The Ordinary Becomes Extraordinary

At the end of "Luke Live", Father Diluzio made some comments from Father Richard Rohr's "The Great Themes of Scripture". I have had the book for a couple of years and our Bible Study group has been reading it as a supplement. One chapter is entitled "The Ordinary Becomes The Extraordinary". Reviewing Joshua to Kings, Father Rohr pauses on the books of Samuel.

"Beginning with the books of Samuel, we can see a tension starting to develop between charism and institution, between the freedom of the Spirit and the inertia of society. Israel started out as a people on the move, following the lead of the Lord. During the period of the judges they followed charismatic leaders in times of crisis. But by about the tenth century before Christ, however, they were starting to become a large and settled nation in the land of Palestine. They found themselves needing more structure, more organization, even more bureaucracy to keep themselves together as a people."

Rohr gave personal examples of how he had had to work through the institutional Church and tried to keep following the Spirit. He then wrote: "The tragedy of the Church is that we often lose this wisdom. Instead of trusting in the Lord and being led by the spirit, we turn the work of the Church over to professionals and bureaucrats. We see a problem, so we start a program and hire someone to administer it. We see another problem, so we start a new program, and then another. Soon we need a department to coordinate all the programs, and an office to run them from, and a staff to keep the whole business running smoothly. Pretty soon the organization takes on a life of its own, and the institutional bureaucracy rolls on year after year, decade after decade, whether or not the needs are still there, whether or not the original programs are still the best way to meet them. We take our institutions too seriously, and we invest them with authority which the Lord would not give even to a king that he himself appointed."

Rohr then goes to the books of 1 and 2 Kings, where the "delicate balance between charism and institution begins to waver." As he sets up trade routes, and gets into mining and building an army, and then building a great temple, Solomon lets institutionalization take over. "The triumphalism of the kingly is begining to outweigh the realism of the prophetic. Everything is becoming task-oriented." "It's all building and doing, building and doing. Even the temple liturgy becomes magnificent and spectacular. We understand how that happens, because we have seen it happen in the Church."

Rohr felt that the delicate balance between institutionalism and charism was an important one. He wrote that this pattern is steadily repeated in the Church's history. Problems always arose when the original institutions lost the Spirit, that charismatic spirit of God which alone breathes life into institutions."

As I was reading this chapter, I reflected on how this tension between the institution and charism might be relevant to our own parish situation.