As a relative newcomer to Cortez I have noticed that, unlike a lot of small towns, this community is not homogenous. There are many folks who have left other places to move here. The scenic beauty, the opportunities for outdoor activity, and the archaeology draw many of them. They bring with them experiences, expectations, and hopes from their pre-Cortez lives that are often different from those of the longtime residents. When they arrive they find established folks, some whose families go back for generations.
The established and the new — the familiar and the unknown — these rub up against one another, and when they do, as in situations like this everywhere, one of several things can happen. The established folks are sometimes grateful for the infusion of new people, new ideas, and new ways and embrace them and incorporate them. When newcomers are seen as a threat to the established way of life, they may be made to feel unwelcome in subtle or blatant ways. They may even be run off. At best, the newcomers and/or those who are established in a place just keep their distance from one another. They exist alongside each other almost as separate communities. They live in a tension that can feel like constant threat.
Our human preference is for familiarity and the sameness that helps us feel comfortable and safe. We are a tribal species. It does not come naturally to us to incorporate people who are different from us. We tend to tolerate one another to the extent that we must.
“The Big Sort” by Bill Bishop chronicles how as a nation we have lived out that tendency. Although Bishop focuses primarily on our politics, he addresses our religious life as well. The polarization we currently experience in the political realm in our country is also evident in our spiritual/religious lives. It is becoming harder and harder to communicate with others across political as well as theological lines. In large part this is because we have isolated ourselves in enclaves of similarity.
It is one thing for us to define ourselves along lines of our various religions — Christian, Jew, Muslim, Baha’i, Buddhist, Hindu, Universalists, Wiccan, etc. It is another thing for us to fine tune those subdivisions along ever narrowing parameters. Or is it? I wonder what it is we are trying to accomplish.
Perhaps we are looking for certainty that we have “it” right — religious certainty. In this most uncertain of worlds such certainty would allow us to relax. And more and more we put a hedge around that certainty by surrounding ourselves with people who believe about all matters large and small the same way we do. There is no challenge. There is no stretching. And it becomes harder and harder to communicate with — much less connect with — people who have different understandings, different values, or even different tastes.
I write as a Christian. For Christians, St. Paul reminds us that we are one body with many divergent parts. We can only live out the fullness of our unity in our diversity. Sameness diminishes us, and if we believe that we are, in fact, the very body of Christ in the world, sameness diminishes Christ’s presence here.
Being a Christian calls us to live contrary to our inclination to be safe from “those” people. Living as a Christian challenges us to move beyond fear and embrace the mystery of “differentness” — the richness God has woven into the very tapestry of creation. It is mystery that is the antidote to an over-reliance on certainty.
Some will find certainty central to how they understand they are to live out their faith lives. For them mystery is to be avoided. It is seen as spiritually dangerous. At the same time there is a growing community of Christians who are again claiming and living the values of mystery and diversity. These growing communities of faith are not bound by denominations or buildings, although they may find homes there. They are constituted by liberals and conservatives, protestants and Catholics, young and old, straight and gay, and all races and ethnicities.
Some say that these communities will be for the twenty-first century what the reformations were for the fifteenth century. The term “emergent” is used to describe them. These communities look nothing like our current denominations. They come into being for a period of time, release their potential on God’s behalf, then dissolve back into the social milieu. They are incarnations (Bodies of Christ, if you will) that participate in God’s transformational work in this world.
What this may mean for established ways of doing religion remains to be seen. For those of us who trust in a God whose Spirit is threaded through all creation — to use church-y language, who holds all things in the palm of the divine hand — there is nothing to fear. Mystery — diversity — newness of life: They are part and parcel of the relationship we share with the God in whom we live and move and have our being.
Leigh Waggoner is priest at St. Barnabas Episcopal Church. She can be reached at 565-7865, rector@stbarnabascortez.org.