L’Avenir

Is it possible to live in the humility of knowing that our purpose, as clearly as we self-define it, is but “a husk of meaning”? The task is really to become superb listeners. Heidegger wrote that waiting, listening, was the most profound way to serve God. People cannot discover new lands until they have the courage to lose sight of the shore. (Andre Gide)

One of the most fundamental precursors of emergence is emptiness, and an ability to embrace mystery. On the other hand, one of the most fundamental characteristics of modernity is the search for certainty. No wonder we haven’t been very good at waiting!

It isn’t easy embracing insecurity. It isn’t easy leaving our comfort zones, our titles, or our previous understanding behind. With every change of paradigm comes the need to embrace a new self-understanding, and the loss of a settled identity.

But our faith paradigm itself is rooted in a fundamental insecurity. The heroes of faith are described by the writer of Hebrews, they went out, “not knowing where they were going.” Faith is a trusting in something beyond sight, something we have not yet seen.

The goal of Christian leadership is a living community. Because the goal is a living community we know that it is a place where there are no professionals, only amateurs.. “amati” is Latin for “lover” and professionals are hirelings who arrive with the baggage of identity and status. Those who arrive with so much to protect rarely have the courage to lose sight of the shore; but those who arrive as lovers – ah! – these ones will give all that they have simply to behold His face.

Every noble crown is, and on earth will forever be, a crown of thorns. (Thomas Carlyle)

In one “Jesus” movie there is a scene near the end where Jesus appears to His disciples in the upper room. Together they kneel in love and awe as He smiles at them. They are united in worship and in love. There are no “apostles” or “leaders” .. together they are lovers and servants, and in His presence they are all on the same level.

Community and mission are both about love and emptiness of our own agendas. Only those who “forsake all” for the sake of love can reach a city not built with hands.

So it seems that a precondition of the emergent church is emptiness. Only the empty, the poor, the naked and the disenfranchised can see clearly, because they have no vested interests and nothing left to lose. This is why Jesus says that we must become as children in order to enter the Kingdom of God.

So often we think of science as quantitatively a different pursuit than the world of faith. We reason that faith is about uncertainty and science about certainty. Faith is playful; science is serious.

Yesterday as I waited for my wife to return from shopping I overheard an interview with a scientist who was talking about Watson and Crick, the two researchers who in 1953 uncovered the function of DNA. What struck me about the discussion was two things:

1) at the DNA level structure is function. DNA functions by replicating itself.
2) both harmony (structure and community) and irreverence (playfulness and chaos) are necessary for new paradigms to emerge, because those who are within the system (at authority levels) usually have too much at stake to embrace sweeping change.

This means that new paradigms are only discovered/embraced by those on the edge, those who are not afraid to challenge the established wisdom.. those willing to ask hard questions and those with no reputation at stake. One author writes of Watson and Crick that,

“it was a tale of boundless ambition, impatience with authority and disdain, if not contempt, for received opinion. (”A goodly number of scientists,” Watson explained, “are not only narrow-minded and dull but also just stupid.”) Yet the Watson and Crick story is also one of sublime harmony, an example, as a colleague put it, of “that marvelous resonance between two minds–that high state in which 1 plus 1 does not equal 2 but more like 10.” (PBS.org)

A friend related to me that the physicists who are researching quantum dynamics and who are working with the very smallest particles came up against another mystery. It seems that while there were some things that were definable, one of the largest questions remaining was about the power in matter. No one knows where it comes from. This caused one scientist to theorize that, “Perhaps the power is in the blank spaces.”

Blank spaces are what we lose when we organize. Blank spaces are those elements of shred life that remain shrouded in mystery. In fact, community itself IS a mystery. You can plan it, organize it and pray for it and still not get it. It requires something spontaneous and unreachable by human effort and thought alone. It requires more weakness than strength, and we aren’t very good at weakness. Community is a gift, and we aren’t good at receiving. Eugene Peterson writes,

“The secularized mind is terrorized by mysteries. Thus it makes lists, labels people, assigns roles, and solves problems. But a solved life is a reduced life. These tightly buttoned-up people never take great faith risks or make convincing love talk. They deny or ignore the mysteries and diminish human existence to what can be managed, controlled, and fixed. We live in a cult of experts who explain and solve...”

“But “there are things,” wrote Marianne Moore, “that are important beyond all this fiddle.” The old time guide of souls asserts the priority of the “beyond” over “this fiddle.” Who is available for this kind of work other than pastors? A few poets, maybe; and children, always. But children are not good guides, and most of the poets have lost interest in God. That leaves pastors as guides through the mysteries.” The Contemplative Pastor

So we listen and we wait. We wait without knowing, for knowing would be knowledge of the wrong thing. We wait without certainty, for certainty would be faith in the wrong thing. Who waits for what he does not know? And who listens for what he has already heard? The true listener moves beyond the noise of expectation and desire to wait in stillness for the Word. This ability to embrace liminal space is rare, and rarely embraced.

There is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting. (TS Eliot)

Jacques Derrida, the man Caputo calls Father Jacques, writes on “l’avenir” to come. Derrida, considered agnostic by most commentators, often evidences a profound faith in a God he refuses to name. He recognizes that to name what we don’t know is only another means of reaching for control; he stands and waits.

“In general, I try to distinguish between what one calls the future and “l’avenir.” The future is that which- tomorrow, later, next century - will be. There’s a future which is predictable, programmed, scheduled, foreseeable. But there is a future, l’avenir (to come) which refers to someone who comes whose arrival is totally unexpected. For me, that is the real future. That which is totally unpredictable. The other who comes without my being able to anticipate their arrival. So if there is a real future beyond this other known future, it’s l’avenir in that it’s the coming of the other when I am completely unable to foresee their arrival.”