Charlie answers two questions: 1) What does it mean for the community to conduct a consultation? and 2) Why have one now?
Transcript
This document is a direct transcript of an audio recording, and may contain transcription errors and other minor edits for the sake of clarity.
[Tape begins after Charlie has already begun speaking.]
CHARLIE:. . . . Okay, then. Iâm gonna give the first talk, which is called: âThe Prologue.â [Laughter.]
âIn the beginning was the Word [laughter], and the Word was with God [laughter], and the Word was God.â Oh. Oh, sorry, thatâs the wrongâthatâs the wrong prologue. [Charlie chuckles and all laugh.] Okay, sorry.
This is the prologue. Okay, here we go.
So, as I share these opening remarks with you, I want to once again emphasize how important it will be to stay in the present moment. This will be key as these two days unfold. I encourage you to resist any worries you may have about the future, about how everything in our consultation initiative will eventually all connect. Just . . . relax! Stay in the moment. And all will become clear, I assure you. We will get to the nuts and bolts of the consultation process. So try not to let your concern for those details distract you as we proceed here.
The Lord is with us. We are all in this together. We are in this, moment by moment. Our lives matter. What we do, and even more importantly, how we do it, all matters.
One question that may be on your minds is, âWhy have a consultation? What are we doing this for?â I know none of you have had that question. [Laughter.]
If Iâve heard one thing as I have been traveling around visiting branches, the most often-mentioned theme has to be, âWe are in need of hitting a reset button!â after two years of an awful interruption. Our lives have been stopped by circumstances beyond our control. We have an intuitive sense that we need to take a step back, think, pray, discern, and discover Godâs will for our future together.
So much has happened during these two years. It does have the feeling of being a âNoahâ moment, on so many levels.
In the community, for example, we did not meet in any normal way for most of these two years. Weâve borne the burden of extensive negative publicity in the press during this same period. And both in the community and in the world and the society at large, weâve had to deal with the fear of COVID, and in the broaderâbroad society, the fear of economic collapse; the fear of war, and actual war; the sharp political divisionsâeven among friendsâbordering, sometimes, on mutual hatred; widespread unrest in our cities and townsâPortland, Oregon, being perhaps one of the most egregious and pervasive for our city [sic].
Many community members in Portland often witnessed first-hand, either in their actual neighborhoods or nightly on the news, the wanton violence and disregard for human life and property, all in the name of one political ideology or another.
Think of the horrible things that happened in nursing homes. Think of the pain and agony of the COVID effects on the education of children. People have turned against each other, with the burden and confusion of masks and distancing. And even within our community, this has shown itself to varying degrees.
So much of what we see in the news are examples of people being dehumanized: a lack of concern for marginalized people; broad acceptance of people who choose to tinker with their birth gender by using chemicals or mutilating their bodies; a disdain for the elderly. And so much more could be added to this list, as I know we all know.
You could say the entire world has been undergoing several contemporaneous earthquakes. But they are social earthquakes, casting aspersions on the possibility of any sane human discourse or reasonable debate in the public square.
We have experienced so much disruption. But where do we go from here? Do we go back, hoping to reinstate the former status quo andâstatus quo of supposed peace and prosperity, prior to the disruptions? That is likely impossible, and shouldnât even be desirable, given the length and pervasiveness of the disruptions, and the dubious nature of the former good times.
These are big questions, needing intense discernment and bold Christian witness. And our lives matter, in deciding together how, in Christ, in the Holy Spirit, we will shape our future in the wake of these stoppages, and in the confused world in which we find ourselves.
But what about stoppages? As it turns out, theyâre not all bad. They can be a time for sifting, for reviewing the past, for remembering with gratitude who we are, and what we have been given, and where we have gone astray.
During stoppages, and because of them, we can look back at our past and extract from it those things which are most essential, most vital. What were the seeds from the past that brought vitality into our lives, and which are now in need of regeneration? These are good questions. Good questions.
A stoppage, an interruption, can be a time for ripe change and conversion. What is revealed through a stoppage is often precisely what needs to change. The stoppage creates a crisis, and crises can be occasions of purification, of further conversion. Conversion to Christ more than before, conversion to the radical gospel of Jesus more than before.
In this way, COVIDs (if you want to speak about them as a noun, as a descriptive noun of a phenomenon going on in society)âCOVIDs can actually rescue us from worldliness, from an egoistic self-satisfaction. How unmistakable has been the nearly universal realization of people the world over that we are not really in control after all. Someone else is!
