Alban Weekly from The Duke Divinity School in Durham, North Carolina, United States "PRACTICAL WISDOM FOR LEADING CONGREGATIONS: "Nadia Bolz-Weber: Entering the stream of the faithful--INNOVATING WITH INTEGRITY REQUIRES BEING DEEPLY ROOTED IN TRADITION" for Monday, 31 October 2016
Nadia Bolz-Weber: Entering the Stream of the Faithful
INNOVATING WITH INTEGRITY REQUIRES BEING DEEPLY ROOTED IN TRADITION
Faith & Leadership
CONGREGATIONS
Nadia Bolz-Weber: Entering the stream of the faithful
You have to be really deeply rooted in tradition in order to innovate with integrity, says the founding pastor of House for All Sinners and Saints.
Her church follows the ancient liturgy of the church, yet during Easter Vigil, for example, members are asked to tell the resurrection story in teams. People have made films, written original pieces of choral music and acted out scenes with Barbie dolls.
“We’ll call that ancient/future church and different stuff like that, but I find that’s what people are drawn to,” said Bolz-Weber, who earned a master of divinity degree from Iliff School of Theology.
She has become a leading voice of the emerging church after a hard-drinking life as a stand-up comedian and restaurant worker, and has been described as a “6-foot-1 Christian billboard” for her tattoo-covered arms.
Bolz-Weber spoke with Jesse James DeConto for Faith & Leadership about communicating a historic doctrine in today’s culture and holding on to something old in an identifiably Christian way. The following is an edited transcript.
Q: For those clergy who want to be doing what you’re doing, what do they need to know?That they should figure out who their people are and try to be their pastor.
Older folks from the church will say, “What do young adults want? What do they want so that we can do it?” I’m like, “I’ve never had to ask myself that question.”
I get to be in ministry in a context I’m native to, so I’ve never had to second-guess, “Will they like this?” or, “Will they get this joke?” or, “Would they enjoy doing X, Y or Z?”
There’s something about doing ministry as the person you are that ends up making a big difference, and who you are is going to be different than who I am.
I know a lot of pastors, if you ask them, “Do you feel like you can really be here in your work?” they’d say no. I think that ends up being really key.
Q: How do you see your ministry as part of a new Reformation -- the Great Emergence or the Fourth Great Awakening that Phyllis Tickle and Diana Butler Bass have talked about?The Holy Spirit is subversive, and one of the things the Spirit does is blur lines that we’re comfortable maintaining. My experience has been that we like to have these lines of liberal and conservative -- theologically and socially. I think that people, especially the younger generation, have experienced those lines becoming real blurry and are fine with that. I know that’s true for myself.
I’m at the point in my life where I don’t want to be a part of fundamentalism of the left or the right, mostly because it lacks two things that I can’t do without in my life anymore -- which is joy and humility.
I don’t see a lot of joy and humility in these extreme stances that people take on either side. So I feel like the Spirit moves in the blurring of those distinctions that we all like to have. Every time you meet somebody who’s in a category of conservative or hateful or narrow-minded or fill-in-the-blank, there’s some sort of connection that’s made, and then you have to rethink the category. That’s the work of the Spirit.
I think it’s interesting people dismiss the being “spiritual but not religious” thing. My business card for the church says, “We’re religious but not spiritual.” That yearning that people have is for something that’s more than 20 minutes old. I think people want to be connected to something that’s more than a whim.
There’s very little in our visual field, generally in our lives, that’s more than 50 years old. And so to be connected to something that’s ancient speaks something to us, because everything around us is new. Since the age of progress, new is better, right?
Now we go, “Wait a minute -- that’s not always true.” When new is always better, we’re not tethered to anything. I think I see a longing in people to be tethered to something, and I like to say that you have to be really deeply rooted in tradition in order to innovate with integrity.
I really like to have those two things going on at the same time all the time -- tradition and innovation. We’ll call that ancient/future church and different stuff like that, but I find that’s what people are drawn to.
Q: How do you hold on to something old in an identifiably Christian way?I reject the premise I often hear in progressive Christianity that in order to be down with multiculturalism or with peace and social justice you have to jettison the Bible and Jesus. I think those are the only two things we have going for us.
