TREASURING THE DANCE OF LIFE
Challenges to Religious Formation in an ever-changing World
Challenges to Religious Formation in an ever-changing World
Part One/Part Two
Michael A. King, has been dean, Eastern Mennonite Seminary, and Vice President, Eastern Mennonite University, since July 1, 2010. He has long been an editor and publisher, first through Herald Press (Scottdale, PA, 1989-1997) and then more recently as owner and publisher, Cascadia Publishing House LLC (Telford, PA, 1997-). He has been pastor in diverse congregational settings, ranging from Germantown Mennonite Church (Philadelphia, PA, 1982-1989), Spring Mount (PA) Mennonite Church (1997-2008), and more. As author and publisher, King addresses theology and culture, including implications of postmodernity and the “emerging church” movement. King is co-editor of Mutual Treasure: Seeking Better Ways for Christians and Culture to Converse (Cascadia, 2009), editor of Stumbling Toward a Genuine Conversation on Homosexuality (Cascadia, 2007), and co-editor of Anabaptist Preaching: A Conversation Between Pulpit, Pew, and Bible (Cascadia, 2004). He is author of Trackless Wastes and Stars to Steer By: Christian Identity in a Homeless Age (Herald, 1990, which emergent leader Brian McLaren has said began to address emergent issues 10 years before McLaren), Fractured Dance: Gadamer and Mennonite Conversation On Homosexuality, C. Henry Smith series, vol. 3 (Pandora U.S., 2001), many articles in a wide variety of magazines and journals, including Christian Century. He is co-author (with Ron Sider), of Preaching about Life in a Threatening World (Westminster, 1997).
Yago: Michael, you are very much welcome to this blog where we are engage
in deconstructing and transforming the energies that keep enslaving today’s
world. In this interview we would like to deal with the challenges religious
formation is facing in today’s ever changing world. We are concern with the
quality of training given to future Pastors and lay Christian leaders. You have
been Pastor in diverse congregational settings and edited and written many
books. You are currently the dean of Eastern Mennonite Seminary and Vice
President of Eastern Mennonite University. In this interview we would like to
be enriched by your experience on leadership in the pastoral and academic
realms. Your contribution will be of great help in our endeavor to be truly
Christ-like in today’s challenging world.
First of all, we would like to know
more about your own background. You grew
up in Cuba and Mexico as son of missionary parents, you experienced multiple
cultures and faith understandings. Could you share with us how your early life
has been influencing your on-going understanding between culture and faith?
Michael: Yago, many thanks for the warm welcome to the blog. When I set up
my Eastern Mennonite Seminary (EMS) employee page I was concerned to address
precisely the type of question you raise here, so I’ll quote from my page,
which can be seen in full at the following (link).
Growing up in Cuba and Mexico as son of missionary
parents, King experienced multiple cultures and faith understandings. He
learned to cherish the Anabaptist-Mennonite commitment to faithfully follow
Jesus while wondering what alternate convictions another tradition might have
shaped in him. Immersion in Christian thought and life at a time his Mennonite
community forbade watching TV even as he gulped down secular books and novels
made him wonder what was real and true and good amid competing perspectives. He
also wrestled with the gap between Christians’ talk and walk. As a result, into
early adulthood King came to question the existence of God and the validity of
Christianity even while craving the divine. Often feeling at the margins,
unsure to which culture he fully belonged, bred in him compassion for others
marginalized by life circumstances or unjust structures.
Then after graduating from Eastern
Mennonite University in 1976, marrying my wife Joan, whom I met at EMU,
contributed to my ponderings of multiple cultures or subcultures. Joan was from
an American Baptist background, had been influenced by the charismatic renewal
movement during her teen years, and in contrast to my roots in a historic peace
church who had registered as a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War, she
had been shaped in an extended family within which military service was common.
