Lenten Choices: Personal and Corporate - Part 1

Like the previous Lenten Choices an either/or approach will miss too much. That is to say each pair attempts a comprehensiveness of expression and doesn't finally beg us to choose between the two.  A practice of faith that chooses wide over deep ends up shallow or if deep over wide and you have a life of faith that is dark and private. 

The same should be said about today's pair.  At it's best that is exactly what the church is: individually -- read "personal" -- we grow as we share and interact with the others of the group -- read "corporate."  Neither is enough by itself.  Without the leveling and context framing of a shared faith our personal pursuits risk sinking into idiosyncrasy. 

Robert Bellah outlines this trap in his study of Sheila in Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985) Her practice is to avoid fanaticism and "in defining what she calls 'my own Sheilaism,' she said: 'It's just try to love yourself and be gentle with yourself. You know, I guess, take care of each other. I think God would want us to take care of each other.'"

None of this is wrong but she is missing any partnering with others.  For her there is no tradition, no leadership, no community, nothing to say to her "stop" or "go" or "help" or "listen" other than her own thoughts.  She is all on her own.

It also will not work for any individual to allow the church do all the work for them either.  Blind allegiance to the body (latin - corpus) can not hope for the development of persons. There really is no other way. 

Without the body/corpus there is no like minded "other."  Something else is missing when Sheila is all alone and when the corpus requires total abeyance; it is the moral standard that helps us to know what sin is.  By herself Sheila cannot presume that authority, besides she's afraid of being branded a fanatic.  Without an interest in the autonomy of persons the corporate definition of sin fails and is based on utility or how one serves only the whole -- think Star Trek's BORG.

Again these are worst case scenarios but they demonstrate the necessity of interplay between the personal and the corporate. Deep needs wide. High needs long. Personal needs Corporate.  Remembering that God says more than anything "Do not be afraid" we can trust the interplay between personal and corporate.   Trust matters.  Jesus will show us how.  More next week.