Having said that, I feel there’s something about the Bible and orthodox Christian teachings -- the creeds, the Bible, the liturgy and, most certainly and importantly, the gospel -- that even the church can’t [mess] up. We’ve tried, and we’ve done a lot of damage, but there’s a resiliency to it.
So I think some of the questions we ask end up not being necessary, because the thing that we’ve been given to caretake is so much more resilient than our errors are. The Bible will still be here long after every book on Oprah’s list has faded into memory. It’s not going to die; it will not return empty.
I find comfort in that. That’s something that’s rooted in reality. It’s not about me coming up with the next clever thing or me trying to be as relevant as I can possibly be or any of those things, because it has its own integrity. You can’t deconstruct the truth.
The reason the Bible is important is because it bears Christ into the world; it’s the cradle that holds Christ. As a confessing Christian, the central message of the Bible for me is the revelation of how God chose to reveal God’s self.
Therefore, since we know what the central message is, the gospel itself is at the center. It’s not one thing; it’s like concentric circles.
David J. Lose has this great book, “Making Sense of Scripture.” He writes there is one view where everything in Scripture is a link -- one of them can’t be weak, so they all have to be together and they’re all equal and they’re all equally strong, and if you doubt that, everything will pull apart.
The view I’m talking about is where the gospel is in the middle, and the farther away something in the Bible gets from that, it has less and less authority.
Q: How do you communicate a historic doctrine in today’s culture?First of all, people should read Martin Luther’s “On the Bondage of the Will” and “The Freedom of a Christian.”
I also think, if given the opportunity, people can actually see [that] the way in which they live can’t live up to even their own values.
At the end of the day, whether you’re a conservative or a liberal, there is something you didn’t recycle that day. There is something you bought that was not fair trade. There’s some thought you had that was lustful. There is no way to escape the fact that no matter what your values are, you cannot live up to them. It is impossible. That’s what we call being convicted by the law. The law is anything that convicts the conscious.
When Adam and Eve were in the garden and they heard the rustling of the leaves, they freaked out. Do you know what the rustling of the leaves was? The law. They’re convicted by the fact that there’s always something within them that is sin.
In that way, a newborn baby is full of sin. It has no thought for God or neighbor. I still don’t have a thought for God or neighbor. It’s so completely clear to me that that is who I am, but then when I hear about and experience who God is for me, when I return again to my identity that I have in my baptism, it’s corrective to that sclerotic posture that I end up always having.
Q: How does this affect you and your work?It’s something I need. I need to receive the Eucharist. I need to hear the gospel again and again and again, because I forget all of that. I think that’s what we do in Christian communities. We gather. We remind each other of who we are. We remind each other of God’s promises, and that’s what we proclaim.
I think people, especially liberals, conflate sin with low self-esteem. They’re like, “I don’t want to talk about sin anymore,” because [they’ve been told] sin is immorality. They’re like, “I’m tired of having someone tell me I’m immoral when I’m not.”
There’s very little to do with morality. Sometimes it intersects with morality -- absolutely, no question. Being curved in on self can cause some really immoral things.
If you could actually manage to be a completely ethical and moral person, you would still be sinful. It doesn’t mean you’re bad. It just means that God is God and you are not, and that’s actually good news.
I once visited this woman who had a 6-month-old baby die. I spent the day with her. She had a pack of cigarettes next to her bed, and she didn’t have custody of her other four kids, and she was a drug addict. She spent the whole time going, “You know, this all happened because of this cop or this social worker who had it out for me.”
She had this totally external locus of control. I was so sad after I left, and it wasn’t because of the situation, which was sad; I was sad because I felt like she was never going to experience the exquisiteness of God’s grace, because she can’t confess. She needs it, but she can’t get to that place. She’s not going to have the freedom that comes from that, because she keeps going, “No, it’s this, it’s that.” Total denial.
My church always has a confession and absolution at the beginning of our liturgy. A lot of church planters want to jettison the confession, because they don’t want people to feel bad. I’m like, “Oh my God, that’s central to who we are.”
Q: How do you conceive of what you’re doing as a laboratory working for the wider church?That’s a good question, because we’re taking the essential parts of the liturgy and the theology in the history of the church and enculturating them in our context and then saying, “Oh, look at what we did” -- and then get quoted like, “That’s identifiably Lutheran, but it looks totally different.”
