THE SPIRITUALITY OF MISSION, an address by the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, the Most Reverend Frank Griswold, to the Global Episcopal Mission Network Annual Institute, The University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California, June 19, 2001

Let me begin by showing you the cross I am wearing. This isn’t just any cross.  This belonged to Bishop Brent, a great missionary and a saint of the Episcopal Church, so I wear it with a real sense of responsibility for his witness as a missionary. 2

What I offer here are  some reflections on the spirituality of mission. I hope that some of what I have to share with you will be useful, confirming possibly, or maybe raising some questions in your own minds. 

Doing the work of the One who sends.

Let us begin by looking at the Gospel of John.  Early in the Gospel Jesus says, “My food is to do the will of the one who sent me and to complete his work.”  And then in the prayer on the eve of his crucifixion, the high priestly prayer, Jesus cries out, Father I have glorified you on Earth by finishing, by completing, by finishing the work you gave me to do.  And then on the cross He cries out: It is finished.  It is completed. 

The whole Gospel is really about the work of God and its completion.  And in the course of the Gospel between Jesus’ declaration, “My food is to do the will of the one who sent me and to complete his work,” and “the work is finished,” which is essentially what he says on the cross – between those two points Jesus says to the disciples and therefore to us, We must work the works of the one who sent me.  

Now the completion of God’s work for Jesus was obviously his self-offering completed upon the cross, which was also his glorification in the sense that this act of self-offering revealed God’s desire, God’s yearning, God’s loving intention for the world. And so Paul tells us that in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself.  In the letter to the Colossians, Paul says, “for in Christ all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things whether on earth or in heaven by making peace through the blood of his cross.” 

Reconciliation, the Redemptive project.

In the Gospel of John, Jesus proclaims the same interpretation of the work of God he is called to make his own when he says, And I when I’m lifted up from the Earth will draw all people, all things to myself.  And so in the Paschal mystery of Jesus’ death and resurrection, God, or more properly, the Trinity, reveals its redemptive project in the world, which is to draw everyone and everything into communion with the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, and at the same time, draw everything in creation and all humanity together in a bond of communion as well. 

Communion and mutuality are the work of God and we see this, for instance, in Paul speaking of us as limbs of the risen body of Christ.  That “limbness” has to do with communion and mutuality.  He also says that we are given varieties of gifts: services and activities which are manifestations of the Spirit for the common good.  He goes on to say that the eye cannot say to the hand I have no need of you.  There is a profound relationship of communion and mutuality that is the heart of what it means to be a Christian man or a Christian woman.  That unity, that communion, that mutuality is reflective of the very life of God, which is a life of communion and mutuality: the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, just as God within God’s own self is a mystery of unity and difference.  We have the Father and the Son who pour themselves out and love one another, giving and receiving, which is the communion of the Holy Spirit.  So too we are caught up into Christ through baptism and become limbs of Christ’s risen body.  We are caught up into a life of communion, a life which is to share the very life of God. 

Here again we encounter the mystery of unity and diversity.  Just as God can only be God as Father and Son in the unity of the Holy Spirit, so we cannot be the limbs of Christ’s body without difference.  Paul again says, “Indeed the body does not consist of one member but of many.  If all were a single member where would the body be?” 

Look also at the Pentecost event as it is recorded in the book of Acts.  Filled with the Holy Spirit, the Apostles, we are told, spoke in a diversity of languages.  And those who heard them were amazed and astonished.  “Are not all these who were speaking Galileans?  And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language?”  Notice here there is no new language that transcends the diverse languages.  It isn’t some kind of ecclesiastical Esperanto that sort of breaks out of heaven and everyone says, “Oh, good, all differences are now washed away and we’re all drawn together in this new language.”  Not at all, no language is offered that is new and nothing supercedes the different tongues, but again, it is an experience of a profound unity mediated by difference: each hears in a different language. 

