Giving In

Schmemann, Journals, Sept. 20, 1974

I had time to think. I realized how difficult it is for me ever to be wholly in one camp. In all that I love and consider mine - the Church, religion, the world where I grew up and to which I belong, I often see deficiencies and lack of truth. In all that I do not like - radical ideas and convictions - I see what is right, even if relatively right. Within religion I feel stifled, and I feel myself a radical “challenger.” But among challengers I feel myself a conservative and traditionalist. I can’t identify with any complete system with an integral view of the world or an ideology.

What’s the problem here? If it’s with “ideology”, that’s familiar enough. Father goes on to indicate that the problem is with a “complete” system. He can’t fully identify with anything that is complete:

It seems to me that anything finished, complete and not open to another dimension is heavy and self-destructive. I see the error of any dialectics that proceed with thesis, antithesis and synthesis, removing possible contradictions. I think that openness must always remain; it is faith, in it God is found, who is not a “synthesis,” but life and fullness.

Fr. S wants to remain open, because openness is faith and in openness God is found. Fair enough. I buy it. God is always more than we can ever have “complete”, and He is always giving of Himself.

But when I first read this, what caught my heart was the “I can’t identify”, in context, with either “camp,” and where one “camp” was the Church. Hmm.

Now probably what Father means by “the Church” in this context is the accumulation of all the local churches which he has experienced, his “religion”, his “world” going back to his youth. In all these local, human instantiations of The Church, he finds deficiencies and (some) lack of truth. But what about The Church, the Body of Christ which all our fallible little local churches instantiate? Could it have deficiences? Lack of truth? Are we permitted to hold back from it, not to identify ourselves wholly with it, because while it has good things about it, it also has bad things; and it’s opponents also have both good things and bad things about them? No, I think not.

I am a great one to hold back. I never rush in. I’m always cautious. I never “commit” until I’m sure. Is one ever sure? No. (I’m not.) So one never commits. Where does this skepticism come from? One possibility is that it comes with age. Here are three reasons age causes skepticism:

1) The older you are, the more cynical. You’ve seen what the world and people are like. You’ve been burned a few times. You don’t trust. Babies are naively trusting. Old men and old women are wary.

2) The older you are, the more you see complexity. Nothing is simple. Actually, there may be a bell curve to this one, with one’s perception of complexity max’ing out in middle age. For truly old people, perhaps there is a return to simplicity. In any case, when you see complexity, you tend not to see black or white, you tend never to be sure, you tend to see a multiplicity of “sides” on any issue.

3) The older you are, the more of “you” there is to give up if you commit, if you give in. As we age our personalities fill up. We become “rounder” people (in many ways). Think of when you applied to college. Is this student “well-rounded”? I don’t think this kind of well-roundness comes until we have some life experience. But the rounder we get, the harder it is to go through the eye of the needle. We come to have too much invested in our selves.

However imperfectly The Church is made visible to us, the question is, can (should) we give into it wholly? Can it be complete for us? Can it give an “integral view of the world” sufficient for us to live with? Can we trust it? Can it cover all complexities? Is it worth going through the eye of needle for, worth slimming every last pound of our rotund personalities? Can one find there a new trust, a simple complexity (profundity), a whole personhood? I believe the answer is yes. I think Fr. S would agree.