I wasn’t raised Lutheran, and in the end, I feel like part of my work is to re-catechize cradle Lutherans. I’m like an evangelist saying to the Lutherans, “You have no idea what you’re sitting on. You can’t even see it.” To have a theological system based on paradox -- that’s what the Lutheran theological system is based on, a paradox, and it couldn’t be more perfect for postmodern people.
The way we view Scripture, law and gospel -- the tension of living between law and gospel simultaneously sinner and saint, living in the now and the not yet, all of that -- Lutherans aren’t afraid to play the mystery card.
We don’t have to explain everything. We don’t claim to have the answers. We have some great descriptions. I took those essentials and I said, “Well, look at what it looks like.”
I think the church in general has to be open to the way in which they need to be reintroduced to their own stuff by people who have chosen it as adults.
Q: What was your process of choosing it?Of course, it doesn’t feel like I chose it. I didn’t go to church for 10 years. I was violently de-churched. I hated Christianity and Christians for 10 years, and then I met my husband.
He introduced me to it. I’d been clean for four years at that time. [The Lutheran church] was the only place that didn’t feel like a self-improvement program. The Lutherans said, “Nobody’s climbing the spiritual ladder. There’s no spiritual self-improvement program here, and God’s continuously rescuing us, continually coming to us, always interrupting our lives. This is the direction.”
I went, “That is what I’ve experienced.” I fell in love with the liturgy, too, which I’d never experienced. It felt like a beautiful gift that we have that we’ve been given by our ancestors to caretake for the next generation. It’s this gorgeous thing, like entering the stream of the faithful.
It’s been flowing for a while, and you get to enter it and carry it, and then the next generation comes and carries it along.
Read more from the interview with Nadia Bolz-Weber »
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IDEAS THAT IMPACT: TRADITION & INNOVATION
Teaching the tradition
It is more important than ever that we know and share our tradition. The risen Christ is actually present in the telling of the Christian story. It is essential that we tell the story -- not talk about the story, not give directives based on the story, not modify or abridge the story -- but tell the story.Christian discipleship began with vocation, with the “call” of Jesus to some fishermen. Jesus’s call was a call to relationship: “Come, follow me.” Whether among first-generation Jewish followers of the Way, third-generation Gentile Christians in Asia Minor, or twenty-first-century Western church folk, discipleship is grounded in the calling to relationship with God through Jesus.
In the summer following second grade I had a consuming crush on a boy named Bruce. While I barely registered on the status meter of elementary-school social hierarchy, Bruce was quite popular, and try as I might I could not get him to return my affections. On warm afternoons I would hike down by the cool creek that ran beside our yard, thinking about Bruce. One day I picked a daisy and began plucking the petals, reciting, “He loves me. He loves me not.” I convinced myself that if I ended on “He loves me,” Bruce would magically return my ardor. Plucking the final petal, I shivered with excitement, “He loves me!” and yet, his sentiments didn’t change.
Magic cannot create relationship. In fact, magical thinking impedes relationship. Whenever we participate in activities designed to induce another to act, think, or feel a certain way, we are engaging in magic, precluding relationship by turning the other into an “it” rather than a “who.” Yet it is surprising how easily magic creeps into Christianity.
When I find myself feeling disillusioned about Sunday mornings I often wonder when worship as celebration became “going to church” as an act of obedience that appeases God. If we approach worship, Bible reading, participation in rituals, financial donation, or other “religious activities” as attempts to win God’s favor, they become magic, every bit as much as dancing around a fire chanting incantations on moonlit nights. If, on the other hand, we approach these practices as ways to spend time with God, then we are involved in relationship.
Relationships are powerful. I recall a friend who had been all “prickles and burrs” in seminary. His anger was notorious among the students, and his hostility frequently erupted in tirades against professors. He didn’t just have anger—he was an angry person. I developed a friendship with this man when we worked on a project together. I learned that he had had a damaging upbringing and had recently experienced a difficult ending to an incompatible marriage. These relationships had left him in a perpetual state of defensiveness. I wondered at graduation time how he would fare in ministry or, more pointedly, how a church would fare in his hands. A decade later I was leading a seminar when I noticed my old angry friend among the participants. The face was familiar, but I saw differences beyond those made by the passage of years. At break time I connected with my prickly friend. Only he wasn’t prickly anymore. He radiated a gracious, gentle spirit and laughed easily, in a way that seemed to celebrate sheer joy in life. As we were speaking, some people joined us, and he introduced me to a small entourage from his church. These people obviously adored him. His final introduction was of a gentle-faced woman with whom he exchanged looks of obvious devotion. “This is my wife,” he said, beaming. The cause of the difference was clear. This man’s relationships with his church members and with his wife had created a safe place within which he could reclaim his inner kindness and joy. Relationships with others have the power to change us.