So the experience of communion in the Holy Spirit is an experience of communion that includes difference and otherness.  And here I think language isn’t simply a question of words.  It is all that language implies.  And so difference is integral to unity in the Spirit.  That is very important because sometimes we fail to appreciate particularly in mission contexts the diversity, the difference, the uniqueness of those with whom we are seeking to enter more deeply into communion. 

So God’s work, God’s project – to use the phrase that has come to us from the liberation tradition – God’s project which is revealed in the life, death and resurrection of Christ and in the outpouring of the Holy Spirit in Pentecost, is about all things being drawn together and reconciled to God in Christ in the communion of the Holy Spirit.  This is communion made possible, as I said before, because of difference and otherness, the three unique ones, the three distinct ones, who are the Trinity.  And with the lifting up of Christ upon the cross, the Trinitarian life of God is turned outward, to the world in an all embracing communion. 

I think here of the prayer for mission in our daily office.  “Lord Jesus Christ you stretched out your arms of love on the hard wood of the cross that everyone might come within the reach of your saving embrace.”  The whole notion is that everything is brought into communion through the cross as Christ reaches out. 

I don’t how many of you ever meditated on the San Damiano crucifix, which is very popular and reproduced all over the place, the crucifix that Francis prayed before, the crucifix that told him to go and rebuild the church.  But in any event that crucifix suggests to me, not so much agony in crucifixion – yes there is blood coming from the hands – but basically the hands are extended in blessing and welcome and embrace, and that crucifix has become a very important sign and symbol to me of what God’s project, God’s mission, is all about. 

The Mission of the Church is to participate in God’s mission.

Our Prayer Book describes the mission of the church as the restoration of all people in unity with God and one another in Christ.  I think we should say that the mission of the church is to participate in God’s mission.  I’m not so sure that we should talk about the mission of the church.  We should talk about our participation in God’s project, God’s way of being redemptively present and at work in the world.  If Christ’s saving embrace has enfolded our world in all its difference and complexity, the mission – if it is to be of God and not an act of our own self-will with all the distortions and ego needs we fall prey to – then engaging in God’s project, engaging in God’s work, requires the aescetical discipline of discernment and asking the question always “Where is God already redemptively present?” 

Discernment requires the ability to listen, and I remind you that in Scripture the fundamental stance of the person of faith is that of listening.  For example,  “Hear oh Israel,” and then at the end of our Bible “Listen to what the Spirit is saying to the churches.”  And if you look at so many of the figures in the biblical record they are caught up into their particular place in God’s project and God’s mission through listening rather than simply deciding that they’re going to be useful in some way. 

So we need to attend to the aescetical discipline of listening: listening deeply, with the ear attuned at one and the same time both to the universal and to the local because each needs the other.  We can become so local that we become disconnected from the universal, or we can become so abstract and transcendent that incarnation never occurs.  There needs to be a tension always between the universal and the local, I think with a preference for the local.  So we listen with ear attuned to both universal and the local, listening contextually to the native language, not just in terms of words but in terms of structures of meaning, of cultural and social patterns and all that bespeaks otherness as well as commonality, and all that may be revelatory of the Trinitarian redemptive presence of God. 

This kind of listening, this kind of discernment, requires having the courage to face all the presuppositions we carry with us as part of our own native language.  The encounter with otherness can be extremely disorienting and extremely threatening, as many of you know from personal experience moving into a different culture. 

Here I am reminded of the freestanding individual of the Western enlightenment: Descartes’ “I think therefore I am” as contrasted with a sense of self derived from the collective and one’s participation in communal life – the tribe: “I belong therefore I am.”  Incredible misunderstandings have developed because of our presuppositions and our dismissal of those who understand selfhood in a different way because of a quite different context or, in its full sense, a different native language. 

