9/26/2002 04:57:00 PM

::the rhythm of spiritual creativity::

it is difficult to deny that our spiritual institutions focus in a near exclusive manner on enculturing a people committed to an external, monogamous patronage of particular places and times of systematized religious organization. the power of ritual observance and cyclical remembrance is not what i am referring to. my main point is that most "religious professionals" have not understood the profound consequences of the question, "is our purpose as spiritual communities to 'do time' or to do something?"*

it is not the plethora of gold stars on our institutional attendance charts that is the point.

to be human is to do something.
to be human in spiritual community is to do something together.
that is the point.

part of the problem is our overemphasis on the short term and our under emphasis on the longer term. the week-to-week urgency of a series of programs and events that make up the church as we know it today is a ridiculous institutional idolatry. this pace and posture of "spiritual life" have made faith gatherings non-events in the strictest baudrillardian sense. they have become little more than the crassest of ideology sales events that report on real human lives of the past all the while contributing to the contemporary christian cultural buffer zone that keeps us from the singularity of living a greatness akin to those of whom we so often speak! greatness requires being fully human! our institutional procrustean beds will not have it so.

the important questions have longer timelines.

who are you becoming (the question of path)?
what are you invested in (the question of value)?
who are you gathered with (the questions of solidarity and community)?

i see a new generation of spiritual gathering
that is organizationally promiscuous while relationally committed.
i see a people who privilege movements of solidarity over self-perpetuating organization.

organization for this generation is
spontaneous
and
self-organizing
in open and adaptive ways.

the relationships are what remain amidst the structural flux.

so begins long now spirituality.




{blogger went down tonight and ate the extended version of this...