The power of human relationships offers a mere glimpse of the capacity of relationship with God in Jesus to transform us. Jesus promised us “an Advocate, the Spirit of truth,” who abides with us and in us (John 14:15–17). This indwelling Spirit makes possible a transformation of self that affects all of our other relationships. Our primary vocation to be in relationship with God, which was redeemed for us by Jesus, makes possible restoration and renewal.
As most of us know from experience, this oneness of self is neither a static state nor one fully achieved in earthly life. Unkind people, challenging circumstances, and habitual self-denigration all conspire to rob us of the relationship with ourselves made possible through God’s grace. Again and again we need the Spirit to remind us who we are and to empower us to grow toward what the second-generation Pauline communities called “the measure of the full stature of Christ” (Eph. 4:13).
Discipleship is grounded in the primary vocation of redeemed relationship with God through Jesus. A foundational question for discipleship formation then is this: How do we teach vocation?
Education is an invitational endeavor. We cannot compel, manipulate, or otherwise coerce people to enter into relationship with any subject matter. As relationship with God is the primary vocation of discipleship, the principal experience for discipleship formation is encounter with God through Jesus.
When I was a pastor I was blessed to serve in a community that had a remarkable ecumenical ethos. One summer night we gathered as several denominations in the Presbyterian fellowship hall for an evangelistic event for older children and teens from the community. The evening began with a group of bodybuilders giving testimonies and continued with the guests breaking up into discussion groups. Since I wasn’t assigned to a group, I spent my time helping with snacks and visiting rooms to see if anyone needed anything. As I approached one doorway, I heard a young woman pleading, “Even if you don’t believe it’s true, just do me a favor and say the prayer with me. If it’s not true, you haven’t lost anything. It if turns out to be true, then you’ll be saved, and when you die you will go to heaven.” This was the first time, but not the last, that I heard this shocking approach to “evangelism.”
Reducing Christianity to a matter of final destination is manipulative, of course, but this approach also suggests that how we live out the faith in our earthly lives is of secondary importance. Most readers would likely agree that the practice of repeating particular words—irrespective of belief and regardless of desire for relationship with God—as a guarantee of going to heaven is pure magic. The question for those of us who reject this and other magical approaches is, what do we do instead? How do we encourage and nurture the primary vocation of discipleship, which is relationship with God through Jesus? The enterprise is complicated by the fact that Jesus is not physically present to us, at least not in the ways that we typically understand physical presence. We need to identify, therefore, the ways in which Jesus is present and invite people to an encounter with Jesus through those venues.
Although they described the experience in a variety of ways, the earliest Christian communities were formed around the very presence of Jesus. Jesus was present through his Spirit, who gave believers the power, discernment, and skills necessary to live out Christian community. He was present in the gathered community as master teacher and guide. His presence was evidenced in the love that members shared with one another, the ongoing ministry of his followers to the world, and the traditions that were taught as the gospel was proclaimed.
For us today, teaching the tradition makes Jesus present and provides opportunity for encounter with him. By nature discipleship is dynamic. We were created for relationship with God, we become disciples through Jesus, and we continue to evolve in discipleship through the practices of transformed relationships. To become fully the disciples we are designed to be, we need to practice the vocations of discipleship through which we develop intimacy with God and move toward “the measure of the full stature of Christ.”
It is more important than ever that we know and share our tradition. The risen Christ is actually present in the telling of the Christian story. It is essential that we tell the story—not talk about the story, not give directives based on the story, not modify or abridge the story—but tell the story. We need to tell the story with our words, through our relationships, and in our actions, and to trust its power as a vehicle of Christ’s presence.
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Adapted from Learning the Way: Reclaiming Wisdom from the Earliest Christian Communities by Cassandra D. Carkuff Williams, copyright © 2009 by the Alban Institute. All rights reserved.