I’m thinking of an experience I had when I was a sophomore in college and I spent the summer on a reservation in South Dakota.  One of the things that undid dimensions of reservation life was the fact that the government had put a local store on the reservation under the care of members of the tribe.  People would come in, members of the tribe, and say “I don’t have any money but I need condensed milk,” or whatever, and because of the norms of the tribe, the person running the store simply gave them what they needed knowing full well there would never be any payment.  And of course the government said, “This is hopeless.  These people don’t know how to run a store.  They know nothing about the economic principles upon which this great nation has been built.”  And so they got rid of the members of the tribe as the overseers of the store and saw the whole thing as a disaster.  But of course, if you flip the whole thing around, you could say, from another perspective, what better thing to do than to share what one is steward of with those who stand in need, and God bless them:  Send in more condensed milk to be given away.  But here again it’s a question of one native language, as it were, encountering another and not understanding the real gift, the grace you might say, that was present in that other experience and seeing only incompetence or an inability to do things properly. 

Certainly what I just described - the whole notion of a deep sense of the collective and of one’s own self being determined in large measure not simply out of one’s own self-assertions but out of one’s patterns of belonging - is much closer to the dynamic of communion which constitutes reality in Christian terms, even though we see ourselves as still, in some sense, the children of the Enlightenment.  But, if you really look at some of the Enlightenment principles, they are profoundly contrary to the structures of the gospel.  They are profoundly contrary to any notion that we are limbs and members of one another in the power of the risen Christ – limbs and members in such a way that we actually shape and form one another, or become fully the limbs we are called to be in communion with one another. 

Marvelously all this is confirmed by modern physics, which tells us that all reality, and we could also say who we are as persons, is constituted by webs of relationship.  And so those who live a profoundly relational life are scientifically the most advanced people in the world.  We, conversely, are hideously backward for all of our self-assertions. 

Prayer as the work of God in us.

Discernment and the ability to listen, not just with the mind but, as St. Benedict says, with the ear of the heart, and to ask the question what is God in Christ through the motions of the Holy Spirit up to in this place, this culture, these people brings me to another dimension of what we’ll call mission spirituality, namely prayer.  You can’t do this work without prayer, prayer variously understood. 

I think the first way we need to understand prayer is the way in which Paul speaks of prayer.  He says in the eighth chapter in the letter to the Romans, “The Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words.  And God who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.” To me what Paul is saying is that prayer is what God is already doing within us.  The Spirit is praying within us and so prayer is the work of God in us.  It is the Spirit drawing us – often below the level of our consciousness, – into deeper union with the Trinity, into that Trinitarian circle dance of endless self-giving and receiving.  And to acknowledge that prayer is what the Spirit does within us – occasionally letting us in on what the Spirit is praying within us and in a form of consciousness a sudden insight, a passionate petition, a sense of action that we must engage in – these sort of sudden breakthroughs often in my mind are the Spirit saying, “Okay now it’s time to make this conscious.  It’s time to turn prayer into deed.” 

I was at a Jewish peace gathering some time ago in memory of that great rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel and one of the speakers was talking about Rabbi Heschel and his deep contemplative spirit, and the fact that he also showed up at Selma and someone asked him as he was marching along wasn’t this sort of a contradiction to his deeply contemplative spirit.  He said, “Right now my legs are my prayer.”  And so I think there are times when prayer suddenly becomes our legs and we move forward in some way, and that’s the Spirit urging, pushing, yanking, tickling.  The Spirit has many ways to get us going and get us conscious.  So prayer is important in the context of participating in God’s project because it allows God to turn us over, to sort and sift so that our own trajectory becomes the trajectory of the Spirit and not our own self-chosen way of being useful, good or accomplishing something. 

Another way of looking at prayer comes from a Benedictine monk, John Main, who taught centering prayer for a number of years in Montreal. He described prayer as an openness to love on every level of our being.  Which leads me into Gabriel Marselles’ way of looking at prayer as availability, availability to God.  That is, before you say something, or frame your thoughts correctly or, get through the Office or whatever prayer form you’ve chosen, the basic question is: are you there?  Is your heart open?  Are you available to the divine mystery drawing you more deeply into its own desire, drawing you more deeply into its own project and work?  So it’s a question of yielding ourselves to the Spirit who prays within us and then listening intently to what the Spirit is saying and sometimes other people who reveal what the Spirit is saying. 

