-- The Privilege of Love: Camaldolese Benedictine Spirituality, Peter-Damian Belisle, O.S.B. Cam., Editor (Liturgical Press, 2002), publisher's description.
As I've been connected to a Camaldolese hermitage since college, I've been thinking about this - especially the third of the three goods. Witness.
In Latin, martyrium.
It is also, in another guise, the third rail of liberal Protestantism: evangelism.
And, in that guise - evangelism - that word is a challenge.
It is the third of three themes of this triennium, the three-year period between General Conventions of the Episcopal Church. Not something I normally pay much heed to -- or even know about. But these three themes are also those chosen by the Episcopal diocese of Arizona as themes for three consecutive diocesan conventions. Those themes are: creation care, evangelism, and racial reconciliation.
In some ways, ways we cannot expect, evangelism is likely to be the most challenging.
Especially when we recall that evangelism, proclaiming and spreading the good news, involves witness - martyrium - martyrdom.
This has been all too real throughout the history of the church throughout the world. Think of the twentieth-century martyrs, from Kaj Munk who stood up to Hitler to Janani Luwum who stood up to Idi Amin. Janani Luwum, a bishop of the church, which turned out to mean head martyr.
The point is to proclaim the gospel - but sometimes that means following Jesus to the cross. That is what happened to those men and women, those martyrs, whose witness was relentless in the face of cruelty, ignorance, despair, violence, death - and who live in the resurrection.
We have (I hope) a simpler task: to face ridicule, belittling, silent opposition, resistance, anger, rush to judgment, when we say what we believe, or worse yet, act it out in the public arena.
What have we to gain but our souls?
And so as the institutional church, or churches, face the simple-seeming, happy-appearing, theme of evangelism - hoping perhaps for those young energetic generous families we all want to fill our pews, our collection plates, and our rosters for volunteer tasks - we might want to consider the cost. Not to them, the sad targets of our feeble desires, but them, the children Christ crucified has called to join us in the true church, the church of martyr as well as saint.
What have we to gain but our souls?
https://www.episcopalnewsservice.org/2016/03/11/making-reconciliation-and-evangelism-the-churchs-new-normal/
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