Read more from Cassandra Carkuff Williams »
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The false choice between tradition and innovation
Faith & Leadership
INNOVATION
The false choice between tradition and innovation
The challenges congregations and institutions face require thinking that can hold together seemingly conflicting ideas or strategies to find generative “third ways” forward.
In case you haven’t, the movie is worth the time of any Christian congregational or institutional leader, especially its first 30 minutes. While the language can be a bit salty, the opening scenes perfectly depict one of the enduring challenges of Christian leadership.
The chef (Jon Favreau(link is external)) has heard that one of the country’s foremost restaurant reviewers and food bloggers is coming that evening to review his Los Angeles restaurant. In honor of the occasion, he has designed an experimental menu, blending flavors in innovative and provocative ways. The owner of the restaurant (Dustin Hoffman), however, dismisses the thought of serving any menu to the critic other than the one that has made the restaurant famous -- an egg with caviar, steak and molten chocolate cake. After an argument, the chef finally relents and agrees to serve the menu preferred by the owner, only to receive a scathing review likening the menu to a desperate relative offering you $5 to come for a visit.
There ensues a bawdy exchange over Twitter between chef and critic that culminates in the chef’s inviting the critic to return to the restaurant the next night to try the innovative menu that he had originally planned. Once again, however, the owner of the restaurant steps in, refusing to allow the chef to serve anything other than the menu that had built the restaurant’s reputation. It does not spoil the plot to say that the chef refuses and is terminated. The critic doesn’t know that the chef has been terminated and so returns to the restaurant the next evening only to be served the exact menu he had panned the day before.
For Christian congregational and institutional leaders, it is not the fight between chef and critic that is most instructive (that said, the way that that relationship plays out across the movie offers more than one sermon illustration).
It is the disagreement between the chef and the owner that is particularly instructive. On the one hand, we have the chef who wants to innovate and experiment, to try new and bold things. On the other, we have the owner who wants to celebrate what has built success and is reliably good.
This tension should sound familiar. It is the tension between young (and not just chronologically young, but young-in-the-profession) clergy and their longer-tenured colleagues. It is the tension between the entrepreneurial and creative faculty and their more restrained, pragmatic peers. It is the fight that takes place between the newcomers who become parish leaders and the somewhat-chastened stalwarts. It is the false choice between innovation and tradition.
What is perfectly captured in the movie is the way that these disagreements often and quickly become zero-sum, with both sides increasingly persuaded by the importance and righteousness of their cause and entrenching further as the fight goes on. It is telling that neither chef nor owner suggests joining the amuse-bouche from one menu with the entrée from another and creating a new dessert together. It is either an entirely new menu or the existing menu unchanged. That may sound familiar, too.
At Leadership Education, we are indebted to the work of Roger Martin around the ideas of integrative thinking and the opposable mind, two ways of talking about how leaders can hold together seemingly conflicting ideas or strategies to find generative “third ways” forward.
Increasingly the challenges that congregations and institutions face require these kinds of integrative strategies, and yet, too many of the present conversations still sound like a shouting match between chef and owner. And if culture is the critic, it will find other places to be fed.
Read more from Nathan Kirkpatrick »
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Faith & Leadership
RECONCILIATION, COMMUNITY, CHRISTIAN LEADERSHIP
Margaret Pfeil: Tradition is a living thing
For Margaret Pfeil, an assistant professor of theology at Notre Dame and a member of a Catholic Worker community in South Bend, Dorothy Day is an exemplar of leadership.
Pfeil specializes in Catholic social thought and the development of moral doctrine and also is a founder and resident of the St. Peter Claver Catholic Worker House in South Bend, Ind.Catholic Worker houses were founded by Day (1897-1980) and seek to foster practice of the church’s traditional corporal works of mercy (to feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked, visit and ransom the captives, shelter the homeless, visit the sick and bury the dead) and spiritual works of mercy (to admonish sinners, instruct the ignorant, counsel the doubtful, comfort the sorrowful, bear wrongs patiently, forgive all injuries and pray for the living and the dead). Catholic Worker houses also advocate for social justice in their local communities and beyond.
