When the congregation cannot congregate, can church continue?
Because of Covid-19, our bishop has closed off all services, choir rehearsals, and pastoral visits until late May, if then. Suddenly, the book my Episcopalian friends and I were already reading seems more timely than I'd thought. Theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer had a few ideas about the predicament of the church in a time of "social distancing."
When the Nazis broke up Dietrich Bonhoeffer's community of seminarians, the Lutheran theologian imagined ways to keep the community's worship and work going in their diaspora, described in his book Living Together (translated by Daniel W. Bloesch, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015). It's a virtual monastery, built not with stones, but with scheduling.
Bonhoeffer wrote the book after his visit to English parishes, and the Anglican influence shows. So far as chapter two, Bonhoeffer has mostly given an eloquent rationale for daily habits still laid out in the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer (BCP)1979. Rise early to pray with psalms (25); read passages of old and new testaments in their entirety so that we may be "attentive listeners and participants in God's action in the sacred story [for] God is with us today only as long as we are there" (35); chant (37); make prayer a combination of fixed form and spontaneous petitions (44-45): These are all things that I've done already this morning, as most mornings, just my dog Brandy and me, Bible on the kitchen table with the prayer book open to "Morning Prayer II" (BCP 75). Of course, Bonhoeffer insists on the eucharist, central to any Episcopal Sunday service, by which we recognize our Lord, as the apostles recognized the risen Jesus only after he broke bread (46).
The morning prayer carries over into our day, Bonhoeffer writes, to achieve the "unity of prayer and work" by "finding the You of God behind the It of the day's work" (50). He recommends a midday prayer service, such as we have in the BCP (51); likewise, prayers and readings for the evening meal. At the close of the day, he recommends the service for Compline. He warns, "Don't let the sun go down on your anger" (Eph.4.26, in DB 53), and then rest assured by the Psalter's hymn to God, "Yours is the day, yours also the night."
Also timely is Bonhoeffer's chapter about "The Day Alone." Bonhoeffer teaches us to develop a habit of "silence," which he distinguishes from the inability to talk, whether that's enforced by a rule or by isolation. Receptivity is the key component of silence, as in the Gospel story of Zachary, the high priest struck dumb in the temple. "If he had accepted [God's] revelation, he may perhaps have come out of the temple not incapable of speaking, but silent" (Ernest Hello in DB 57).
Reading Bonhoeffer with friends in Education for Ministry (EfM, program of the School of Theology at The University of the South, Sewanee,TN), I have to admit that Bonhoeffer is "preaching to the choir." This four-year program fosters a community that meets once a week for worship and study. What Bonhoeffer calls meditation in silence is something we practice alone and in our seminar, "Theological Reflection," relating a small portion of scripture to our lives in order to discern how the Bible may be speaking to us alone (62).
Bonhoeffer for me slips off the track only when he preaches to the actual choir. Pure unison singing is his ideal, unadulterated by altos seeking attention (41), or by Bonhoeffer's bane, sentimentalism. He deplores "doctrinaire" attitudes towards music, though his attitude towards church music is as doctrinaire as I've ever read. I'd say unison singing, harking back to the Dark Ages, is evocative and emotional in the way such singing, beautifully done, conjures up a sentimental idea of monks and nuns singing away their days behind rose-colored glass. (I've had that dream, literally. See my blogpost of 01/2019).
Behind all of his recommendations is one stricture, repeated in many variations: It's never about you. How you feel, how you get or don't get a worshipful feeling from music or prayer or community or retreat: these are all obstacles in the way between each of us and God, and between our community and God.
Bonhoeffer attacks sentimental ideas of cloistered faith and community. Like Christ, and like Bonhoeffer himself, we are to live "in the midst of enemies," not "among the roses and lilies" (1). We imagine retreating with like-minded believers because we don't feel thankful for the little daily gifts of life:
We think that we should not be satisfied... and that we must be constantly seeking the great gifts. Then we complain that we lack the deep certainty, the strong faith, and the rich experiences that God has given to other Christians, and we consider these complaints to be pious (12).
Of all his insights, that last one is my favorite, that we confuse complaining about lack of rich faith experiences to be a sign of our superior piety.
It's a virus, Bonhoeffer writes (66). This sentimental yearning, this self-centered aloneness, even when it originates with just one member of a community, can spread to infect the whole body.
Bonhoeffer's slender volume is a book for our church in our time.