Now, we certainly would have grandly celebrated our 50th anniversary year if COVID had never happened in March of 2020. And we also may very well have had a community-wide consultation, simply because of the milestone occasion. It is rather natural for our minds to think about review and evaluation at benchmark times like this.
But, it seems, God has shown us more about what kind of 50th anniversary celebration he wants us to have! The anniversary itself would have been enough to move us to take stock, to project into our future. But now, what we are dealing with is much bigger than that. God, it appears, intervened before we could even start planning an anniversary celebration very much. He just kind of shut it down. We found ourselves forced, by circumstances beyond our control, to take stock and to consider together what matters most.
Let me share a brief story about a COVID stoppage moment that revealed to the members of the Vancouver/Portland branch what matters most. It happened at an outdoor community meeting earlier this year, when we first began to meet in person again.
The Sunday meeting was in the parking lot at our branch center, complete with the sound system, half-circle seating setup, the same setup we were used to having indoors. Masks were optional, so each branch member could navigate that issue as they were comfortable.
There was about a 70/30 split in favor of not wearing masks at that point in time among the branch members. One of our members, one of the oldest sisters in the branch, had very recently found out that she had developed a type of cancer, and was therefore beginning to deal with the diagnosis and treatments. Needless to say, she was wearing a mask.
At one point, the meeting leader asked Ann to share with everyone an update of how she was doing, and what kinds of treatment regimen she was to undergo. She did so, and there were tears visible among many members as they listened to her sharing. After she shared, the leader then invited anyone who wanted to come forward and pray with Ann for protection and healing.
Immediately, nearly everyone enthusiastically came forward to pray over Ann, with the laying on of hands and all. Everyone who came forward, without giving it a momentâs thought, put on a maskâseventy percent were not wearing masksâand approached Ann to pray with her, full of faith, full of tremendous love.
The mask issue, although many had strong opinions about it, simply disappeared into thin air. Not one person, no matter howâno matter what their personal opinions and preferences about masks, would have ever dreamed of approaching Ann without wearing a mask. Everyoneâs deeply personal love for Ann trumped any concern or personal opinions about pandemic issues. And not a moment was wasted on analysis. It was just almost like a âlurchâ forward.
The stoppage that COVID had brought about, and the potentially divisive and often petty issues associated with that, simply dissolved into nothingness in the midstâin our midst, and I found myself saying to myself, âWe just had an experience of what matters most.â
So, these are just some of the reasons why we find ourselves in a time in our history when a consultation seems both organic, and also very much from the Lord.
And consultations are part of our history. I learned recently that in the weeks leading up to the first covenant in 1971, the 29 brothers and sisters met and went over the words of the actual covenant line-by-line. Everybody shared their input on the covenant. Then the leaders took that input and worked it into some text and brought it back to the group. They repeated the revision process several times. And thatâs what led up to the first covenant 50 years ago.
Discerning Godâs will as a group is as old as our covenant, at least. Group discernment is in our DNA as People of Praise. It is foundational to our community. The original wording of our covenant affected each member who was going to make it. So, each person who would enter into that covenant had a say about how it was to be worded.
Thatâs how weâve done things in the People of Praise since the beginning.
And thereâs plenty of other examples, the consultation that resulted fromâthat resulted in Action being a notable one, about 20 years ago, when the original idea of a youth divisionâYou remember that idea? âLetâs have a youth divisionâ?âwas supplanted through a community consultation, by an initiative wherein both adults and youth engage in purposeful action and work together. The final discernment did include some real surprise.
âWhat affects all should be discussed by all.â Pope Francis, in his book Let Us Dream, points out that this is a principle that has been in use for centuries. Sometimes, this literally means all of us taking great pains to actually discuss things in some detail together. Especially things that might result in our deciding to make changes, things that could be part of a reshaping of our lives, as we read and prayerfully discern the signs of the times together.
Consultation also seems to be something currently going on in the wider world. That being said, we are tapping into our 50-year People of Praise tradition, not simply copying what the Catholic Church is trying to do.
For certain, the preparation for a community consultation will involve a lot of planning. Planning for our future is fundamentally a matter of discovering Godâs will for us. The planning decides nothing. It is for the sake of understanding what we are doing together. It kind of sets the stage, so that a good decision can be arrived at together. Discernment requires incredible patience, mostly with each other.
But I want to give a caution about planning: about how we think about it, and what its role is in the process. It would be easy to get this wrong. We can easily slide into a frame of mind whereby we end up using people in âmy plans,â rather than listening to people and freeing them up, so that we plan together.
