Kindred Spirits... and the Church

An odd phenomenon is happening in my yoga classes: most of my students are my mother's age. (And most of my mother's yoga students are my age. Is this a product of learning yoga together?) Most of my yoga students have been practicing yoga much longer than I have... which is intimidating but beautiful as we learn so much from each other--at least I learn a lot from them.

One student in particular has taken a keen interest in my manuscript topic--yoga and Christianity. A couple of weeks ago, she brought in Benedictine Joan Chittister's In the Heart of the Temple as suggested reading. Just like I think my yoga student might be a kindred spirit, I think Joan Chittister is too.

This week, I realized that my current take on yoga and Christianity is more about how practicing yoga saved my faith and continues to resuscitate my relationship with the Church. (The Church and I are notsomuch kindred spirits.) I don't want to write about the Church... but I can't get away from it. I keep asking myself why my relationship with the Church is so important, why I can't just give it up like so many other people, and I haven't been able to come up with anything good...

So here is Joan's answer to that question:

"'It is good to have an end to journey towards,' Ursula Le Guin writes, 'but it is the journey that matters in the end.' The truth of that statement explains, as well as anything, I think, how it is possible, necessary even, for me as a Roman Catholic to stay in a church that is riddled with inconsistencies, closed to discussion about the implications of them, and sympathetic only to invisible women. The fact is that I have come to realize over the years that church is not a place, it is a process. To leave the church may, in fact, be leaving part of the process of my own development. And so, intent on the process of grappling with truth, I stay in it when, for a woman, staying in it is full of pain, frustration, disillusionment, and far too often, even humiliation. Both of us, this church and I, have need to grow. The church needs to grow in its understanding of the gospel, and I need to grow in my understanding of myself as I strive to live it. It is, in other words, a journey of conversion for both of us." [She quotes Ursula Le Guin!]

"I stay in the church, a restless pilgrim, not because I don't believe what the church has taught me but precisely because I do." [favorite line.]

"I stay in the church because there is nowhere else I know that satisfies me in what the church itself teaches us to seek: a sacramental life that makes all life sacred, a community of faith that celebrates life together, the proclamation of the image of God alive in each of us, the contemplation of truth that makes life meaningful."

"...every time I thought about leaving, I found myself thinking of oysters." Oysters? "I realized that an oyster is an organism that defends itself by excreting a substance to protect itself against the sand of its spawning bed. The more sand in the oyster, the more chemical the oyster produces until finally, after layer upon layer of gel, the sand turns into a pearl. And the oyster itself becomes more valuable in the process. At that moment, I discovered the ministry of irritation."

[The ministry of irritation. Wow. Now that's a phrase.]

"I stay in the church with all my challenge and despite its resistance, knowing that before this is over, both it and I will have become what we have the capacity to be--followers of the Christ who listened to women, taught them theology, and raised them from the dead."

Amen.