Reading: Just barely into the meat of Freedom Evolves, sort of waiting for Dennett to just get to his point.
Being House Leader: Not half bad. Once I got into the swing of things, life was alright. It's basically like being a normal Assistant, except that you have to think about more at once. House Leaders have to be conscious of functional stuff like finances and keeping the books straight, but also of the "house dynamics." That is, how everyone is interacting with each other and forming relationships. Then, at the appropriate time (usually some kind of meeting), I just bring these things to light so that they can be reflected and acted upon. Easy Peasy, right?
In alot of ways, being a house leader is better than being just an Assistant because it comes with some of the responsibilities of community-wide agency. I get to move through channels that typical Assistants can't. How's our Community Participation Service (sort of like a day-base) working? Can we plan some events around Christmas time? Could I please recommend that we get a new van? Things like that.
OK, so maybe "easy" isn't the best word for it, but the job's definitely got a rhythm. I find that if I'm unintentional about my duties and place in the community, then life becomes a serious chore, but taking the other track, being intentional about the House Leader duties makes it all very rewarding and even a little bit fun.
I've been taking some initiative and making some changes to things while Akiko's been away. It feels pretty good to make the house run in a better way. Well, a way that feels better, I guess. I bought a new safety rail for the shower last week and held a meeting with Tamzin's Mum about welcoming her into the community. It all feels a bit like the first time I rode a bike all by myself. "Look Mom, I'm responsible!" I feel much more confident now and I don't know how I'll feel when Akiko gets back to reclaim my new duties. I suppose that, in many ways, I'll feel very relieved, but I've proven to myself now that I can handle the responsibility and that feels really good.
Discerning my Vocation: The bigger project here is still in the works. After being house leader and having the experience of L'Arche, even with as short of a time as I've been here, I feel like I no longer have to be afraid of building an academic ivory tower. I feel as though I no longer run the risk of running roughshod over the life experiences of others. Well, not as much as I used to, anyway.
At the same time, I'm growing tired of being within circles of "religious" people. I don't like to put on committees for "youth ministry" or "spiritual exploration" or anything like that. Don't get me wrong, those things are probably necessary and there are people who are definitely called to those areas, but personally, I feel drained by them.
Here's what I'm thinking: As I usually do, I've been coming at things in life backwards. Instead of approaching alternative community from the angle of Religion, I think what I need (and maybe what the world needs right now, in a more general sense) is to approach Religion and belief from the angle of alternative community.
There are lots of Assistants in L'Arche and lots of community-livers who aren't religious in a personal sense and don't care to be. They haven't come to the community because of their religious beliefs and they don't really feel called to believe like those around them do. They may go to prayer, but it obviously doesn't feel the same for them. We have quite a few of these people in L'Arche. These folks come into alternative communities because there's something here that can't be found elsewhere: something transcendental. I've got a hunch and I think that the nature of Religion and belief itself is changing for us. Specifically, for this generation of people.
Now, it's fairly obvious from my historical studies of biblical narratives, that ancient peoples made no differentiation between truth and fact. In the example of the Romans, one worships the Emperor because that's what makes the Empire run, regardless of what is known or unknown about things like human psychology, sociology, or economics. The point is that having a God-Ruler figure made things work and how one worshiped determined how one lived. Truths and facts were apparently one and the same because ancient peoples would have had no need to separate the two into different experiences. All this, however, would have changed with the rise of the natural sciences, beginning during the Enlightenment period of western history. For us moderns and post-moderns, 'how' has become a different question from 'why.'
Indeed, I'll invite you all to check out Wired.com's science reporting in all it's glory. Here's a good article on how Religion works in your brain:
It's entirely possible that religious belief, as a development of thought, only helped to "boot strap" human ingenuity and social relationships into their current state. I'd throw my bet there as well. The evidence for such a case seems pretty clear and only grows stronger as more and more information about human consciousness emerges from the fields of Neuroscience and Psychology.
However, contrary to what certain Darwinian fundamentalists would have us believe, the rise of the scientific, naturalist perspective doesn't necessarily entail the end of Religion. I think that Religion is simply mutating...evolving, if you will. I, for one, am certainly not about to give up worshiping God, even if I dislike alot of what's associated with it, and even if that's true for alot of people. The major ethical objective here is to avoid fundamentalism, both religious and naturalist. Only by first sidestepping that, can we move forward without running the risk of invalidating at least some portion of the human experience.
For those of you who understand Christian language and metaphor in the same way that I do, essentially what I'm saying is that alternative communities, regardless of their religious affiliations or "beliefs" are the new Body of Christ. Look at it this way, in the words of Henri Nouwen: Jesus "did not offer an ideology, but Himself" (from The Wounded Healer). It doesn't particularly matter what you think "about" God, because the realm of "about" and the term itself is now subject to scientific inquiry. The realm of causation, of the "about" as such, is now the subject of a new sort of prophecy for us: The Natural Sciences.
I say prophecy in the same sense as it is meant by Walter Brueggemann. That is, the natural sciences function for us as a way to speak against the status-quo. They allow us to ask new questions and old ones in new ways. In that capacity, the sciences help to tear down the walls of what Brueggemann calls, "The Royal Consciousness" through the phenomenon of "discovery." The Sciences themselves, however, are only allowed to touch matters of the factual. They can only tell us things about stuff as it happens. They only offer us information and they are subject to the kind of formative questions that we ask. In order to say, "Look, things aren't like we thought that they were." We must first have a set of things that we "think" or "believe."
Religion and spirituality, by contrast to the sciences, open the door for formation and formative experience. I don't speak that as a function of Religion, but rather as a way to identify the phenomenon which we commonly call Religion. Let's cut to chase. Here's the plain-language version: Anytime during which a person is offered an opportunity to transcend what he or she already "knows" or believes, this we may call a "spiritual" experience. If said spiritual experience finds grounding in a specific practice or ritual, this we may call "Religion."
So basically, all of these folks who come to places like L'Arche without being "believers" as such, are having spiritual formations. Their experiences are valid in terms of Ethics. They are discovering a kind of spirituality and, perhaps, creating new "religions." They come because it's different here. They come because there's something weird here; something else. They come because they have been provoked; called forward by some Other.
Now, for those of you who are Christians (and for those of you nervous about the idea of letting go of your God), I would say that you ought not fear the loss of Tradition or Scripture. Instead, try to focus on the self-giving example of Jesus in the Gospels. Offer it up to God, offer it all up, even that which you think you know. Offer up not only the beliefs of the world, but also belief itself. If God is fundamentally creative and if Jesus dwells with creation and if the Holy Spirit moves through creation, then what have we to fear of an evolving tradition. We should be more afraid of preventing God from acting creatively in the world than we should be of acting unwisely. If the evolution of Religion itself can be the saving arms of Christ, if it can turn the world upside down and move it toward the Kingdom of God, then to that I say, "Why not."
In my time at L'Arche, as I explore Ethics and the Other and Religion, I posit everyday that God is vulnerable and that this very characteristic of God's mutability; God's creativity, is the very same which offers us Salvation and, indeed, the salvation of the world. I think then that our tradition ought to reflect this. The Gospels ought to feel imperiled by everyone and everything, for when God comes to the world, God risks it all.
I do have much more to say on this topic as I work it out further, but you're sure to hear more of that as it unfolds. For now, I must be content with this rambling as it is, publish it, and go to cook dinner.
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