We then together moved to Philadelphia in 1979, for me to go attend Eastern
Baptist (now Palmer) Theological Seminary and she to begin a career working as
a nurse in urban hospitals and later a visiting nurse in some of the most
poverty-and-pain-ridden areas of Philadelphia before in recent years working as
a family therapist and a consultant to mental and behavioral health programs.
We had intentionally chosen an urban
setting and continued to invest in learning about and living within urban
dynamics after I graduated from seminary and we moved to the Germantown area of
Philadelphia. Living in a largely African-American neighborhood made us more
aware of our whiteness and gave us at least a taste of what it can feel like to
live as members of a minority community—even as we retained many of the
privileges conferred on whites in our wider U.S. culture.
This range of exposures, from
interpersonal through urban multi-cultural through personal, to a diversity of
cultural and sub-cultural factors fed my conviction that faith and context
inextricably shape each other. It has also nurtured my passion for seminary to
be a context within which we together learn about intercultural intelligences
and competencies within our ever more diverse world. This has contributed to my
passion to hire new EMS faculty members on the merits—but from as diverse an
applicant pool as we can encourage to apply.
Yago: Michael, you went
through difficult times wrestling with the gap between Christian’s talk and
walk. As a result, into early adulthood you came to question the existence of
God and the validity of Christianity. What did you learn from that experience?
How did you rediscovered your Christian faith?
Michael: First,
Yago, let me quote again from my personnel page, then I’ll elaborate.
Although
refined and chastened by life journeying, experience as pastor and publisher,
academic training, and turning toward a faith in Christ enlarged by doubts and
questions, lessons from King’s background continue to nurture his passions at
Eastern Mennonite Seminary. There he is articulating such themes as
"treasures of not being sure,” “transforming the shadows,” and “using
power for the less powerful.”
Years of wrestling, as you might
imagine, lie behind that paragraph. To be quite brief about matters one could
write books about, I’d highlight that key to my moving beyond doubt was not
intellectual assurance but my version of Pascal’s wager. I concluded I’d be
better off allowing my life to be shaped by betting on God and faith and being
wrong than by betting against God and faith and being wrong. The key way I lived
the bet was to follow Jesus. Over the years, the bet became self-confirming.
I still don’t believe that we can
have failsafe proof that God exists or that given faith claims are
unquestionably valid. We each will tend to look for the evidence that confirms
are choices and beliefs and to bypass or downplay the evidence that might disconfirm
it. Still the more I live toward God through my walk with Jesus the more I
trust that some sort of reality underlies what I then experience.
Yago: Michael, could you
share with us how did you experience your call to be pastor?
Michael: Yago, my
call was somewhat backward, in that I went to seminary with the conviction that
I wanted only to explore issues of faith and meaning and specifically did not
want to become a pastor as a result of seminary training. I had too many
questions about the church and its leaders to want to become formally involved
in helping to lead the church myself.
However, as I reached my final year
in seminary, one factor was that perennial one: How will I earn a living? I had
tried various short-term options between college and seminary, including house
painting, factory assembly line work, and writing and selling radio ads. To
this day I appreciate the skills I learned in those jobs, but as the time came
to find work beyond seminary, I found I wanted to do something different,. Despite
my misgivings I found myself drawn after all to explore whether I could somehow
be true to my faith journey and involved in serving the church.
That led to my exploring the option
of planting a church in West Philadelphia, and in fact that church was eventually
planted, by David and Anita Greiser and others, and is now West Philadelphia
Mennonite Fellowship. But the night before Joan and I were intending to say yes
to the committee overseeing the church planting assignment, I dreamed that I
was throwing Joan and our first daughter, infant Kristy, over a waterfall. In
the dream I watched them fall with an abnormal lack of concern, and I heard a
dream voice saying, “That’s what you’ll be doing to them if you take on this
church planting role.” The dream so powerfully affected me that after Joan and
I talked it over, we told a startled committee we felt we needed to turn down
the assignment.
