The Splendor Falls

on castle walls

And snowy summits old in story. . . . 

On vacation in the mountains of Austria, and thinking of a coming week in Oxford, I had a kind of dream. Of beautiful ruins on the precipice above angry seas. Of stately queens in high castles. . . 

Oh, that was just Enya, whose “The Celts” had popped up in my play list. But relevant, because her’s is the music of nostalgia par excellence. She writes Tennyson’s echos into melodies you can hum as you read the report of the Commission on the Way Forward. For despite its name, the horns of Elfland could not have more ably brought to the fore our romantic longing for a past that never was. 

I won’t review the three plans of the commission - by now well known and commented on. Or various proposed alternatives. Because in one way or another all seem to me to be based less about going forward than trying to capture and repackage the echos of the past. 

Does the movement started by Wesley resonate in your mind as one that is broadly inclusive, widely ecumenical, and constantly progressive? Was its harmonic unity shattered by a shrill voice insisting that Wesley despised polyphony because it didn’t clearly communicate the gospel? Well the way forward offers a way back for you. 

Was Wesley a restorer of orthodoxy and its evangelical fervor? Does his movement march in your mind with the regimented unity of the Church singing onward through the ages in unbroken line? Has that line been broken and unity smashed by dissonant rhythms and discordant voices? Well the way forward offers a way back for you as well. 

Does Methodism dance across your mind like a circus, three rings or more with a clown horn blaring from one and an accordion accompanying the daring young man on a flying trapeze in another? Something for everyone if only the right ringmaster who could bring back the crowds and keep the circus band employed? The way forward offers a way back for you. 

Many have called the plans offered delusional, but I’m not sure they recognize why. It isn’t their political impracticality. It is because the varied Methodisms they imagine are themselves illusions; the creations of human minds out of the echos of the past. 

If we wanted to put it theologically we’d note that the only real thing connecting long past to past to present to future is the Holy Spirit. What we humans do is assign names like Wesleyan and Methodist to constantly changing sets of shared memories and longings that we choose from a broad historical palette. These, as a wise hymn writer noted, will fly forgotten as a dream dies at the opening day. 

It matters not at all how much we essentialize and narrow these sets of memories and longings down to political slogans. They will always be thin and clear and dying dying dying. It doesn’t matter if we make them as lush and variegated as Enya’s synths or a thick book of laws: a slow fade is inevitable before the next track begins.

Nostalgia is always for a past that the present invented, an inheritance created by the heirs and written into the testament they edited into being. So the real way forward can’t be sustenance of a legacy, it must be a vision for the gospel. And right now United Methodists in the United States are so wrapped up in our decades old culture wars that no such vision is apparent. We’re battling it out to possess the narrow isthmus formed between human legs and the entire rest of the world just won’t fit.

I would suggest that if we want vision we might well look outside the US and see how United Methodists and Methodists more broadly are leaning into the future with the Holy Spirit. And not I might add looking at them through the narrowing and narrow minded lens of human sexuality. Not as yet another colonized commodity producer, in this case of votes for the general conference. 

A recent post on UM&Global might help clarify, and a look back on this truly global look at Methodism would deepen an understanding of how the Holy Spirit is at work: http://www.umglobal.org/2018/08/what-are-united-methodist-views-on.html

Methodist churches in Africa, Latin America, Asia, and the Pacific may not be moving forward in ways officially approved by this or that US caucus group. But they are moving forward, in many different ways, to witness to the gospel in their distinctive cultural and socio/political contexts. Not bounded by our narrow isthmus they both can and do address the depth of the world’s needs, and the breadth of its cultures, with a gospel bigger than than American Methodists have thus far imagined.