(Some thoughts inspired by Richard Rohr’s essay ‘To
Care And Not To Care’, in _Near Occasions of Grace_, Orbis, 1993).

Occasionally at my seminars on ‘The Marks of a Healthy
Church’ someone will say, ‘I believe our church is the most biblical!’
My usual retort: ‘Name the prophets you have commissioned’. We
then have a change-of-subject…

Of course, prophets and institutions don’t mix. They
never have. Churches usually honour prophets only in the first
generation of their life. Prophets don’t need institutions for
their (spiritual) survival. But institutions _do_ need prophets.
Otherwise they are ruled by precedent, law and dogma instead of
the inspired Word of God.

T.S.Eliot’s ‘Ash Wednesday’ concludes with these
lines:

Spirit of the fountain; spirit of the garden, Suffer
us not to mock ourselves with falsehood Teach us to care and not
to care Teach us to sit still Even among the rocks, Our peace
in His will And even among these rocks…

What we need today – as always – is detachment. Detachment
from an enslavement to our own ideas, our own feelings, our own
opinions. I am more than opinions which must be dumped on others.
I am more than feelings which have to be ‘shared’ (sometimes that
gets so bad that ‘my feelings have me’).

Prophets help us name our idols, precisely. They
know the right questions. They have a ‘feel’ for the seductiveness
of power, privilege, wealth, law, order and control. They understand
the dangers in creating a professional religious class of ‘separated
ones’ or clergy. So St. Francis, for example, refuses priestly
‘ordination’.

Prophets intuitively side with the powerless, the
deprived, the marginalized, the oppressed. Some work to liberate
the oppressed; Jesus, among others, worked more to liberate the
oppressors (whereby the problems of the oppressed are more likely
to take care of themselves). Which is why he sometimes engaged
in theological discourse with people like Nicodemas, or social
discourse with the wealthy in parties…

So prophets are big on justice. (Our world is no
longer impressed by charity when it is not built on justice.)
So it’s no wonder the institutional church doesn’t factor social
justice into its creeds or evangelical doctrinal statements…

The prophets are big on community. (They’d find the
individualistic notion of ‘receiving Jesus as your personal Saviour’
odd).

Prophets are big on social responsibility. (So they’re
wary of ‘born-again/ Spirit-filled’ bless-me religion devoid of
real care for, say, AIDS sufferers, Bosnian refugees, the lonely
kid down the street, the teenage unwed mother…).

Prophets like Jesus major on love – love for God
and others, even enemies. (Makes you wonder why the notion of
love doesn’t get into creeds, or most confessions of faith…).

Perhaps we need to


sit still Even among these rocks…


and reflect awhile.

As a prophet once said, ‘Don’t just do something,
sit there!