Metanoia
Changing Hearts and Minds
The fundamental responsibility entrusted to the Church is that of leading its faithful to an experience of God, a life lived in relationship with God . . . the discovery of a personal relationship with God lived in a community context, rooted in attentive listening to the Word of God contained in Scripture, formed by the Eucharist, and expressed in a life of faith, hope, and love. – Enzo Bianchi, Words of Spirituality: Exploring the Inner Life, p. 1.
There are so many pressing concerns and dire conflicts facing our world. In the United States, we have reached a level of violent and seemingly unreconciliable polarization not seen since the Civil War. Life everywhere is shadowed by the accelerating climate crisis, a global pandemic, war in Europe, and the largest mass migration of people the world has ever known. Democracy at home and abroad is in retreat.
With so much at stake in these life and death matters, it is easy for the Church to lose sight of its fundamental responsibility. As Christians, we want to have something meaningful to say, we want to do something to address these existential crises. But too often, what begins as genuine compassion and concern becomes high-jacked by ideological agendas, and the Church becomes just another proxy in the culture wars reduced to policing the boundaries of acceptable belief. The new orthodoxy is no longer theological, but social and political.
The temptation for the Church to become aligned with one or another party contesting for authority within the state is nothing new. There is something very human about wanting to shore up our sense of security and identity by feeling powerful and relevant. There is something diabolical about using power to impose ideological conformity or enforce some notion of purity (religious, racial, or sexual).
The decline of the Church in the West is, in part, a result of its failure to fulfill its fundamental responsibility. Rather than inviting people into a relationship with the living God, with all the risk and challenge such a relationship necessarily presents to our comfortable certainties and defended identities, the Church reinforces our conceptions of what we already know and who we think we are. But an encounter with the living God cannot leave us unchanged! The Church has lost its nerve as a vehicle for conscious transformation into the image of Christ.
What this means is that the very thing that people seek for their healing and growth is denied them. I think that people, to the extent that they are in touch with their desire for God, are not interested in the Church because it doesn’t foster the wholeness they seek, and they have plenty of other vehicles for social action and political engagement, much less entertainment. The Church asks too little of them in terms of spiritual adventure, development, and risk, and too much in term of ideological purity (whether conservative or liberal).
I wonder if part of the problem is that, at least in Western Christianity, the mystical heart of the tradition carried by monastic communities was largely separated from diocesan and parochial institutional life. In other words, the work of conscious transformation was treated as a specialized ministry for monks and nuns. Rather than seeing them as archetypes of a human transformation that is our common vocation, they were seen as religious specialists. The rest of us just needed to show up on Sunday, pay our tithes, and do as we were told.
What would have happened if, as in the Celtic model, Christian communities had been centered around monasteries rather than congregations? The Eastern Church, whose leadership and theology retained a monastic foundation, might have provided a helpful corrective, were it not for its modern lapse into fundamentalism. Today, we might look East (or down the street!) to an ashram or sangha for a different model that places spiritual practices in the service of conscious transformation (metanoia) at the center of religious life.
The Church’s prophetic role in society must be rooted in contemplative practice, in the experience of conversion that awakens the heart, so that action is based on insight and compassion rather than ideology and ego. We cannot solve our current problems at the level of consciousness that created them. There can be no real cultural change without an advancement in consciousness. As the institutional Church in the West continues its decline, its revival lies in the renewal of ancient spiritual technologies for the transformation of consciousness in some (as yet unknown) institutional form.
What this will look like has yet to be revealed. But I suspect that as we face a new dark age, it will be some kind of renewed monasticism that will carry forward the project of conscious human transformation until “God may be all in all.” (I Corinthians 15:28).