Jesus – Save Me from Your Followers
This t-shirt caption took my attention
recently as I reflected on the impact that we as brothers
and partners of Edmund are having on building a more
heart-centred and just earth community.
The word religion comes from religare meaning to fasten, tie or bind up. Leaders are channels through which freedom flows for the liberation of hearts, minds, hands and feet of those they serve.
At the recent Mitakuye Oyasin – Connecting Spiritually gathering of the Edmund Rice Movement in Vancouver there was a sense that Christians today are invited to hold their rich religious tradition lightly, making space for freedom of movement, with a high tolerance for criticism and doubt. This was the kind of atmosphere Edmund and Jesus created around themselves. A way of being that held ‘heavy burdens’ only long enough to enable the lesson of suffering to be learned.
Religious communities and institutions that have ‘space for freedom’ quality of life will be like a large home where lots of people might choose to live. This home has certain furnishings and symbols that inspire and delight its dwellers. It observes traditions of food, festivals, stories, and other customs. It has basic rules that create order. Guests are welcome and respected even though they come from a different kind of home and tradition. Residents come and go, even travelling for extended periods to other religious environments, bringing back tokens of their experiences, which are put in places of honour in their home. But the home remains its own distinct environment. It is a kind of porous place, open to other ways, open to question and evolution, but it always retains the important elements that have shaped its identity. It is also a place where no subject is forbidden to bring up, to question, or to doubt. There is room in this home for skeptics.
Jesus and Edmund created such communities around them. They were men of their time, culture, and religious upbringing. They were critical of it, challenged it but never walked away from it. They held religion lightly to allow it to take the heart into the divine presence of deep stillness and places where the unlovable lived. They were both ultimately free of ‘the ‘heavy burdens’ of institutions realising that God moves freely in the centre of life and it not imprisoned in any particular religious community.
Are our new re-structured provinces ‘homes’ in which Jesus and Edmund would feel comfortable and free? We are making choices at this stage in history about what kind of ‘home’ we desire for ourselves…let us be people who are rooted in our story not stuck!
‘If the times are bad,
then let us be better.
Then the times will be better,
For WE ARE THE TIMES.’ (St Augustine)
We are the architects and builders of our structures, our ways of seeing and living. Where are we at this time in history? Are we like Jesus counter-corporate, challenging unjust structures, resourcing the services for the unlovable and excludedcand witnessing to living in alignment with the spirit of earth?
Peter Harney – Congregation Renewal Team July 2007
Please email: ptrharn@aol.com with your comments and reflections.
Recommended: Brian Taylor (2005) Becoming Human Cowley Pubs, Massachusetts.