Creative About Our Problem

As we climbed the side of the Grand Canyon, I proposed to my husband of three days my idea for a new kind of monastery. "But we're Baptists" he said.

Well I held my tongue, wisely I think, and now we aren't Baptists anymore.

But I've never stopped thinking about that monastery (of sorts.) At that time my idea was for something that would get plunked down right in the inner city, preferrably at a crossroads of ethnic concentrations. I was thinking of what kind of mission would actually be effective in a place like that and I knew it would be nothing like what actually exists.

Here in Milwaukee the inner-city problem is very bad for a mid-size city. Our only ethnic concentration is black, although the Hispanic illegal population is growing, too. However the problem in the black sub-society is something that people are afraid to talk about, or they don't know how. It's an extreme form of racism in which a cultural and ethnic group huddle around each other, execute their own brutal form of justice and in essence deny the authority of the larger state in which they live. They see themselves as persecuted and they are taught to hate and/or fear those who are not of them.

Practically and otherwise speaking, there is no reason whatever why the ethnic minorities among us should be unable to simply take their place in this society and become a seamless part of the mix that is us. Unfortunately history takes its revenge.

Political conservatives, who tend to be very practical, probably wish that this evil could be wiped off the map. The right leadership thrown in jail or executed; some examples made of lawless youngsters, other wayward kids drafted into the army, conservatives taking over education, drastic welfare reform and other measures to stop encouraging the tragedy that is the inner-city "family." It would probably work.

A mission, though, must have a different mind and a different end in mind. I wouldn't oppose the measures above if a political entity undertook them. But the church is not the government - mercy, not justice is its concern. At least that's what people used to believe. A milwaukee cop I know tells me that these inner-city criminals do grow up knowing the Bible and evangelical religion; but it does them no good because they believe that "God hates ugly" and that they themselves are ugly in a moral sense. They commonly believe their religious situation before God is hopeless based on the evangelical preaching they hear. This makes for very desperate people who will stop at no crime.

So what kind of Christianity could invade the inner city and be 'other' enough to have a real effect on that miserable society?

It would have to be other than the society which it was going to, of course. My cop friend tells me that most inner-city churches are in the homeless-shelter and foodpantry game, getting subsidies from the government while taking the paychecks of the people they are supposed to be serving. Meanwhile, anyone who tried to go there and do "Christian rap" would probably be laughed out of town if not shot fifty or sixty times.

But it's not enough to be different from the society you are trying to help if you are simply an off-shoot of some rival but equally secular culture. You can't fix the inner-city by transplanting some placid suburban platitude-ridden half-modernist take on the religion of Christ. What's more it's terribly arrogant and insulting to try to do so.

Not only that but it's foolish and sinful; for Christianity is other. Our cultural heritage had once been shaped by Christianity. But somewhere a shift happened and all the shaping seems to be going the other way now. Yes, Christianity is pervasive and yes it is politically and otherwise powerful. But its values and viewpoints are secular; they are the dreams and morals of a God-hating society, being fed to it ambiguously by the mediation of supposedly innocent cultural expressions.

So in my dreams of this "monastery" I knew that every member would have to forswear the approval, influence, and for the most part contact with, modern evangelical religion, including fundamentalism.

I thought of all the traditional elements of a monastery. It would be self-supporting, not only through gardens and greenhouses and perhaps chickens etc., but also through writing and publishing works of art and scholarship. It would, in fact, be a place where people could escape mundane responsibility to spend their lives praising God. Out of this center, I felt, could flow any ministry to needy humans.

And when I thought of praising God, I saw painting and typing and hoeing. But especially I saw a choir composed of every member; singing at morning and evening in a tower, glorifying God and interceding for the city between earth and heaven. I also saw works of charity. I thought of a uniform of sorts - some beautiful garment with a symbol printed on it so that the residents surrounding us would recognize our members. I hoped this would provide the members with some protection as well as communicate our purpose. I thought of a beautiful traditional church building that would open right onto the street; bells that would ring a welcome to all and a pool of running water for washing feet in the entrance. I thought of having the children of the neighborhood in; teaching them to sing to God.

I thought of walls around the rest of the property (and perhaps a farm outside of town) and I thought of stained-glass windows rendered somehow unbreakable.

I also thought of families inhabiting the "monastery" instead of simply single men. In this way, my idea of a monastery is very different from previous ones. It is not so much a shelter for specially sanctified people from all cares of the world as a shelter for normally santified people from the deceptions of the modern world.

Lately I have been thinking that in addition to being something like a monastery it would need to be something like a University.

At this point I am not simply thinking about a mission to a city. Rather I am thinking about how we can create a permanant institution that can ride out the destruction of the coming centuries and take souls and other valuables with it. My sense is that an unthinkable amount of knowledge has already been lost and is being lost. With it is going discernment, wisdom, and what is more, the existance anywhere of a tolerable kind of human life. We are physically comfortable, it is true; but we are tearing our souls apart for lack of light. Light of many different kinds is what we are losing. We need to build an Ark.

This Ark would be a shelter, first for Christians to discover the religion of their fathers, next to preserve that religion by passing it down as a sacred charge for and to every succeding generation, and third to continue in the tradition of that religion, so that its stem may even grow and its flower blossom when all around that Ark is darkness.

For the time being, Josh and I may join an old Church - we don't know yet. It may be necessary for many reasons. But I fear that will not be enough. The Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches will long survive the reformed and evangelical ones. The latter have little or no structural protection and are being everywhere invaded by infectious sins. But even the old churches seem to be gradually infected little by little with that which will eventually destroy even them. I fear those institutions that survived so much already will fall to the ravages of Vacation Bible School and icons on coffee mugs. They don't believe it will happen because each of them believes themselves to be the true church; therefore they cannot fail. They forget Israel, which had the true altar and the true preisthood and fell into apostasy that has not yet been healed.

So we must create somwhere an institution that will consciously reject modernity; that will seek orthodoxy in the fullest sense of the word, and that will pass down the religion of our fathers in a pure form to generation after generation.

Reasearch would go on; recording and inventing. In addition it would not be a classless society. In order to survive and to benefit the largest number of people it would have to have four classes of member.

The first two classes would pertain to its function as a University of sorts and would be levels of initiation; novice and member or something like that. Some learning would be protected for the use of those who would understand them and dispense them to the others. Children raised in the place would not be full members until adulthood; likewise those coming in from the outside in later years. This would be more necessary as the gap between the Ark and the outside society widened, for the protection and continued existance of the institution.

The next two classes would be according to its function as a Monastery of sorts and would have to do with the type of labor each person would contribute to the institution. Those who preferred and were good at scholarship would of course pursue that. Those who preferred manual labor but wanted to benefit from the culture that would (I hope) be created by this place of Conservation would be a different class. They would render the first class able to indulge in the study necessary to the purpose of the place, by relieving them of manual labor and supporting the institution through farming. In this way, both permanant classes would be indespensable to one another.

All would be one in the church. But for this to come true, questions of ecclesiology would have to be dealt with and I'm not there yet.

When I make fantasies this is where my mind flees.