But a member of the committee was
Roman Miller, on the pastoral team and Germantown Mennonite Church, and when he
heard this response he told us he thought God was speaking about a different
option. He and his wife Marianna invited us to a brainstorming dinner at their
house, and the result was eventually to be my being called to my first
pastorate at Germantown Mennonite Church.
So the call was a mix of
circumstances and inner processing that finally took me from resistance to
pastoring to at least exploring whether it suited me.
Yago: Michael, thanks for sharing this meaningful event in your life. It is an invitation to take seriously the symbolic content of our dreams. Now, what were
the main challenges you faced during your Christian ministry?
Michael: I became
a pastor at age 27 in a congregation which had for a generation or so been
strongly committed to “priesthood of believers” congregational polity. This was
understood to mean that pastoral leaders should come from within the
congregation, might well be laypersons rather than ordained, and that the
Anabaptist-Mennonite understandings from within which this approach emerged
pulled against viewing pastors as paid professionals or set-aside leaders
Because the congregation had
dwindled to some 25 members, the congregation eventually concluded it was time
to try returning to a paid pastor model though there was not full consensus
that this was the best way to go. I became the first paid professional pastor
of that era.
Meanwhile I myself, influenced by
1960-1970s anti-authoritarianism and my own faith questions, wished to minimize
the professional trappings of the pastorate even as I needed somehow to do more
than simply replicate the lay leadership modes of authority or lack thereof
which were proving not fully functional in the congregation.
Adding complexity, as word got
around that a new young pastor was leading the congregation, many younger
Mennonites from throughout the Philadelphia area who felt themselves in some
exile from their roots (much as I had at times been due to my faith questions)
began to attend the congregation. The more of them attended, the more were
attracted to attend, and within a few years the congregation had grown to over
100 participants, often with their own doubts about authority figures or
professional pastors.
In another semi-rural congregation I
pastored for 11 years into 2008, the issues were quite different. That
congregation was down to 35 members and at risk of dying as many of its younger
members had moved away or key older leaders had die amid a rash of tragic
illnesses. The congregation, largely made up of more traditional Mennonites,
needed to learn how to attract community participants who had not been
Mennonite or face likely death. There I experienced more fully the power of
being actively asked to wear the pastoral mantle, as in that context my
ministry included more traditional activities, such as hospital visitations and
funerals, than had been common when I was pastoring a congregation made up
largely of younger participants.
By the time I left, the congregation
was perhaps semi-stable with attendance often in the 50s and over half of the
participants often from broader community rather than Mennonite backgrounds. To
reach that point, we needed to do deep wrestling with ways Anabaptist-Mennonite
values could be meaningful to persons not raised in the tradition. That meant
learning which of our beliefs and practices were non-negotiable essentials of
Anabaptist-Mennonite understandings and which were “clothes” of local context
or cultural background which could be exchanged for other clothing without
violating the underlying body.
For instance, though a majority but
not all in the congregation would have agreed, I saw pacifism as an essential.
But even as I’m personally quite committed to a view of believers or adult
baptism according to to which persons baptized become members of and
accountable to their baptizing congregation, when several teenagers wanted to
be baptized without joining the congregation, after careful consultation with
the larger regional denominational body to which I was accountable as pastor, I
did baptize them without insisting on congregational membership.
We did much of this learning at the
feet of the Apostle Paul, who had to engage with similar issues as the early
church wrestled with what it meant that in Christ “there is neither Jew nor
Gentile.”
Yago: Michael, thanks for sharing with us your life experience as a pastor. Now, let us talk about the challenges our Christian faith faces in today's world. Our understanding of reality is
changing drastically. Robb Smith, in his TED talk “The Transformational Life,”
invites us to grow in discernment, mindfulness, humility, sustainability and
empathy. These transformational practices are essential if we want to thrive in
the complex world we all now inhabit. What can you say on his proposal? What is
required so to be more equipped to adapt to today’s world without losing the
very essence of our Christian faith?
