christiannonduality.com Blog

Tom Roberts is editor at large for the National Catholic Reporter. To get a better feel for parish life today, he has been on the road visiting Catholics along the way.

Watch NCRonline.org for updates. He recently turned in his 19th installment.

http://ncronline.org/blogs/in-search-of-the-emerging-church

From reading Tom’s series, a reality that has been impressed upon me is how well so many are doing and being church. And the way they live and move and have their being emulates the aspirations our leaders have articulated in our emerging church conversations.

Many of these people will never blog, never tweet and never use Facebook or friend as a verb, but they competently (even if unconsciously) integrate contemplative lives with social justice in an honest relationship to Jesus finding, sometimes founding, authentic community. And there you have it: Emergence with a capital “E”!

Of course, we recognize and affirm a diversity of ministry in our unity of mission. When I was in Louisiana’s nonpartisan think tank on poverty, I sought out the Fourth World Movement, which was working with the radically poor in New Orleans (a precious little French missionary family, at that; in other words, foreign missionaries in America!). I learned that what the desperately poor want, sometimes more than a crumb of bread or a sip of water, even, was a place at any table of dialogue where there destinies were being worked out. (And I sigh and think of the lines that were drawn on Middle Eastern maps by departing colonial powers.)

Another thing that was impressed upon me was that they wanted to tell their stories and to have their stories passed along, such that they might matter as persons to somebody. My eyes were opened by one quote relayed to me by one of the 4th World missionaries. A desperately poor person crying: “I don’t want to be an icon of your fucking Christ!” That made me a post-patriarchal, post-colonial, post-paternalistic, post-hierarchical, post-institutionalistic, post-whatever faster, smoother and more efficaciously than all of my immersion in abstract postmodern philosophy and theology. We objectify people when we make them a salve for our hurting consciences or a badge of honor for our heroic strivings.

And we learn this from Merton, that we all have crises of creativity and continuity, the first corresponding to our need to feel like we make a difference to someone, the latter, all the forms of death we encounter, literally and metaphorically.

And in this regard, I realized how poverty-stricken so many in America’s board rooms, war rooms, classrooms, living rooms and even bedrooms are, how utterly miserable are so many of the people we all rub elbows with daily. And I resolved to minister to what I came to call The 5th World, in other words, this litany of rooms, which all too often has so much less joy than we can find in either the 4th or 3rd world.

And this is no naive romanticization of poverty.

I know, now, in my heart of hearts, that the preferential option for the poor is the Gospel because it is Good News for all, for at some time or another, sooner or later, it is going to be consolation for every last one of us.

This is reproduced from my post at Cathlimergent Conversation: Catholics in the Emerging Church Conversation. Please, join us there!