"Elizaveta Iurievna Kuzmina-Karavaeva Skobtsova, later known as Mother Maria, was a Russian Orthodox religious thinker, poet and artist. Her multi-faceted legacy includes articles, poems, art, and drama. In the 1910s she was part of the literary milieu of St. Petersburg and was a member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party. She fled Russia soon after the Bolsheviks' takeover and lived in Paris, where she became a nun. In 1935, she participated in organizing the so-called Orthodox Action, which was designed to help Russian immigrants in France. She and her fellow-workers from Orthodox Action opened a house for homeless and sick immigrants in Paris. During the Nazi occupation of the city, the house was transformed into a refuge for Jews and displaced persons. Mother Maria and her son were arrested by the Gestapo in 1943 and died in the Ravensbruck camp in Germany. Mother Maria's selfless devotion to people and her death as a martyr will never be forgotten. In 2004, the Holy Synod confirmed the glorification of Mother Maria." - from Columbia University Libraries Special Collection link

Sabbath Rest and Neural Ganglia

Worship and Church need to be about Sabbath rest and wholeness. Church and worship are all about the seventh day of creation. They are rest from the work of life. We need to find ways to enter into the stillness God has called us into—out of the chaos of our worldly lives. The sacredness of Church and worship sets them apart as “Sabbath experiences.” Where is the rest in Church today? We cannot envelop wholeness without it.

Sabbath rest is also about telling tales. We reach into the ken of stories that emerge from our history as a people of God and we share them in a space rich in silence and stillness. The space provided by the silence and stillness enables us to hear how the tales interact with our own lives. We connect in a richer fashion when our tales our told out of rest, rather than constant movement. By removing these standard and routine practices from “Church”, “Sabbath”, and “religious” experiences, we have begun to dismantle structures in the neural ganglia of mankind. We are pruning out developmental culture and its place in our lives. This is dangerous.

Replicating our workplace environments in our Churches has proved empty. We really do not want to have executive meetings on Sunday, we just have forgotten that we are being called into something different. Making Churches into businesses has failed in the long run and we all feel that. Relegating growth to an “org chart” has left us hollow.

Eventually we are left with asking, “What happened to Jesus in all of this? Where has God gone in all of this?” Perhaps we have substituted our prayer practices with the distractions that keep us from stillness. As easy as it is to do this in our private lives, it is just as easy to do this in our corporate lives. We can eradicate healthy habits quite nicely in democratic cultures. I am afraid Church has become democratic—in ways that it has clearly not ruminated over long enough.

From Chapter 2 of Cairn-Space

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1 comment:

  1. AlexisJanuary 22, 2011 at 5:33 PM

    Amen!
    Love your observation about turning church life into another expression of office life.

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