Michael: Here I’d
largely reference one of three “dean’s leadership themes” I’ve used for three
years as guides to core values or principles I want to emphasize when leading
EMS. One of those themes, “treasures of
not being sure,” I’ve described like this:
Amid
today’s divisions and polarizations in culture as well as church, seeking to be
a community marked by the reconciling
power and peace of Christ. This includes fostering an intellectual posture
of “humble learning” contributing to a relational and learning community able
to model ways of managing divisions that allow community participants to see
each other’s different emphases less as enemy positions to be defeated and more
as partial understandings of God’s truths to be woven by the Holy Spirit into
treasures benefiting the entire community. Modeling peace in the seminary
community can form a basis for sharing peace with an entire world in need of
peacemaking rooted in the teachings of Jesus and shaped by an Anabaptist
hermeneutic of taking seriously Jesus’ commands to love enemies and do good to
those who persecute us (Eccl. 3:11; Matt. 5:43-48, Luke 10:27, 1 Cor. 13, 1
Cor. 13:12; Gal. 5:6; 1 John 4:12-18).
I see my comments in the above
paragraph as strongly connected with Robb Smith’s emphases on “discernment,
mindfulness, humility, sustainability and empathy.” I find inspiration for such
an understanding in the classic statement of the Apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians
13 that then, face to face with God, we will see clearly, but now we see only
dimly, as if through a mirror, and so know only in part. That calls us to live
and think humbly, in awareness that absolute certainty is likely a mirage, and
that in fact we need each other’s treasures of insight, since none of us knows
all—but our given part-knowledge when pooled can empower communal discernment
of truth, knowledge, right living.
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| Sustainability |
I won’t begin to try to sort out the
complexities this leads us into except to suspect that given the dominance of
globalized capitalistic practices, a key way we may achieve some sort of
meaningful humble sustainability is to turn a capitalism of the future against
the capitalism of the past by ensuring that our use and misuse of resources is
priced into our capitalistic practices.
If the true cost to the environment
of our resource extraction and consumption were priced in, we would at least
incentivize ourselves to begin to move toward sustainability, because then we
could see the terribly high price of what we’re doing rather than bracket that
price out when we buy our consumer items and our energy streams.
With the very fate of our ability to
continue to live peaceably on the earth threatened by climate change, I suspect
one of the most powerful responses we could implement—and doable, if only we
had the will—would be a carbon tax.
Michael: Yago, in
that book a host of chapter authors wrote about this. I wouldn’t claim to have
an adequate answer to such a large question writing primarily on my own behalf.
I do think we need to bring multiple perspectives to bear in answering the
question. But I’d offer a few thoughts.
One would be to clarify that though
I doubt the effectiveness of stridently confrontational approaches to
culture—particularly today as confrontation is virtually the oxygen we breathe
or the money we spend to gain attention through our blogs, Facebook pages, or
Twitter posts, which sometimes seems to do little but leave us with air fogged
with outrage.
That doesn’t mean I see nothing to
criticize. I worry greatly that, to echo Foucault, we live in a global
“power-knowledge” nexus driven by wealth, power, status, popularity within
which the wealthy and powerful exploit for their own benefit the world’s
natural and human resources. Whatever generates more of any of these ingredients
tends increasingly to shape what we consider real or true or right.
I see such forces as making it
difficult for us in fact to come alongside others. Thus the very hope to come
alongside may require some prophetic critique of the underlying factors that
may impose on us certain preunderstandings of life, reality, truth itself
before we even have a chance to begin to think.
Nevertheless, to the extent that,
even within the obstacles, we are able to experience a zone within which mutual
understanding can flourish, when we disagree I do see it as vital to view each
other’s perspectives not simply as objects in win-lose battles in which I seek
the victory of my viewpoint over yours. Rather, we need to see alternate
viewpoints as potential sources of mutual treasure.
This relates to my earlier comments
on humility and knowing in part—if we know in full, then of course we may wish
to impose our “in full,” God’s-eye view on everyone else. But if we know only
in part, then we need the nuggets of treasure potentially inherent even in
perspectives we may be tempted to smash.
