phantom limbs

People who have suffered amputation report that they can still feel the lost limb. When they try to use it, it is not there, though they had felt that it was.

There are those of all the sects within the Episcopal Church today who are feeling detached. "This is not the Church I was ordained in." "Church isn't fun anymore." Some are quietly disenchanted, some despairing, some relieved. "Oh, why bother anymore?" Both the desperate and the plotters seem to work or drift toward amputation. And the irony is that both, but especially those who have plottted the day of separaton, imagine that when the thing is done the stump will be the whole body.

We see the same kind of fantasy in the universal insistence that the "middle" is wherever the individual is. No matter how extreme or marginal the view may be, "this is the middle; this is the mainstream." "Behold, I am Via Media!"

Many things feed such attitudes and arouse these disturbances. General Convention meets too often, is one. But more fundamental and ancient is the collision of two understandings of the ecclesial reality. It's old news, it still plagues us, and it likely will still be doing so when the Lord comes again in glory.

Any simple analysis is absurd. But one way to see it is as a divergence between the church as a collection of people around a set of ideas and the church as a community constituted by sacrament and the act of God. Now it is more glorious to talk about the church in the second way, but the church usually behaves according to the first way. We talk the unshakeable bonds of baptism, but we live divisionally, subdividing the community by ideas, prejudices, secular ties, temperament. The list is endless.

However we prefer to think about the two sides of the church's nature, we fantasize if we see the reality as distinctly one or the other, as separable, as requiring a choice. When we begin to detach the one from the other, we amputate. Having freed ourselves of the burden of the other, we awake with the phantom pain of the separated part. And when we try to walk ...