04/14/2019
Attached below aHoly Week message from Bishop Joseph, filled with gospel-based insight, particularly with our way of being "the church" in mind. May we keep it in mind as we walk with Christ throughout the week at supper, betrayal, crucifixion and resurrection.
Holy Week 2019 Pastoral Message
The Need for Prophetic Imagination by the People of God
Bishop Joseph Augustine, AIHM
When I was a teenager, I began to imagine myself in the religious life and priestly ministry. I saw myself offering Mass in a beautiful church wearing colorful medieval vestments then walking around in my habit, praying, etc. This imagination was a way to deflect and compartmentalize my growing awareness of my sexuality as a gay man. My imagination was not truly from God but from what the scriptural theologian Walter Brueggemann calls the totalism of a social structure. Totalism is:
“ ideological... that intends to contain all thinkable, imaginable, doable social possibilities. That totalism always wants to monopolize imagination, and it wants to monopolize technology, so that there are no serious alternatives that seem on offer.” (1)
My totalism was a traditional social structure of religious regimen that offered a social status to an otherwise life of questions, sneers, and persecution. Being a religious was a way to avoid all the stigma of being a gay man, a way to gain respect and honor in life. However, God WAS doing something, but I was not thinking deep enough into the challenge of the Holy Spirit. That spark of prophetic imagination would remain an ember until this desire to embrace the totalism of social acceptance was burnt away.
I explored three different religious communities even canonical novitiate in one of them. None worked.
Nothing worked until I and another began to truly imagine religious life and our experience of Church in a different way, a way of greater inclusion, a way that would embrace the margins rather than be sealed off from them. Today I am a religious friar, following the Rule of St. Augustine, and I have been ordained a priest for nearly 15 years, and a bishop for the past four. I have a habit, which I get to wear mostly on Sunday only as I work in the public sector and live in a condo community. I have a church worship community which meets in my living room on Sunday mornings, and as mentioned, I am a bishop in a church of three priests, five religious, a hermit, two seminarians, and a dozen or so laity.
This picture is very different from the one I use to imagine as a teenager, but it is a picture much truer to the prophetic imagination that the Holy Spirit was giving me and thus much more successful in living in integrity with my faith. My ministry in my Church is to stand and minister to those on the margins of society and many mainline churches, especially of the 1980s and 1990s. Our Religious Order embraces men and women, and all the gender identities in-between equally. We embrace a life of celibacy, single-hood, or marriage equally. Our Church ministers to those left behind in many other faith communities: those in the LGBT community, women wanting to be ordained, those divorced and remarried, and those who don't fit in anywhere else. We are small but our faith statement is mighty and we are just beginning. We stand against the totalism of today's culture, economics, and religion.
I believe we all in the IC/OC movement especially are called to this prophetic imagination and to help lead a prophetic revolution against the totalism of: oligarchies, the culture of white nationalism, and the religiosity of exclusion and judgementalism...the status quo.
“we have to pronounce the truth about the force of the totalism that contradicts the purpose of God. That's called prophetic judgment. And my sense is that in the institutional church we are very quiet about prophetic judgment, because we and most of our parishioners are too deeply committed to totalism, and you really are not able to talk that way.” (2)
We in the IC/OC are not mainstream Church, for the most part, and should resist the urge to be that way right now. We have a unique gift to bring to the Churches of God. A freedom to embrace this prophetic imagination against totalism.
Our country politic, culture, economic system, even judicial and legislative power is all too wrapped up in totalism. In our politics we demonize, in our economics we enslave workers and pit the marginalized against the slightly less marginalized all to the benefit of the oligarchs in the top 1, 2, 10 percent. We, in our culture blame the other: gay, trans, brown, black, women, muslim, etc. all to the benefit of the rich white male already in charge. Brueggemann offers three stages to prophetic imagination as a fix:
“So the first task is to identify the totalism. The second task is to identify the contradictions that put us on the route to death, because one can see that we now live in a society that is engaged in its self-destruction. And the third task of prophetic imagination is to articulate the alternative world that God has promised, and that God is birthing before our very eyes. If we have eyes to see it.” (3)
In our church gatherings, our communications, our preaching, we need to call attention the this totalism in our culture over and over. We need to show its destructiveness to our faith and challenge one another to be counter cultural, counter totalistic. We need to reflect by example the alternative path in our local and wider church communities. We need to really be an example, a vision for others to see. We need to welcome the stranger, the other who is different, into our small faith groups. We need to publicize our different vision and call attention to the hope we offer.
In our Church, I believe we truly show a real lived and authentic love for each other. Although separated sometimes by 50, or 100 miles of distance, we gather together for holidays, we call each other when we know someone is hurting, we lend to each other real time, real money, real help as needed. We know that someone is there for us. We are gay, straight, married, single, male, female, trans, questioning, brown, white, evangelical, liturgical, contemplative, active. We are not perfect, but we are slowly starting to “get it.” Small but mighty with imagination and prophetic witness.
I believe our challenge this Holy Week is to first listen, be still, and imagine the Reign of God that Jesus truly announced. He was executed for his prophetic imagination against the totalism of the Roman Empire of his day and set forever, the picture, the poetry, the vision of the new creation coming.
Second, look around and see where totalism is entrenched in our lives. Where do we give in to the totalism of our day, the comfort of belonging to the masses, the comfort of not standing out, of not stepping up. Finally, take the Spirit of God poured forth in the baptismal font, the power of the new life in Jesus Christ, RESSURECTED from the DEAD, and put forth in vision and action the prophetic imagination so needed today. We are at a crossroads and the prophets are needed once again to raise a voice of poetic judgment and inspiration. By the power of the Resurrected Lord of all creation, the power of the Spirit of eternal love, go forth and imagine! Go forth and announce the Lord's judgment in mercy. Go forth and show the hope and love of the new creation to which we are called! Go forth and be this prophetic inspiration for others and indeed the world!
+Joseph Augustine Menna, AIHM
Bishop and Prior General
Augustinians of the Immaculate Heart of Mary
Synodal Catholic Diocese of the Mid-Atlantic
(1) (2) (3) Jesus Acted Out the Alternative to Empire, Walter Brueggemann, Sojourners' 2018 , Lecture June 22, 2018