Yago: You are also
the author of “Trackless Wastes and Starts to Steer by: Christian Identity in a Homeless age.” In this book you
reflect again on the challenges the “postmodern” world poses to our Christian
faith. Many Christians live in a homeless age as exiles lost between the
traditional religious homes and whatever homes will replace them. Christians
respond in different ways, the two extremes are what you call the separatist and the translationist. You weld these two approaches into a third way.
Could you explain to us your alternative behind “the third way”? How do you
envision our Christian engagement in today’s world?
Michael: When I
wrote Trackless Wastes in the late
1980s I was still actively remembering my own childhood in a “separatist”
Mennonite church context within which I was taught that Mennonites probably had
the best understandings of “God’s one true way.” Hence we should seek to
maintain the purity of God’s way by remaining separate from the “world’s”—the
larger culture’s—tainting and corrupting and mistaken ways.
Meanwhile I had seen one alternative
as liberalism in its various forms, including through flexible accommodation to
the larger culture rather than fierce withdrawal from it. That tendency was
what I was summarizing with the “translationist” description.
I doubt I was doing anything greatly
original by calling for a third way; many have sought some sort of mediating
alternative to the poles Jesus himself seems to point to in his invitation for
us to live “in but not of the world.” Some 30 years after writing Trackless Wastes, I probably have less
faith that I know what precisely the third way is.
But I still see value in the quest
to be connected to culture and larger world on the one hand, within an
understanding that God as creator of the earth and its fullnesses is present in
that world, and on the other hand to keep ever in view the need for critique
and even prophetic denunciation of ways the world falls short of God’s dream
for creation.
Thus I continue to treasure the
separate-from-the-world’s-strategies mindset my parents and Mennonite community
bred in me through various teachings. These included that God’s laws are above
human laws, so there may come a time, for example, for me to proclaim loyalty
to God over nation.
That was why I was taught not to
pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States, which left me in anguish
sometimes as a young person trying to fit in when I tried not to call attention
to my silence when the time for pledging came.
The intent was not disrespect of or
disloyalty to country; I see much to cherish in the United States, including
many precepts of our Constitution which call us to forms of justice we
frequently fail to live out yet are worth calling ourselves to. Rather, the
intent was to remember that we are always most primally citizens not of our
earthly nations but of that heavenly country toward which, as Hebrews 11 so
movingly pictures it, we ever travel and for which we ever yearn.
That was why I was taught that love
of enemies means Christians don’t kill people, with all the personal and
political ripple effects that can have.
Yago: Michael, let us explore now some challenges seminary formation faces in today's post-modern world. We are
living in an age of information. Internet connects across time zones and cultures.
Daniel Pink describes today’s age as the Conceptual Age. Diarmuid O’Murchu says
that “millions readily access information
on a whole range of different subjects; this can be both empowering and also
overwhelming. And the information channels target new ways for connecting,
relating, participating, and collaborating in endeavors of different types.”
How does the reality of internet and access to all kind of information
challenge the formation of the seminarians?
Michael: We’re
still in relatively early stages of grasping how the Internet and access to all
kinds of information challenges the formation of seminarians. But it’s
important to wrestle with the questions. In an EMS chapel address, I noted that
before the Enlightenment, people were often less self-reflective. The world
just was what it was. The Enlightenment taught us that we can stand apart from
how we first see the world as being. We can go beyond dwelling uncritically
within inherited realities and knowledges. We can observe that those of us
embedded in Muslim or Jewish or Buddhist or various Christian traditions start
out experiencing our world as The World. But the Enlightenment began
to force us to see that many worlds
can be experienced as The World.
Then in recent generations, intensifying
pluralism, globalism, and cross-cultural engagements have only heightened our
awareness of how many worlds have been experienced as The World. The Internet has explosively and exponentially
intensified this awareness. We can with a few flicks of keyboards roam the
globe entering and experiencing a dizzying range of worldviews.
