It has been a while since I blogged about running. Even longer since I’ve blogged running trails.
But, alas, something happened on Saturday, as I was heading home to Tyler from San Antonio, through Austin. What happened is this: while doing a pretty short, 6 mile run at Lady Bird Lake (formerly known as “Town Lake”), I had a mystical experience. What I mean is that my heart and mind were soaring as I ran past multitudes of beautiful people made in the image of God, ran through slanted beams of light and oxygen-rich breeze which entered my body, ran over packed granite gravel onto which my feet rhythmically pounded and trod. As I my friend Richard likes to say, “I felt alive.”
Without waxing too Annie Dillard, I noticed birds and turtles and bugs and leaves and ripples. And bridges, rail road tracks, and running shoes.
I focused on my breathing, in and out, in and out. I prayed the Jesus Prayer “automatically.” I gently struggled to let go of distractions and concerns. I gave myself a mental vacation.
Town Lake is the perfect blend of nature and culture. I’ve longed believed that the best possible physical space for a human being is a cultivated garden, a blending of nature and culture. And the best kinds of gardens, in turn, are urban ones, which are open to the public and provide opportunities for “real, social space.” (Not private gardens, or country clubs, or gated communities.) Beautiful, urban spaces, where you belong just because you are human.
For me, this is what Town Lake is. This is what, for about two decades, has made it conducive to mystical experiences for me.
And this brings me to White Rock Lake in East Dallas, where I ran this morning, and where I’ve been running about once a week for about four and a half years now.
Now, White Rock Lake is no Town Lake. Still, it’s pretty great. And yet sometimes I do feel as if it has saved my life. There are so many things I truly love about Tyler (especially the rich community we have, and the church we belong to–both the people and the buildings!), and yet, there simply is not the same kind of urban running culture that exists in Austin. (Running on a sidewalk or in a neighborhood is simply not as conducive to mystical experiences as is a good urban trail, such as the Wissahickon Trail in Phillie.) And so it has been a true blessing to have White Rock Lake about 75 miles away, en route to the University where I am a PhD student.
I am thankful!
For the last couple of days, ever since the election of Donald Trump to the office of President, I have felt like a character out of a Walker Percy novel. Whether Binx Boling in The Moviegoer or Will Barrett in The Last Gentleman is more apropos does not matter. In either case, the character gains a certain clarity from an impending (or presently occurring) crisis.
Have you ever heard the phrase, “Nothing clarifies the mind like one’s impending death?” The dynamics of these characters’ lives is not far from that sentiment. Truly, Binx and Will could be called–to borrow a Percian phrase–“last gaspers.”
To what catastrophe do I refer in my own life? I am talking about the above mentioned election of a tyrannical thug to the office of U.S. president. It is crisis of the highest magnitude, even if, like a molotov cocktail, it might end up providing a much-needed rupture within a system that is badly broken.
The clarity which this catastrophe has brought in my own life is as follows. I render it in the form of a (more or less real) dialogue between me and a good friend, “N.”
Me: I feel like the election has allowed me to “put my finger on” perhaps the main reason why I’m drawn to the Roman Catholic Church, and will probably, at the very least, die Catholic. It is this: I currently have (almost) no “ideological” comrades in my church. There is not a significant community in my church to whom I can look and say “we are united in being ‘for the world, against the world.'”
N: That is okay. Ideology is mere opinion. As Anglican / Episcopal Christians who are also presbyters in the Church, we are united in something thicker than ideas. We perform the divine service!
Me: Ah, yes! Thanks for reminding me of what is so easy to forget! Keep saying stuff like that to me please, bro. I do get it, and agree. But it’s so damn hard sometimes. But I do need to say that I do not regard Catholic Social Teaching as a mere ideology. And I guess that’s what I have in mind. It’s possible that I need to be in a church where I am in solidarity with others who uphold Catholic Social Teaching. Against the modern left, and against the modern right.
N: We have a similar catholic social teaching extending back to Richard Hooker. Let’s re-own that together.
My friend has a really good point. We Episcopalians (who are, of course, also Anglicans) do have a steady stream of social thought which finds a foundational starting point in Hooker’s Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, and which flows like an underground current through many and diverse thinkers such as John Neville Figgis, William Temple, F.D. Maurice, Kenneth Kirk, William Stringfellow, John Hughes, Rowan Williams, and many others.
Why is it, then, that this tradition, this stream of social thought, is so little known, much less understood? Why is it that when you do a Google search on “Anglican Social Teaching,” hardly one hit even registers? Things are not much better when you search on “Anglican Social Theology.”
Hence, my moment of clarity. (We will see if I still have it a year or so, when I finish my PhD.) I am actively thinking about, praying about, and discussing with trusted friends who are mature in habit, heart, and mind, the possibility of launching an endeavor after I finish my PhD.
After all, if our Anglican tradition is worth belonging to, then it is worth developing, fighting for, “living into,” and commending to a hurting world which in so many ways has lost its way.
I am prayerfully considering starting, even while remaining a humble parish priest, an NGO / “think tank” / community of research and promulgation, a project to inculcate Anglican social teaching within our crumbling Western culture. This endeavor would include a community of prudent scholars who would develop and catalogue that body of Anglican social thought which exhibits the poverty of the modern partisan left and the modern partisan right. If I said that the last page of Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue, where he speaks of “waiting for a new St. Benedict,” together with the “Benedict Option” which takes this single page as a source of inspiration, were not ringing in my head and heart as a faint source of inspiration, I’d be lying.
Hence, my decision yesterday to purchase the domain name anglicansocialteaching.org.
Prayerfully, we shall see what happens. For now, I’m enjoying the clarity.
