The WHOOSH of Inevitable Change within the Church and Society

Images are formed in my mind all the time. I allow most to drift on past like cottonwood seeds that float lazily by me on a late spring day, but others are received with great attention and import. I refer to this image above as the Beach Ball Triptych and thanks to professional photographer Sarah Petty and her team, they allowed me to share my vision enough to render it for all to see in this series of images. I suppose the notion of playing with a beach ball in a pool has remained in my memory from my days as a boy playing in my best buddy Stevie's pool. In the first frame, a girl takes hold of the beach ball. Something within compels her to try and push it down below the surface and in the second frame, you can feel the resistance and futility as the girl encounters unbalanced buoyancy and the fierce properties of water.  Though she continues this task with stubborn determination, eventually the force of displaced water responds and WHOOSH! The ball surges back up and creates a splashy reentry with watery aplomb.

As playful as the images appear, I wanted to lay out this sequence of action and reaction to help all see and feel what happens when human beings decide to take a hold of something and subvert it against its nature and purpose. History has shown us that those who, in the words of Dr. William J. Barber, try to move things forward by taking us backwards, inevitably fail. Progress and change in this instance is the beach ball and there are a lot of well-meaning folks trying to subvert its upward progress instead of allowing  everyone to happily toss it around to one another as a shared experience.

First we have some Catholic bishops and lay people who fear what will happen when women are allowed to rise into the leadership they are showing themselves quite capable of bringing to the church. Even as some fearfully-determined conservators strive to push the subject out of our view, too many have beheld the vocational efficacy and fervor that women are now manifesting. WHOOSH! With each shove, they just get wetter and more frustrated. The same thing happens as other ecclesial purists shove down the notion of welcoming our lesbian, gay and transexual brothers and sisters more fully at the table of welcome. WHOOSH! No amount of subverting our growing awareness of the gifts they bring to the church can hold their necessary inclusion down for long.

In society, we're seeing the last vestiges of strained suppression of black people, Native Americans and immigrants as simply aberrant versions of human persons who lack the norm of our whiteness. With violence, ignorance, fear and hatred do these hands take hold of a growing sense of unity through diversity and try to shove them and keep them down, WHOOSH! By Love's grace, some of these who get splashed in the face by this folly suddenly awake and realize what has been happening. They move to the sides of the pool where the marginalized have long been sitting and engage in long-overdue conversations.

To subvert the work of the Holy Spirit by denying inclusion and diversity for all those who have languished outside the pool for so grievous an exile is a grave sin. The world is growing impatient and angry with the leaders of churches and societies as all watch recent events unfolding around us. To the extent these leaders lay hands upon and subjegate those on the margins, their institutions will shrink and shrivel. Instead, I imagine and celebrate the great joy of seeing all God's children at play with a huge and colorful beach ball that all hands can touch and keep aloft for years to come.