hidden institutions

yesterday a comment i posted on gladys glaniel's blog was turned (by her with my permission) into a guest post.

if anyone read my (more personal) recent post, Kirk, you'll likely see a connection, as i try and work out what it means for me to be desiring to return to church (which i assumes i left, and i'm not sure about that)... i'm not much interested in theory, much more in making sense of lived experience...i think the margins of religious experience and expression, away from the brittle stability of certainty, is an arguably more blurred and fluid space...

those margins aren't only experienced by being outside the church in a physical sense. the margins are a name for an internal experience... and i am finding deep resonance with people inside the church walls who are internally out on the margins... location only tells you so much... there's a heap of thoughts burgeoning on that disruption of in/out.  i don't really care what 'emerging church' means. in some ways, the word is a distraction... and i'm certainly not concerned with needing a theory to answer it all. but i do have questions and cautions about determining for others what their lived experience means to them... 

i read thoughts on the emerging church and I can't but think of L'Arche.  i think of Jean Vanier's words...

'Nouwen and others have testified to the way L'Arche communities transform caregivers as much as those who are cared for. As Jean Vanier sees it, they become practical expressions of the most basic, paradoxical teachings of Christianity, notions about power in humility, strength in weakness, and light in the darkness of human existence.

Mr. Vanier: 'You see, the big thing for me is to love reality and not live in the imagination, not live in what could have been or what should have been or what can be, and somewhere, to love reality and then discover that God is present." ' (more here)

I kind of what to put those words into every conversation I hear about emerging theology.
But any thoughts on that will have to wait for a while. anyways, i decided to share my thoughts with gladys because much of the reading i've done of late on this theme leaves me wanting for more nuance... fwiw, here's a link to my half baked thoughts and wonderings.

Right, back down to work...

LB