The Underside of Ecumenism

Greetings friends,

I was out in the lobby of the World Council of Churches in Geneva, crying quietly, having recently excused myself from class, and checking my email. The woman at the other computer there turns to me and asks me what's wrong.
"(sniffle) oh, I'm alright, I’m just in one hell of a class upstairs."
"Really, what's the topic?"
"Ecumenism."

She looks at me and I at her. I nod. She nods. And we both crack up laughing.

"It's always the way," she says. "Isn't it?"

It was the International Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. We were in Geneva, the international ecumenical city, at the Ecumenical Center, home to the World Council of Churches and Action by Churches Together. We were here to participate in a course devoted to ecumenism.

And we seemed about ready to kill each other. We had got pettiness, bickering and infighting, snobbery and cliquishness, shunning, pontificating, and patronizing, rolling our eyes and enjoying the sound of our own voices. We built our fortresses against one another according to school, age, wealth, appearance, physical ability, as well as ideology. There was plenty of backbiting and gossip among the teaching team as well as the students. (The majority of open contempt, though, appeared among the teaching team itself). And in all this I also have to confess my own thinking of, and uttering of, certain un-Christian thoughts about my immediate neighbors. By that day though, I was just ready for a good cry. My heart had become too heavy to breathe or laugh.

If the course were called 'Living Ecumenism 101,' nearly all of us had failed.

It is the brokenness of our human condition that even in a study trip devoted to ecumenism, to inclusion and reconciliation, that our group did not even necessarily get along—it only took us one week to reach this level of distress. With this abysmal status among our own small group in such a short period of time, it’s hard to have hope for any larger ecumenical or interreligious effort.

I've been thinking that there has to be a term coined for this something-shortness of ecumenism, and I think I'll call it ‘exclusionism.’ It is a sort of anti-Christ actually, appearing as a distraction to the real thing. Exclusionism is defining ourselves according to who we are not, and setting up walls against the Other. We all learned it somewhere along the way, and it plays out --probably even in the face of our best intentions. This course was truly an immersion into exclusionism as much as it is ecumenism.

Yet here is the dirty gritty reality of the church, isn't it? You could say that if we didn't have all these humans, the church would be divine. Yet here we were, jockeying for the place at the right hand of the Father, not knowing the impact of what we do.

And what drives all this? Maybe it is simple insecurity. Wondering, 'do I have a place at this table?' 'Will my voice be heard?' 'Perhaps it is better to make alliances with the familiar against the foreign.'

I had been wondering how much of interchurch strife was simply personality-based; two bishops hating how each other chewed his food and finding theological bases for why to avoid contact. Yet I think personality can drive good ecumenism as well. I see now that one person with genuine warmth and curiosity about others and the ability to listen will make far more progress than those schooled for years in comparative religions or text studies.

I have also come to realize there are really two types of ecumenism: There is soft ecumenism, where we gather to study how great and useful ecumenism is. Then there is hard ecumenism, where we have to realize the ways in which we are different, and recognize that we will come to no agreement on one 'right' answer. I believe it is when this ecumenical honeymoon is over, when the dazzle wears off, that the real marriage begins: namely, learning to disagree with one another without abandoning the relationship. And perhaps it is only at this time that we can realize the necessity of agreeing on what constitutes mutual respect for one another. And on naming those things which we hold in common, those connections we do have which can withstand the discord.

And so it goes with the prospect of peacebuilding among religions. We are all broken, and as Dr. Schreiter at CTU put it so often during our course on Reconciliation last semester, full reconciliation will not be realized until the Eschaton. In the meantime, we need heaping doses of grace to enable us to examine our own shadows honestly without being consumed, or doomed, to the horror of our failures. Grace also frees us from the chains of debilitating shame and look to the future. It is only the Spirit that can overcome our human divisions and heal the wounds, and inspire the souls involved to work for understanding.

--

Having said all this, I also need to say I don't regret coming to Geneva for even a moment. The rest of the trip has been truly wonderful, as have been our speakers and visits in the class itself. I'll write more in detail about these when I can.

Until then, peace,

Le Anne