The temperature finally got up over freezing this past weekend -- warm enough to open the windows and declare a Spring Cleaning day. I did the three bathrooms and the three upstairs rooms. My husband cleaned out the fireplace, the porch where we stack the firewood in the winter and enjoy the sound of the nearby stream in the summer, and scrubbed out the kitchen. Oh, bliss!
The day before, I had just heard the news that an old friend had been elected a bishop in the Episcopal Church. Evidently the election process was a bit messy, but looking at the ballots posted on the internet, it seemed as though the newly-elected bishop had in fact been the frontrunner all along. And it got me to wondering, how do we 'clean up' in God's household? It was a day's work for my husband and me to get our little house sparkling and fresh. Now my friend has been called to be the head-of-household for over 100 congregations. How does that get done?
I'm afraid that too often established churches leave the cleaning up efforts until the moment a crisis hits, and the cobwebs in the corners, or the dirty laundry under the bed, is so bad it can't be avoided. Financial abuse, sexual abuse, or simple abuses of power (no, come to think of it, they're never simple), whatever it is, it gets so ugly and soul-draining that you have to call in the ecclesiastical equivalent of Serv-Pro. The big guns, the public trials, the parish consultants, the long-term interims. The bigger the house, the harder it is to do the housekeeping on a regular basis, the church, link any other household, needs regular maintenance. And it can be done: annual reviews that ask really hard questions, vestry meetings with honest disagreements, dialogue with faithful people who can help you see what you don't really want to see, without making you or your congregation or your diocese or your whole denomination feel like failures in the eyes of a mean-spirited God. It's not fun, but neither is vacuuming the spiders out of the closets!
One of the things I like about the community I belong to now is our size. We are a secular monastic community. We live 'in the world,' as singles or couples or families, working wherever we feel called. Our founders are our abbot and abbess, consecrated bishops so that they may ordain those of us within the community who are called to sacramental ministry. There are perhaps 40 of us, total, scattered across the US and UK. And we are each encouraged to have an anam chara, a soul friend or confessor, someone with whom we may do our own spiritual cleansing when needed. As a community we gather once a year on retreat, to be nourished and supported by our brothers and sisters.
It is a small oikos,or household. And that suits me fine. I wouldn't want to be the head of a household half-a-state large, or filled with people who have all sorts of puffy pink expectations of me. I love my little house in the woods, and my small, faithful, eclectic community. It's manageable. That may be what some folks are uncomfortable with when they talk about 'organized religion.' It's too big, too structured, too impersonal. In a smaller household you can be known, and forgiven, and washed clean much more easily.
Blessings to my friend, Alan. I wish him well. Blessings, too, to Jane and Andy and the little flock they lead in the Lindisfarne Community. My brothers and sisters are my daily blessings. May you, dear reader, find just the right-sized household for yourselves.
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