Transformation and the Sacred "And"

During my first year of seminary, I was working each morning at a men’s homeless shelter. I was there Monday through Friday 6:30 a.m. – 8:30 a.m., and then I would walk two blocks to my day job as a fundraiser for a major university.

While the geographic distance between those two places was only a couple of blocks, they were actually worlds apart.

• At the shelter, I was dealing with people who had not a dime to their name. At work, I was dealing with people who had given—or were considering giving—multi-million dollar gifts to fund professorships or scholarships or other major endowments.
• At the shelter, everything was falling apart or held together through temporary, makeshift means. Everything at my office was pristine by comparison—fresh paint, new carpeting, state-of-the-art technology.
• At the shelter, the clients were mostly invisible to the world at large unless something went very wrong. At my office, our donors were among the most visible people in our society.

Two worlds just two blocks apart. And I dwelt in both.

Learning to hold that disparity was great training for ministry. When you set out on a path of service to the wider world, you soon find out that everywhere there are huge chasms of difference. Many of them are the results of terrible and often shameful injustices.

But whatever their origins or reason for existence, one must recognize that they exist before one can hope to do anything approaching meaningful service. It requires a great deal of hard work to hold both in one’s consciousness—especially without attempting immediately to judge or resolve them in some way.

But that embrace of all things exactly as they are is a necessary first step.

The work of transformation requires us to hold in a similar way this fundamental disparity: (A) the way things are and (B) the way things might be. Our tendency is to glance at A (but not too closely) and then try to wish our way into B. Or, if we happen to be pretty comfortable with the way things are for us (without regard for the rest of the world), then we don't even worry much about either A or B.

But religious transformation can occur only when, together, we shine a light on how things are right now, and then, together, discern how to live our way into what might be. In this way, we do not transcend the present world. Rather, we incarnate the world that might be.