Who’s at the Center? Who’s in Crisis?

Last updated on: October 6, 2015 at 11:39 am by David Mason

Who’s at the Center? Who’s in Crisis? 2015-10-06T11:39:39-05:00 David Mason

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Dorothy Day

O, Faithful of the Great Pushback, take note of Pope Francis before Congress. Selecting four Americans to note as exemplary in an address to the U.S. Congress and the collective United States, Pope Francis commended Lincoln, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Thomas Merton. Only two of the short list were Catholic, and these two, in their lifetimes, were pushed to the margins of the Catholic community.

Which is to point out: it can happen more quickly than one might expect. One minute, you’re comfortably in the mainstream, castigating Dorothy Day for so brazenly challenging the alignment of Catholicism with American politics, condemning Thomas Merton for hanging out with Buddhists, and congratulating oneself for holding so fast to the center, resisting the restless winds of political fads, and saying no to the pressure to conform to cultural evolution. The next minute in history, you find that you have gone nowhere, but the center has shifted. In an unexpected instant, those you despised for walking away from your faith appear as the embodiment of faith, and the quality of your faith, such as it is, comes quickly into question.

The recent LDS-Mormon Conference offered variations on a theme that is growing increasingly virulent in American Christianity, as the center of the larger culture moves along. Don’t move, said Conference. Don’t be drawn away from the center by voices that are critical, fleeting and faddish, by some cultural trend or other that will not outlive The Word. There is a center, Conference asserted, and anyone who stands away from that center is suspect.

There will be smug and assertive pushback in the days to come, as the self-assured, LDS-Mormon centrists take to the channels of the Internet to sling stones at those of the faith who speak toward them from a distance. Y’all and your faithlessness, will go the online refrain, are out-of-the-fold. Some few will earnestly and genuinely plead, Come back, come back, dear departed. Stand here, at the center that turns around us.

American Catholicism did the same to Day and Merton. Shun the socialist peacenik, it was said, concerning Day. Beware the inter-religious idealist, Catholics were warned of Merton. They have wandered from the center and threaten to draw you with them into their meandering, pointless pathways.

And then, in suddenness before the U.S. Congress, the lost sheep turned out not-lost at all.

What will be, in a few decades, for LDS-Mormonism? Perhaps we should beware of holding too tightly to a center that every decade shows will shift, sometimes mightily, sometimes right out from under our feet. Lester E. Bush—bullied as he was by The Brethren, themselves—turned out to be prophetic, and was found in suddenness at the center, after all. Who will we discover standing at tomorrow’s center?

Don’t be so sure that it’s you, as you go out to defend the orthodoxy of the moment, and to stand boldly for today’s truth and right.

As for those hanging out apart from the self-professing center: do you presume that Day or Merton were undergoing a “faith crisis”, as they faced chastisement and condemnation in their own community? I would not minimize the sting and the sorrow that comes along with acting against the petrifying traditions of family and friends, but I am not convinced that the language of “crisis” is always adequate or appropriate for describing the earnest and sincere pursuit of truth that inevitably leads us to the edge of darkness. The language of crisis seems to concede that one’s movement is a departure. But one’s journey might just as well be a homecoming. Day and Merton seemed to wander, widely, from the Catholic fold, and, lo and behold, they discovered the pope himself standing where they arrived.

When, as Boyd Packer recommended, you step beyond the lighted circle that shines on the center to find that the light extends further than you thought, illuminating and expanding that center to hold far-flung territories together, you may not be leaving home, however much the movement hurts and bewilders, as much as finding that home is a much bigger place than you knew. Indeed, the panic that cries through the increasingly strident exhortations to stay put, hunker down, and resist, seems much more the expression of a crisis of faith to me than the determination to find god, even when the search means moving.

The center shifts, sometimes suddenly. Whatever your crisis, move on your path. History shows clearly that you may, at an unexpected moment, find the center suddenly beneath your feet, after all, and those so breathless to proclaim your damnation, breathlessly rushing to catch up.

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