A recent post by Honna Eichler explores a number of important issues that we might all benefit from contemplating more. Her reflections inspired me to write this post, which responds to the question with which she concludes: “Why you have stayed in religion or prefer to exist outside of it?”
At the risk of reduction and with the promise of brevity, my response is: I have remained involved in my Christian community because it is my vocation.
What do I mean by ‘vocation’? I mean it in a sense similar to that of Martin Luther and Karl Barth. It is my ‘calling’, to use the language of my denomination, the United Church of Christ. How does one know what one’s calling/vocation is? I don’t think we ever truly know. Discerning a call is never clear or unambiguous, except for those rare “knights of faith” that Kierkegaard discussed (wondering all the while if those knights exist). For Kierkegaard and the rest of us, however, we proceed along this aporetic path only in fear and trembling. Discerning one’s call is no easy task, but harder still is discerning the voice that calls us from a height (who’s voice is it?), as Jacques Derrida explores in his The Gift of Death.
Honna’s question cuts to the very heart of ethics and it is a question that has, in various forms, occupied such masterful thinkers as Luther, Schleiermacher, Kierkegaard, Kant, Barth, Derrida, and on and on… It is the unanswerable question that demands an answer – a respons/ability to respond despite our inability to respond. An aporia, and a necessary one, at that. Should one deny oneself in order to remain, and remain in order to change one’s community? Or should one affirm oneself by leaving one’s community, thereby setting an example (of sorts) with the hope of either transforming one’s community from the outside or attempting to build a new (perfected??) community?
Or in the words of those great theologians from 1981 (a.k.a., The Clash): “Should I stay or should I go now? If I go there will be trouble, and if I stay it will be double; so come on and let me know. This indecision’s bugging me. If you don’t want me, set me free. Exactly who am I supposed to be?”
Moses received his calling in a somewhat more dramatic story than I myself can claim. And yet even he had to ask “Who are you who is calling me?” (Ex 3:13) – and he could only even come to ask this question after asking (himself?) “Who am I?” (Ex 3:11). We might also notice that Moses was only able to ask the question “Who am I?” after having left his community. Wandering quite alone, he asked the questions “who am I?” and “who are you?” and only then discerned his call to return to his (Egyptian) community to liberate his (Hebrew) community (though both were his community, were they not?). Even this, though, was a schism, a separation, a division… a “we can’t be who we are – not here – we must go.”
So what is the lesson here? Should I stay or should I go? Perhaps you will be fortunate enough to hear your call from a burning bush. Even still, though, the uncertainty remains – whose is that voice that calls me to this task? Was Moses ever certain? Was Luther, who splintered the church? Was Thomas More, whose head suffered a schism in his attempt to avoid a schism in the church he so loved, yet sought to transform?
The question of whether to stay in one’s community or forsake it is no easy question. I recently asked my advisor, a Jesuit priest, this same question. It was clear from his response that it has not always been an easy decision. I think it is such an important question and one that we all have to answer for ourselves. Like Honna, I am no longer a member of my original community (Southern Baptist). Though I continue to love that community – and love it enough to want to work towards its transformation – I did not feel that I could continue to be a part of it. I had to leave Egypt, so to speak, and enter the wilderness in order to ask “Who am I?”
So, I think for me, my answer is that I had to find a balance. I had to find a way to be true to myself while also discerning my calling to transform those communities that I love too much to simply abandon. It would be easier to walk away; but I would not be true to myself if I were to abandon those for whom I care so much – those communities who helped to shape me into whom I am and who continue to shape/form the lives of others.
There are those who have been harmed by the church and by other religious communities. They have been told that the person that they are is shameful, sinful, or even demonic. They have been told that their human worth is diminished by their gender, race, economic status, orientation, nationality, or creedal commitments. How does one respond to this? How can one respond? What is one’s ability to respond? What is one’s response/ability? Some have left and seek to build new communities. Many others remain as victims. Others have stayed, seeking to transform those communities. The “knights of faith” (if they exist) have no doubt about their decision. For the rest of us, though, we proceed along this aporetic path only in fear and trembling, questioning the call, the caller, the called and our ability to respond.
This is truly beautiful, Brad! I welcome the revelation of your “fear and trembling”, and the questions which accompany you as you follow your calling. As someone who has recently been feeling the tug of a “calling”, I have been wondering what this term might mean for a Humanist.
You say ” Discerning one’s call is no easy task, but harder still is discerning the voice that calls us from a height”. Certainly I agree that figuring out what one’s call is is challenging, but the second question is even harder for me – whence comes the call!
I don’t think it comes from above – “from a height”. Rather, the model I’m developing for myself sees my calling as coming “from the side”: the needs of others interact with my abilities to create a “calling” – what I can do for them. The “voice that calls me to this task” is the collective voice of the need of humanity, as I perceive it (as I type this it seems extraordinarily grand and pompous =P).
But I am still struggling with the question “Why me?! Who am I to do this?” Reframing this as “Why not me!” has helped a lot, but has not totally resolved the question.
None of these struggles make me think I would want to pursue my calling from within a community that did not share my fundamental values, however. I can just about see how someone who had grown to love a particular community might want to stay within it to help it change, but at some point you have to break away…
Many thanks for reading and responding, James. One small point of clarification… the phrase “calls me from a height” is almost a technical term for me, referring to Levinas’ ethics of alterity… it is the ‘other’ who calls me from a height out of the infinity of Being (Levinas’ term is ‘il y a’) into relation and intersubjectivity. I share your hesitation at Levinasian heteronomy, but I do find the ambuguity – especially as seen through Derrida’s lens – to be compelling. I, like Derrida, am not convinced (and never can be) that the other is not god… or, to borrow Derrida’s ambiguously tautological mantra, “toute autre est toute autre”.
Brad, thanks for prompting me to pull out and post an old blog entry on this question of call….it’s a beautiful one to me.
Many women, people of color, and LGBTQ people have chosen to “defect in place” in religious communities. The communities’ imperfections are sometimes worth leaving, a decision I can respect, but I also see the beauty in people who stay and agitate for a better version of their imperfect form.
You’ve asked, James, in your own words and way if the similarities between such actions in religious communities and naturalistic communities are evident. I often believe our choice to continue living in this imperfect democracy here in the U.S.A. is a similar act. Any value that knits people together is prone to be enacted with our own imperfections embedded therein. It’s still worth staying and working toward its better form, for me.
Thanks Jennifer! How great is it that this SoF community is taking the form that it is, with my post inspired by Honna’s and yours inspired by ours… and I again by yours!
As for your comments on democracy, I agree. In fact I published a journal article a few years back that was related – our commitments/responsibility to the ekklesia, and our commitments/responsibility to citizenship and democracy. This is, I think, a topic deserving of much more reflection and attention by all of us.
Brad – this is a great post, I really appreciated what you said! And I think you picked up on a lot of what I couldn’t quite cover in my own post: the idea of being called to engage in a specific community. As you explain, sometimes we are called to leave a community. It is a very challenging prospect and so much of what you said was helpful.
James – I liked what you said about being called by those you are in community with. I think this is very important. As a Presbyterian, we support the idea of communal call – where one’s individual calling must be affirmed by a community. This is one thing about the Presbyterian church I do hold dear. I wish you best in your search!