There is a salient story about a well-known Catholic intellectual by the name of Ivan Illich, who was once talking with Jacques Maritain, the early twentieth-century philosopher famous for reviving interest in Thomas Aquinas. They were having a conversation on the subject of planning. And Illich commented: âI had great difficulty in explaining to the old manââthat is, Maritainââthe meaning of the term I was using. Planning was not accounting, nor was it legislation, nor a kind of scheduling of trains,â unquote. Maritain at last responded to Illich:âIs not planning, which you talk about, a sin? [Inaudible response from someone in audience.] A new species within the vices which grow out of presumption?â Whoa! Unquote.
Maritain suggested that in thinking about humans as resources that can be managed, a new certitude about human nature would be brought into existence surreptitiously.
Psalm 19:14: âFrom presumption restrain your servant; may it not rule me. Then shall I be blameless, clean from grave sin.â
I think Maritain may have had that passage in mind.
Needless to say, we want to avoid any kind of presumptuous planning, but rather, aim ourselves at listening to brothers and sisters, and freeing everybody up to work together to shape our common future.
Some of you may remember a two-part set of talks that Paul DeCelles gave 20 years ago at a leaders conference right here in this room. They were creatively titled âOur Father, Part Oneâ and âOur Father, Part Two.â [Charlie chuckles.] It was actually one big talk in two parts. These, and the other talks given at that conference, were published in hard copy and distributed to every member of the community in 2002. I recommend both of these talks to everyone, as they have to do with Godâs planning and our freedom.
In the first of those talks, Paul walked us through the work of the Father through several stories from the life of Jesus. After all, Jesus and the Father are one. And then he points out, quote: âAll through his public ministry, Jesus is dealing with peopleâs freedom. It is not like he has a plan. Rather, he is always improvising, changing, going from plan A to plan B, to plan C. He doesnât have âa plan.â Rather, he is always planning. It is not as if he has set a course. Itâs not as if heâs running down a bobsled run, moving inevitably toward the finish. What happens is not programmatic, in Jesusâ ministry. What happens in the gospels is shaped by each encounter along the way.â Unquote.
The responsiveness of Jesus in his public ministry to what others are saying to himâhis responsiveness to requests from others (for example, his mother, you may recall, at Cana), to the actual choices of others; his willingness to be responsive to othersâ freedom; his willingness to adjust his own personal plans based on the reality of his interactions and conversations with othersâspeaks volumes to us about our own need to listen to one another and avoid any proclivity that we may have to push our own agendas and correlate that with discernment.
Perhaps around the Beltway in the nationâs capital, where I lived for 21 years, the squeaky wheel gets the grease. But may it not be so among us.
The key to discernment with integrity lies squarely in our awareness that any discernment that we are doing together is done with the participation of, and in the palpable presence of, the Holy Spirit. We are discerning together, with each other, and with the Holy Spirit.
So, Iâll end by kind of a retelling of the story of a consultation that took place in Acts 15.
Acts 15 recounts a council in process. There are problems and differences emerging. Paul and Barnabas were in Antioch. They were telling the new believers, who were uncircumcised, that they could stay as they were before they became believers. Some Jews there disagreed with this. It says they had âfierce arguments.â Finally, it was suggested that Paul and Barnabas go up to Jerusalem to discuss the matter with the apostles and elders. So they went. It says the discussion became heated, and Peter stood up. Without going into too much detail, Peter goesâgives an overview of what God had been doing.
Then, quote: âThey were silent as they listened to Paul and Barnabas, who told of the miraculous signs and wonders God had done through them among the Gentiles.â
Then they finish, and James starts talking, and everyone is listening.
In the end, they say: . . . âThe Gentiles win and the Judaizers lose!â [Laughter.] No, no, Iâm sorry, thatâs notâno. No! [Charlie chuckles.]
No, they say, âIt seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us not to put any other burden on you except what is necessary.â Unquote.
They were having a consultation! The Holy Spirit was present there too, and they came to unity of mind and heart through the Holy Spirit. They did it together, as brothers and sisters.
So, letâs look forward, brothers and sisters, to discerning together what seems good to the Holy Spirit and to us. Whatever shape our future takes, it will depend on us, in close partnership with the Holy Spirit.
We, in Christ, are the agents of whatever cultural change the Spirit may be urging us to embrace in the community moving forward. To the degree that we, and everyone in the community, participate, this consultation will be a blessed success.
Praise God.
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