Justice, Mercy, and the task of Church

At a retreat for Episcopal clergy from the Diocese of Atlanta last month, we spent quite a bit of time talking about the disconnect between what the Church is and what many parishioners, accustomed to a consumer model, expect.


T. S. Eliot once was commissioned to write a play called "The Rock." It was to be performed, I believe, to raise money for a church in London. He suppressed the publication of the entire piece, but the Choruses from "The Rock" appear in The Complete Poems and Plays. There is a lot of polemic about the movement of the church out into the suburbs, where the comfortable bourgeoisie were congregating, at the cost of abandoning some inner city parishes that were doing important work. These choruses were written in the 1930's, but they speak to our condition in the 21st century, as well. While consumerism and a sort of pernicious cynicism are more developed in our own time, Eliot saw and commented on the beginning of this trend. He decried the increasing irrelevancy of the Church, both in the city, largely empty on Sundays; and in the suburbs, where people, exhausted by long commutes and long working hours, had no energy for or interest in attending Sunday worship. I quote only two little segments from this long poem.


The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.
All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to GOD.
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?

Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Bring us farther from GOD and nearer to the Dust.


And later...


A Cry from the North, from the West and from the South
Whence thousands travel daily to the timekept City;
Where My Word is unspoken,
In the land of lobelias and tennis flannels
The rabbit shall burrow and the thorn revisit,
The nettle shall flourish on the gravel court,
And the wind shall say: "Here were decent godless people:
Their only monument the asphalt road
And a thousand lost golf balls."

...Why should men love the Church? why should they love her laws?
She tells the of Life and Death, and of all that they would forget.
She is tender where they would be hard, and hard where they like to be soft.
She tells them of Evil and Sin, and other unpleasant facts.
They constantly try to escape
From the darkness outside and within
By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.
But the man that is will shadow
The man that pretends to be.


The Church, says Eliot, "is tender where they would be hard, and hard where they like to be soft." Robert Frost said something similar at the very end of his life, in a letter he dictated just before he died: "How can we be just in a world that needs mercy and merciful in a world that needs justice." (Quoted in Harold Bloom's introductory essay to Bloom's Modern Critical Views: Robert Frost 2003. Bloom is explicit that this apparent question was dictated as a statement. Hmmm....)

This brings me to the Collect in the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer for the Fifth Sunday in Lent:

Almighty God, you alone can bring into order the unruly wills and affections of sinners: "Grant your people grace to love what you command and desire what you promise; that, among the swift and varied changes of the world, our hearts may surely there be fixed where true joys are to be found; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.

The task of the Church is to turn us from "decent godless people" into people who "love what [God] commands, and desire what [God] promises." That transformation happens as we journey by way of the Cross.