Pfeil spoke in June 2009 with Faith & Leadership’s Jason Byassee about the Catholic Worker Movement, Dorothy Day, and an “anarchist” vision of leadership. At the time, she was teaching at Duke Divinity School’s Summer Institute: “Shaping the Beloved Community.”(link is external)
Q: How did the Catholic Worker Houses of Hospitality get started?It began during the Depression in New York. Day’s visionary partner Peter Maurin envisioned combining the works of mercy with scholarship. He and Day started a newspaper, which still sells today for a penny per copy. Day had been a journalist previously, and he came to appreciate her journalistic skills. And at first he wanted to run the paper. He envisioned Dorothy just doing the menial tasks involved in publishing. But she made it clear that this is going to be a joint effort. They wrote together about the making of a new society within the shell of the old.
Maurin wanted to light the fuse he saw leading to the dynamite of the social teachings of the church. We have these wonderful teachings, Maurin said, but who's actually practicing them? What about within the life of the institution of the church itself? Are we falling short? Aren't we called to something much more radical? The name, Catholic Worker, was a takeoff on the Communist newspaper, the Daily Worker. Maurin and Day would stand in Union Square and sell it. And they'd stand next to the Communists reading the Daily Worker and announce, “Well, read the Catholic Worker daily.”
Then, unexpectedly, workers started coming to the door where they published, saying, “This sounds great: hospitality, agronomic universities. Where do I find it?” Day said, “We put on a pot of coffee, opened the doors and have kept them open since.”
The houses of hospitality grew organically, in response to a need, through the mass communication of Day’s and Maurin’s ideas, which grew from their commitments of faith. That was a crucial moment. If Dorothy and Peter had said, “We're just writing this newspaper. That's all we're called to. We think these ideas are great, but that's as far as it goes,” there wouldn't be a Catholic Worker Movement today.
Q: You speak of the Catholic Worker house you live in as trying to institutionalize patterns of virtue rather than vice. How do you do that?It has to happen at the level of relationship. At the Catholic Worker we try to welcome people as they are, without necessarily giving them a spiel about who Dorothy Day was. We try to live in a way that makes guests feel comfortable and welcomed. We want them to understand that we intend to be a house of hospitality (I’m sure we do this imperfectly, by the way). Hopefully after awhile people begin to feel comfortable and will start asking questions, “What is this all about? Why are you doing this? Who is this Dorothy Day?”
Q: You argue that, for Dorothy Day, Christians need to be doing the works of mercy and creating faithful institutions. What does that look like?Dorothy was a Christian anarchist. By that she meant that we Christians tend to foist upon the state things that we need to take responsibility for at the personal level and as Christian communities.
Dorothy was envisioning something like what Bethel New Life does in Chicago under Mary Nelson -- gathering groups of people at the local level and meeting needs in a relational way. It's not meant to grow into a multi-billion-dollar corporation. It's just meant for the people who actually live in that area.
Maurin meant something similar with his idea of “agronomic universities.” They wanted to connect each Catholic Worker house with a communal agricultural setting where people who would never come into contact with the dirt can come to know creation in that way. All people then can leave the city and be recreated in their spirits through the land and with one another and get to know God more deeply. For people from very privileged backgrounds to engage in manual labor and get their hands dirty creates a sense of community where gradually the alienating effects of the Industrial Revolution can be healed.
For Dorothy, the Eucharist was key. She didn't mandate that everybody go to daily Mass, but she did herself. She invited people to join her, and then explained how important it was for her as the culmination of everything else. It didn’t have merely instrumental value. She didn't go to Mass to work more effectively. It was to go deeper.
Q: How could a Christian anarchist also be a pious Catholic? Didn’t she need also to submit to the authority of the church’s hierarchy?Someone once asked her, “What would happen if the cardinal said to close the houses of hospitality tomorrow?” And she said, “Oh, I would obey that, but then I would also refer all requests for the 1,000 people we serve on the soup line, and the 200 people we house, and all the vegetables grown and requested on our farm, I would refer all that to the cardinal's office for him to deal with.”
Robert Ellsberg, the editor of Orbis Books now and editor of much of Dorothy’s work, was first shown he had gifts as an editor by Day herself. He was no more than 20 when Dorothy said, “I think you should edit the Catholic Worker newspaper.” When he first met her he wanted to ask her a good question. So he went up to her and asked, “Miss Day, how do you reconcile your Catholicism with your anarchism?” And she looked at him and said, “Well, it's never been a problem for me.” And that was it. He didn't know what else to say. That was the end of the conversation.
