whether or not people who don't even know you liked what you did.

Anyways, she was wonderful and I'm really trying to track down a copy of her Sean-Nós Nua album.