On what the point of virtues, practices and postures is.
I have been ruminating a little on the first discussion, a couple of weeks ago, on the virtues, practices and postures proposal, and I’d like to share some of my reflections.
Plato and Aristotle theorised about the make-up of the human person, and one of the models they came up with, which seems to have stood the test of time (not that that necessarily means anything, but let’s work with it for now) suggests that we have three main faculties: cognitive, conative and affective.
These can be understood as: cognitive – the thinking part of us; affective – our thoughts and emotions; conative – our drives, our strivings and tendencies, almost totally informed by the affective. I know I can relate to this basic outline – my active life is informed by both my thought-life and my emotional-life – and it started to connect with something else I heard recently.
One of the world’s most influential theologians, Jurgen Moltmann, recently spoke at a conference at Holy Trinity, Brompton about “being church in the power of the Holy Spirit”. Among very many other important (and no doubt relevant) things, he spoke of the great need we have for a good dose of orthopathy in current church practice. Never heard of that word? No, me neither. But he described it, basically, as ‘right feeling’.
We’ve all heard of orthodoxy (many of came to Moot to escape its tyranny), which is ‘right thinking’. Many of us with church backgrounds well know the importance often placed on this, generally to the exclusion of other things. We’ve probably all heard of orthodoxy too – many of us have been learning, and indeed prioritising, things coming under the rubric of “justice” (social action, political campaigning, protest marching, buying the Big Issue, etc, etc).
Orthodoxy relates most closely to a part of my self – my cognitive faculty. Orthopraxy relates most closely to my conative faculty. So where does orthopathy fit? Church culture and teaching, it occurs to me, have often neglected to bless and teach us with regard to our whole being. On a global scale, the church can be thought of as bipolar: one half has generally been concerned with “believing the right stuff”, and the other can crudely be described as prioritising the need to “do the right stuff”. But who’s got wisdom on “feeling the right stuff’ – orthopathy? Put simply, the monks, nuns and friars.
I’m sure you’ve heard it before but I’ll say it again: Moot is a fresh expression of church. I think that our new monastic focus, and the current discussion on virtues, practices and postures, is one of the things that really makes this true. This is because the proposal deals with the affective aspect of our being. We are a community seeking wholeness, integration. Believe it or not, the foundational idea of the proposal is that the Christian tradition actually has the resources to make this possible.
I’ve often wondered how to get my emotional life healthy, how to find healing so that I have less ridiculous outbursts, less of the bad kind of anger, less anxiety; I’ve also wanted to be more consistent in my ability to love, to do the right thing, to grow up/mature. The proposal says (although maybe not in so many words) that life is a journey of conversion of the whole person – cognitive, affective and conative.
My point is that what drives us can also be transformed – we know about the need to “think the right stuff”, or “do the right stuff”, but without addressing our thoughts and emotions, without finding healing and wholeness as people, we aren’t ever really going to change. The approach to spiritual growth we are advocating is holistic, which means that it is candid about the need to find inner freedom, as well as practice justice and have good theology.
Of course, psychotherapy has had to pick up the baton in the modern period because the church forgot the wisdom of the desert fathers and mothers. I believe it’s time we began to reclaim our heritage, and release some real life and liberation into the heart of our community. It will also save us vast amounts of money on therapy.
P.S. Brian McLaren’s new tome, A New Kind of Christianity is great. I could say loads about it – because I do think you should go and buy it at The Centre Bookshop on Lombard Street – but maybe in another post. If you have it, turn to pages 38-39.
