Chaos Theology Proposes Flourishing Spirituality & Mission in Our Time
By Brother Martin L. Smith, SSJE
The Episcopal New Yorker Barb's Episcopal, Anglican, Catholic page A lot of our religious language such as we find in the Book of Common Prayer constantly harps on the themes of calm, stability, concord and quietness. But our contemporary experience is of chaos, a chaos which is never going to go away. And so we will need to find a spirituality that enables us to find divine companionship and creativity in and through this chaos. Paradoxically, the mystical traditions of spirituality are much more relevant and real to us because they emphasize that God keeps us company by dwelling in us not just in certain experiences of calm and stability, but in all experience, and especially in experiences that shake us free from attachment to inessentials so that we learn to live from, and depend on,God alone from moment to moment.
Here is an aspect of the link between spirituality and mission. We are called to do mission in a time when we are experiencing the world over collective psychic and cultural chaos. If we are fixated on religious imagery and ideas that are period pieces from past ages, that have little or no resonance in contemporary reality, then we are going to be paralyzed in mission. If we focus intensely on the actual religious experience of Christ's indwelling and embodiment in and among us, we will not panic when externals collapse and our systems buckle and collapse under the pressures of new realities.
If we focus on a living spirituality that fosters the experience of Christ as our living contemporary in us, then we are free to embrace more courageously the chaotic conditions of our own time. We will trust that Christ yearns to express his risen life in our time and our conditions just as he did in the time and conditions of our forebears.
God Has a Stake in Chaos
Twenty years ago there was no such thing as "chaos theory." Now a whole new set of disciplines is being born that illuminates the ways in which chaos in nature and in cultures becomes the matrix of new forms. Our spirituality will need to rapidly develop so that we begin to experience within and around us that God has a stake in chaos, that the God of creation and the Christ of new life are the great "chaotic attractors" the forces that draw us into and through states of chaos into new forms of life.Last time I came to New York I read on the train Michael Crichton's sequel to Jurassic Park, called The Lost World. The novel is not just another good read. It is a fascinating example of how an entirely new discipline like "chaos theory" is filtered down into the popular imagination through literature. One of the characters, a mathematician called Ian Malcolm, discusses how complex systems such as corporations or other human organizations learn to adapt or face extinction. He goes on to say this:
"But even more important is the way complex systems seem to strike a balance between the need for order and the imperative to change. Complex systems seem to locate themselves at a place we called 'the edge of chaos.' We imagine the edge of chaos as a place where there is enough innovation to keep a living system vibrant, and enough stability to keep it from collapsing into anarchy. It is a zone of conflict and upheaval where the old and the new are constantly at war. Finding the balancing point must be a delicate matter -- if a living system drifts too close, it risks falling over into incoherence and dissolution; but if the system moves too far away from the edge, it becomes frozen, totalitarian. Both conditions lead to extinction. Too much change is as destructive as too little. Only at the edge of chaos can complex systems flourish."
I was struck by the phrase the "edge of chaos." It rings true to the situation of the Church as the second millennium draws to a close. But conventional religion inherited from the past would regard this place at the edge of chaos as terribly threatening. But note the conclusion "only at the edge of chaos can complex systems flourish." Here chaos is associated with health, vigor and viability.
Can the Church Flourish at a Zone of Conflict?
A lot of people are horrified by the amount of conflict there is currently in the Church but according to chaos theory, complex systems like the Church, if they are going to flourish, have to live on the edge of a "zone of conflict and upheaval where the old and the new are constantly at war."Here we might introduce one of the most fundamental themes of classical spirituality -- the art of discernment, discernment of the times and discernment of spirits. Classic spirituality cultivated the spiritual discipline of learning to recognize the call of God found in the circumstances and concrete challenges of our own day, time, place and inner experience, rather than in abstract rules.
This is a development of Jesus' own challenge to "discern the sign of the times." And it cultivated the art of discriminating between attractions and impulses, to learn which ones emanated from the Spirit of God and which came from the evil one. Of course, these are the very disciplines that are going to be essential in our own day. Crichton's character says that "finding the balancing point is going to be a delicate matter -- if a living system drifts too close [to the edge of chaos] it risks falling over into incoherence and dissolution; but if the system moves too far away from the edge it becomes frozen, totalitarian. Both conditions lead to extinction."
What is Christ Urging Us to Jettison?
We will need spiritual disciplines that will help us recognize what are the things from the past that Christ is urging us to sustain and deepen, and what are the things from the past that Christ is urging us to let die or jettison. We will need spiritual disciplines that will help us recognize what are the changes Christ is urging us to adopt under the challenge of the future, what are the innovations and unprecedented experiments Christ is spurring us on to.You are perfectly familiar with the polarizing voices in contemporary Christianity that scream at each other across a great divide. One chorus at the right yells that the Church is going to hell in a hand basket, that changes and innovations must stop, that salvation is through preservation of the faith and of the hallowed forms we have inherited.
The opposite chorus screams that institutional religion is doomed, that there is little to be salvaged from the traditions of the past, and contemporary voices outside the Church are the ones that have the keys to the future. I am suggesting that our vignette of chaos theory tells us that both are wrong.
The Church is called to fulfill its mission both through a fresh deepening and intensifying of the essential resources of its past, and through a fresh courage for innovation and holy experiment. The Church can only fulfill its mission by being at one and the same time more conservative than it is now, that is, more committed to drinking deeply from the wellsprings of its great spiritual traditions and resources, and more radical, that is, more trusting of the Spirit as a Spirit of transformation, innovation and creativity.
Some of you may have noticed that apparently I have made no reference to "the will of God" in all this. This is deliberate. Instead, I want to use the expression the "yearning of Christ." What is Christ yearning to be and do with, in and among us? How does he long to express himself as the risen giver of life in and among us? I use this language of yearning and longing quite intentionally out of faithfulness to the mystical tradition of the Church which dwells on the mystery of God's desire, his wanting to be with and in us, and God's desire to express God's self in our time and place.
God Keeps Intimate Company With Us
There is a way of talking about the will of God that maintains the old stance of conventional religion. There is a God who has it all planned and our role is to find the plan and execute our instructions. One of the shifts that will take place as we make the resources of Christian spirituality more deeply our own is that we recognize that God is not imposing a plan, but keeping intimate company with us in our own time through the incarnate presence of Christ in the heart.God's will is known through awareness of Christ's longing to express himself anew through us and among us. Christ within us keeps us company together as we learn what it is to live courageously on the permanent edge of chaos, faithful to the essential resources of the past, ready to jettison what is now lifeless, and willing to experiment with what is struggling to come to new life.
Brother Martin is the superior of the Society of St. John the Evangelist in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and chaplain to the House of Bishops; his latest book, Nativities and Passions, is published by Cowley Publications.
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