While I was writing this I stumbled
across a pertinent quote from Os Guiness in Christianity Today: “Many conservatives misunderstand and then twist the term
‘diversity.’ Diversity is simply a social fact. We are in a world where it is
now said, because of the media, easy travel, and migration, that ‘everyone is
now everywhere.’ What is dangerous is not diversity per se, but relativism—the
claim that there is no such thing as truth.”
I’d see Guiness as correct in
highlight diversity as a social fact—and also that this social fact is
affecting our relationship with truth. My thesis is furthermore that this is
making it ever more difficult for us to avoid facing the difference between The World and a world experienced as The
World. Increasingly this breaks the spell of any conviction we may hold that our world is The World. This can open us excitingly and enrichingly to
insights from worlds beyond our original one. It also requires us to learn new
ways of holding passionately to our own convictions and understandings even as
recognize how many alternate ways of viewing things are available to humans.
Again the pressing need for humility
becomes evident. Perhaps as never before in human history, the Internet
confronts us with the reality that we do know only in part. We can respond by
discrediting and separating ourselves from all the other parts and insisting
once more that our part is the whole. But I hope what we help seminarians learn
is that we dare commit to the part we do know while trusting that God, who
holds the only God’s eye view there is, can help each of our “in parts”
contribute to drawing us fallibly yet meaningfully closer to the fullness of
God’s truth.
Yago: In this new
landscape networking is emerging as the way humanity wants to share power. It
is an invitation to create fluid structures in our Churches. How does this new
reality challenge a hierarchical understanding of leadership?
Michael: Yago, I
agree with your comments on networking. At the same time, I was invited to
comment on power dynamics at the seminary for an analysis Laura Amstutz, EMS
Director of Admissions, was doing in a course, and that project kept in view
for me that as a seminary dean I operate within power arrangements that mix
both network-centric and hierarchical modes. Although organizational life tends
to be more hierarchical than many church structures, particularly
congregational (at least in Mennonite polity) often are, my guess is that we
will long continue to operate within a mix of network and hierarchical modes.
So let me comment within that expectation and draw on learnings from seminary
life I also shared with Laura.
I believe every member of an
organization, including students—or employees, or congregants—has power. I’m
influenced by Michel Foucault’s view of power, in which power flows across
power/knowledge networks, not only hierarchically, is neither entirely stable
nor predictable, and when imposed by structures can be resisted by individuals.
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| Michael Foucault (1926-1984) |
I’m also influenced by systems
theories, in which every individual’s actions within a system will have some
systemic ripple effects.
Both Foucauldian and systems views
strike me as suggesting that all persons and groupings at EMS or in other
church contexts do hold power, whether or not they recognize it. However, at
EMU and EMS there are also hierarchical forms of power. Persons report up
levels of hierarchy. Any supervisor of a direct report has some power over that
person, and this power works its way up and down level by level. I have power
over my reports and in turn the EMU provost to whom I report has power over me.
The president has power over the provost. The EMU board has power over the
president.
Again, however, power is more than
hierarchically disseminated at EMS. For instance, if I regularly use the
positional power of hierarchy to impose my will—which the EMU/EMS system gives
me at least some latitude to do—but minimize earning relational power through highlighting
and nurturing collaborative initiatives to which other EMS stakeholders have
contributed or helped shape, I will likely often sabotage my positional power.
I will create blowback, generating outcomes only reluctantly adopted by
stakeholders or sometimes actively resisted.
In more network-centric contexts,
the issues of relational power are foregrounded, and indeed with you I see the
world as increasingly trending toward forms of power that are earned within
networked relationships rather than to a significant extent structured within
pre-determined hierarchical arrangements.
Yago: In a
patriarchal society power has been used to disempower more than to empower. You
have the vision of using power not to aggrandize the powerful but to uplift ‘the least of these.’ What are the risks that our Pastors face in our Churches
related to use of power? How do you envision seminary training so to prevent
the risk of dysfunctional use of power?