Q: How did she resolve the similar tension between being an “anarchist” and being faithful to Catholic tradition?Tradition was a living thing for Dorothy, not a dead thing. Tradition did not mean for her that you grip things past in such a rigid way that they can’t be life-giving today. She looked back to the early church and said, “Why are we not doing this?” In the early church there was no usury, for example. In the early church we shared everything in common. In the early church Christians were pacifists. And so she modeled the Worker on this.
But Catholic Worker did this in the living church of today, as a prophetic witness, not in defiance against others. It wasn’t oppositional, though sometimes some perceived it that way. She absolutely understood herself to be within the tradition of the church, offering this witness in a very humble way.
When she insisted on pacifism even during World War II, and spoke on behalf of Catholic conscientious objectors to that war, she received a lot of criticism from members of the hierarchy in the Catholic Church. Her pacifism was taken as a personal affront by some in the hierarchy. They confronted her and said, “Who are you, a laywoman, to speak on behalf of this, on behalf of Catholic CO's?” And she said, “I'm speaking on behalf of laypeople. We're the ones who do the fighting.”
Forty years later, in “The Challenge of Peace,” the U.S. bishops named her personally as a witness of nonviolence in our times. That was a sea change, brought about partly because she remained faithful to that vision her whole life. That's her gift to the church.
The fact that subsequent generations keep adding to tradition is what makes it a living thing. She knew that in her bones. It was not merely an intellectual commitment. It was an incarnate commitment for her.
Q: You speak of your friend Neris Gonzalez(link is external) as an exemplary leader. Who is she?She is an advocate in El Salvador for popular education. She was working as a lay catechist, teaching peasants basic literacy skills, in hopes that they could then agitate for better prices for their crops. Those who opposed that work kidnapped and tortured her, and she lost her 8-month old unborn baby because of it.
Yet she continued through that country’s civil war to offer education. She sought asylum in the U.S. in the ’90s after further threats, and since then she has developed a new initiative in Chicago called Ecovida. This is a project designed to help inner city kids connect with the earth through sustainable agriculture in a way that would heal both them and the earth and the broken structures of their society.
A couple of years ago she did a 30-day retreat and used that as a time to imagine the next steps in her life. She decided it was time to learn English because she wanted to tell her own story. She's done a lot of interviews all over the world, all through translators, but her own voice is powerful. So she went to Eastern Mennonite University in Virginia to study English, and she's learning little by little and telling to tell more of her story herself.
That's a model for me. There's always something else on the horizon. She doesn't stay still. And she's willing to listen and to take into account new information, new ideas, new people, new possibilities and stoke her vision.
Q: Some of your students at Notre Dame will live a similar kind of radical commitment to communal living that you do at the Catholic Worker house. But most will not. What's your hope for students at Notre Dame who will become leaders in more conventional settings?I would hope that they'd be true to themselves before God. I hope they will allow themselves to keep discerning how God is calling them because within these various institutional settings there is plenty of room for greater personal sacrifice and greater risk-taking in relationship with those who are the outcasts in our society.
I hope my students who grow into positions of leadership at institutions would gradually imagine better ways of participating in their institutions, pressing their boundaries and challenging them in order to transform them. Such institutions can help heal the divisions of race, class and gender that sunder our society and our churches. I want them to act out of faith.
Read more from the interview with Margaret Pfeil »
FROM THE ALBAN LIBRARY
Church Mergers: A Guidebook for Missional Change by Thomas G. Bandy and Page M. BrooksChurch Mergers offers churches of all sizes and traditions practical advice on how to merge successfully. Authors Thomas G. Bandy and Page M. Brooks draw on decades of experience to illustrate why and how missional mergers are possible.
Church Mergers guides congregational leaders and regional planners through the process of successful mergers. It shares the stories of four churches in the merger process, explaining the steps to assess their situations, build trust, and discern vision. The book offers guidance to assess the potential for merger, explore contextual relevancy and lifestyle compatibility, overcome internal and external obstacles, define strategic priorities, create new boards, build leadership teams, combine assets, and more.
Church Mergers shows that a faithful, healthy, missional merger is possible, and it illustrates that the whole can indeed be greater than the sum of its parts.
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