Editor's note: This article is the first in a three-part series discussing the role of prayer, personal and corporate, in the life and mission of the church. Check back for future installments!

It is axiomatic to note that we are living in times of upheaval and transition. Aided by a global pandemic that has simultaneously catalyzed change and made us stop and look at our lives more intentionally, we perceive with increased clarity that the world and the Church-on-earth are being transformed. The new contours, however, remain invisible or, at best, blurry to the exterior eye. Complicating matters further, we often hear in church circles about the urgency not only to act, but to act swiftly – a press to action born of an acute awareness that the number of people who identify as Episcopalian/Anglican is in steady decline.

The resulting mood is one of anxiety and reactivity, and it has reached almost fever pitch of late. From within this prevalent mood, many have spoken of the obvious need to go out of our churches (and even to go away from them) to meet the world where it is. This outward thrust is born of genuine evangelistic desire, to be sure, and yet also born of fear – fear that our branch of the Church will disappear within a generation (or less) if we don’t do something, and do it fast. And the spirit of fear, of course, is not the Spirit of God. 

A retired bishop noted recently that:

[i]t is true that we have been overtaken by very rapid social change in which we can expect the Holy Spirit to reshape the Church. As an era in which perhaps we felt too much at home passes away, it is right to look expectantly for the living forms that Jesus and his Church will take in the Christian centuries to come. But alongside this proper expectancy there is an insidious temptation to believe that we can abbreviate the birth pangs of the new age by drastic surgery when we really don’t have the spiritual insight to understand what we are doing. [1]

These times thus call for careful and intentional discernment — that is, for what Christians have long known as the discernment of spirits [2] – at the institutional level. All too often we rush through deep discernment in our corporate life or skip it entirely. Pressed to act, we focus our sight instead on the pragmatic, visible dimensions of a problem, in search of a “solution” that may soothe (momentarily) our fear that we are out of control, yet may not prove rooted or wise in the long term.

As it happens, Ignatius of Loyola’s time-tested method of individual discernment has been adapted for use in group processes. As a prerequisite for grounded discernment-in-community, every person in the process ought to be:

1. ready to move in any direction that God wants, therefore radically free;

2. open to sharing all that God has given [them], therefore radically generous;

3. willing to suffer if God’s will requires it, therefore radically patient;

4. questing for union with God in prayer, therefore radically spiritual. [3]

This unitive quest is, of course, central to what we Episcopalians consider to be the mission of the Church: to restore all people to unity with God and each other in Christ. [4]

So it is in the spirit of communal discernment — and holding the quest for union with God to be central to our mission — that I would like to offer a word of caution about some dissociative tendencies that I perceive in our midst, mindful that my vantage point is neither common in the Church nor particularly popular at this time. As a clinical psychologist and a deacon-in-formation, I have found myself unfailingly at the intersection of interior life and exterior environment, at the threshold of Church and world. It is from that vantage point that I write, with the hope of fostering integration of the interior (invisible) and exterior (visible) realms.

Integration and union are qualities of relationship, of course, and relationship seems a good place to begin. After all, the most succinct yet all-encompassing revelation we have received (in words) about the essence of the mystery at the heart of the universe is this: God is love. 

Love implies relationship. A real relationship, in turn, requires distinct beings. So it is no surprise, then, that the God who is love has been revealed to us as a distinct Three in One unity: Lover, Beloved, Love-Between, as Saint Augustine put it. Relational in essence, the oneness of the Holy Trinity did not remain closed in on its own three-ness but poured out triunely: in creation, on the cross, in a continual outpouring of the Spirit. Three Persons: three manifestations of love outpoured. 

And we, too, were made relational — in the image of our relational God — as part of Love, outpoured.  As Aquinas writes,

…the distinction and multitude of things come from the intention of the first agent, who is God… [who] brought into being many and diverse creatures, that what was wanting to one in the representation of the divine goodness might be supplied by another.” [5]

Yet this outward thrust is not the end of the movement. There is no end other than God, whose love outpoured seeks to draw the God-willed multiplicity and diversity of creation back into the Center, into re-union with the Source, in and through Love. It yearns for our human assent: our “Yes!” in response to Love outpoured. Love yearns for love requited.  

“For God has revealed himself to be love, and love it is he seeks, not honour, from his creatures.” [6]

Should it surprise us, then, that the way of love requited — the way of self-gift in response to God's own self-gift in love — should also bear a triune imprint? What other response could any lover make to the three-in-one revelation of such extravagant Love? 

What I perceive from my particular vantage point is that we are called on a triune journey home: the journey inward, the journey together, the journey outward. Each is a way of self-surrender, a way of living more deeply into our response to the mystery of God's loving self-gift through our own self-offering in love: [7]

• The journey inward: to our true Center in God, through deep personal prayer and spiritual discipline.

• The journey together: with each other in corporate prayer and Eucharistic worship, the mystery by which Jesus - God with us - draws all to Himself.

• The journey outward: to the margins, bringing the Good News of God's abiding and incarnate love to the world through lived example, word, and action.

Each strand is distinct — each bearing perhaps the imprint of a distinct Person — yet all are one and inextricably embedded in one another. They all stem from the same Source and lead to the same Destination: they all begin and end in God. Yet, in our human brokenness, we often dichotomize them, privileging one or two over the other(s), which only leads to our stumbling, or even falling, away from the Way home. At different times and in different contexts, we drive the wedge in different places, only to realize years later the costs of neglecting the excluded strand(s); then we often try to “solve” the problem by driving the wedge in a different place. As illustrations, let’s have a look at some of the ways in which our triune journey has been — and is being — cleaved.

[1](2021, July 23). Quotes of the week. Church Times. https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2021/23-july/regulars/quotes/quotes-of-the-week

[2] See, e.g., 1 Cor 12.10; 1 John 4.1.

[3]Byron, W. J. (2020, June 25). A method of group decision making. Ignatian Spirituality. https://www.ignatianspirituality.com/making-good-decisions/an-approach-to-good-choices/a-method-of-group-decision-making/.

[4] Church Hymnal Corp. (1979). An Outline of the Faith: commonly called the Catechism. In The Book of Common Prayer and administration of the sacraments and other rites and ceremonies of the Church: According to the use of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America, together with the psalter Or Psalms of David (p. 855). 

[5] Aquinas, S. T. (2010). Summa Theologiæ, Prima Pars (I.3E.1, p. 156). https://gorpub.freeshell.org/aquinas_thomas_st_ia.pdf.

[6] Casel, O. (2016). In The Mystery of Christian Worship (p. 30). Crossroad Pub.

[7] I heard an initial formulation of three distinct journeys — inward, together, outward — in a sermon preached in the late 1990s by the Rev. Samuel T. Lloyd III at Trinity Church, Boston. It is possible that he, in turn, got it from O'Connor, E. (1975). Journey Inward, Journey Outward. Potter's House Bookservice.