Michael: Amid the
tendencies we’ve discussed for networked power to begin to supplant
hierarchical power, pastors still will often find themselves granted some blend
of hierarchical or at least positional power. In addition, they will often
experience the power conferred when congregants project on them various priestly
images or hopes.
The pastor will thus often function
within the midst of high voltages related to the divine. If not careful, a
pastor may confuse or conflate his or her personal power with God’s, which can
set the stage for dramatic inflation.
We need to train pastors to
understand the many forms of projection and confusion of their human powers
with God’s they are likely to face and to help them recognize that in the midst
of the temptations and complexities this can pose for them, they remain frail
and fallible human beings, not the near-mythic figures projections may
sometimes tempt them to experience themselves as being.
On the other hand, amid major
questions these days as to the viability and value of traditional church
structures and offices, pastors can also face the contrasting dynamic of
experiencing their roles as unclear, under-valued, or actively disempowering.
They need training to recognize the power they hold even in ambiguous
circumstances and to find peers and mentors to help them maintain healthy
self-understandings even when structural factors may at times undercut their
experiences of power or self-worth.
Nevertheless, I do believe that all
pastors have power, in one form or another, and a key move they and we are
called to make is both to name the power we do have and then to make decisions
about how we will use that power. If we use the power to reaffirm cultural
narratives that lead more toward death than toward life, including elevating
the powerful over the less powerful, we have squandered and even destructively
used our power. If we use the power to elevate and highlight narratives that
are life-giving (of the sort you describe as “from below”) then we are spending
it more wisely—even as we must ever remember that every use of power can be
mistaken, corrupted, or corrupting.
Sara Wenger Shenk, who was associate dean at EMS and then in 2010 the
interim dean who actually trained me in the early phases of my work as a new
dean, has been doing insightful and valuable thinking about this in her current
role as president of Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary. For example, in a
blog entry she asks, “How do we have a richer conversation about power—abuse of power,
yes, but also nurturing power, power for justice, power for good? How can men
and women each acknowledge the power they wield and commit to work
collaboratively for the well-being of our communities?” She also asks important
questions about how patriarchal tendencies in society and church contribute to
shaping understandings and use of power enabling abuse.
Yago: I believe
that God’s mission unveils “from below”, through embodiment. So our formation
programs must equip us to take the path of descent. This is the path of
transformation. As Richard Rohr says “darkness, failure, relapse, death, and woundedness are our
primary teachers, rather than ideas or doctrines.” I would
suggest that our formation programs seek to equip the seminarians with the
skills of how to dialogue with today’s world as s/he carries in “vessels of
clay” the treasure of his/her deepest humanity. This is a clear counter-script
to the one presented in today’s society. How do we design programs of formation
where the path of descent is value as the primary teacher?
When are students graduate, they
often tell the stories of what brought them to seminary and what happened to
them during a graduation weekend brunch. Again and again they speak of
arriving lost, wounded, troubled, conflicted. Then they repeatedly tell of
finding themselves not through rejecting their frailties and fallibilities but
through having them reformed into resources.
Yago: We all carry unprocessed energies in our bodies (different intensity levels of trauma). A “top-down” approach to formation reinforces paralyzing energies such as guilt, remorse, shame, etc. Religious formation “from below” invites us to be creative in dealing with our areas of growth. The concept of Post-traumatic growth becomes very important on this regard. Peter Levine says that “trauma has the potential to be one of the most significant forces for psychological, social, and spiritual awakening and evolution.” Do you believe that “trauma awareness” is an important tool for religious formation? What is being done on this regard at the seminary?
Michael: Yago, I appreciate and resonate with your perspectives here including the thinking of Levine but will comment very briefly so as not to claim to know more than I do! I would primarily note that we do seek to provide trauma awareness in our seminary formation work, both in formation classes and through several professors who are particularly versed in trauma studies.
Link to Part Two >>
Link to Part Two >>
