A Spirituality that grows life, joy and peace

The Vanishing Point

A pastor in the Southern USA started her own church because, as a Lesbian, she had begun to feel that whatever her graces, however strong her faith, her acceptance in her Protestant congregation would always hinge around her sexual orientation. I heard an interview with her as I drove home from a meeting in Langham, and I'm still pondering an intriguing point she made. Our sacred texts—The Bible, The Quoran—should never have had back covers put on them, meaning that if these texts are inspired by God—as she believes—does it follow that their contents were all God had to say?

“I'm not represented in scriptures,” she said, “and there are any number of life situations people face that simply didn't exist or were ignored when the scriptures were declared complete.” She has a point; how often have we debated moral issues by extrapolating from scriptures what we think they would say if written in our time? We call it discernment, but that exaggerates our competence in bringing about unity of faith and purpose: our “discernment” rests on the foundation of our pasts, earlier convictions, solidarity with those sharing a similar worldview.

Her church has become a place of asylum for refugees from the world of addiction, anger, neglect and loss. “A spirituality that doesn't grow life, joy and peace is poor indeed,” she said (or similar words; I was driving, I don't write things down while driving.) Her parishioners testified that she is a pastor who meets and loves everyone with a depth they've never before experienced. She has become an island of sanctuary for many. She gets pain, really gets it.

What this pastor practices is what some have called primary justice. It's the application of the Old Testament witness, of Jesus' reiteration, of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms: peace rests on a foundation of righteousness and justice. When we confuse righteousness with piety, we repeat the error of the scribes and the pharisees whom Jesus rebuked repeatedly. Whether or not we carry our Bibles to church every Sunday is irrelevant to the definition of righteousness; how we enable the poor, the hungry, the widows and orphans, the despised and the imprisoned are all at the core of the righteous life lived.

There are efforts to applauded as well as failures to be mourned. Through numerous NGOs, restorative justice is slowly catching hold in limited settings. Through education and development training, poorer nations are being helped along a path to primary justice: equality, self-sufficiency, fairness and freedom.

What is God's word for the Twenty-first Century? Let's all think about it.