I know often my prayers are answered not by voices from heaven, as much as I might like them, or flashes of light, but by some ungainly person who says something to me and I think, “My God that’s exactly it.”  So God has many ways of catching us off guard and answering our prayer which may be deeper than what is consciously in our minds. 

Stephen Mitchell, the translator and poet whose work is so well-known these days, in a little poem on the Baal Shem Tov, describes prayer  as a quality of attention, a quality of attention to make as much room for the given, that is, the things that simply are in our lives, that it can appear as gift. I think this is quite wonderful because I think so often prayer at its deepest opens us to surprise, opens us to otherness in ways that our own consciousness never allow us to.  In such

prayer things confront us, and we react to them: For example, what should I do about this?  This is a burden.  Why am I the one who has to deal with this?  But, if one can stay with it at a deep enough level in the power of the Spirit the given can appear as gift.  There is blessing in even the most difficult things that confront us. 

And certainly participating in God’s project presents us with endless difficulties along the way.  Prayer, therefore, purifies us, it overturns the idols that exist within each one of us.  And it works in us, over time through grace, the mind of Christ.  It renders our hearts compassionate and catholic, and makes us able to live with paradox because the project of God is filled with paradox. 

Compassion, catholicity and paradox

So let me just spend a moment on compassion and catholicity and paradox.  What is a compassionate heart?  The answer was wonderfully given centuries ago by Isaac of Syria:  “It is a heart which burns with love for the whole of creation, for humankind, for the birds, for the beasts, for the demons, for every creature.  When a person with a heart such as this thinks of the creatures or looks at them their eyes are filled with tears, an overwhelming compassion makes their heart grow small and weak and they cannot endure to hear or see any suffering, even the smallest pain inflicted upon any creature.  Therefore they never cease to pray with tears even for the irrational animals, for the enemies of truth and for those who do them evil asking that those for whom they pray may be guarded and receive God’s mercy and for the reptiles also they pray with a great compassion which rises up endlessly in their heart until they shine again and are glorious like God.” 

So the compassionate heart, which is worked in us by the Spirit as we are conformed to the pattern of Christ, is tenacious, enduring, courageous and it takes us beyond any efforts we can make out of our own abilities to embrace, or to be kind, or to be loving.  It is a whole other consciousness that is worked in us by God so that we can participate more deeply in God’s project. 

I love the reference to the reptiles.  I know people who say, “Eeeew, snakes!”  Well here this compassion is so all-embracing that even the reptiles become objects of affection, and the enemies of truth, and those who do us evil.  We can’t embrace to that degree without the grace of God.  It is simply impossible.  In talking about a catholic heart, I turn to some words of the contemporary theologian Kenneth Leach in a book called The Social God.  Father Leach said, “Catholic does not mean universal.”  Well, that’s a shock! We’ve been told all our lives that it does mean universal.  But the Greek, kata-holos, means wholeness, completion.  That which is catholic is moving toward the fullness of God.  So catholic really an eschatological notion.  We’re moving toward catholicity.  We’re not there yet.  And catholicity, which is all things being brought to unity in God through Christ, is God’s project.  It is thus the opposite of sectarianism, of racism, of all that divides humankind. 

Now a compassionate and catholic heart is a heart that can embrace paradox.  And what does it mean to have a heart that can embrace paradox?  It means being able to go beyond the Newtonian world of either/or and moving into the quantum universe of both/and, where several things can be true at the same time.  We are not accustomed to thinking that way until you look at our own tradition and the classical Calcedonian definition of the person of Christ who is both fully human and divine.  And if you look – and I’ve said this before in another context – if you look at the early Christological heresies in the church they all have to do with being unable to accept that paradox, and so Jesus becomes either fundamentally human with the guise of divinity, or divine with a guise of humanity.  But orthodoxy is both/and. 

The same is true with the doctrine of the Trinity. Gregory of Nazianzus, a great exponent of Trinitarian theology, said centuries ago that it is paradoxical.  The end of his ruminations, his deep theology, his explications were to say ultimately the doctrine is paradoxical. 

So why do we think everything can be either/or?  And yet that too is part of our Enlightenment heritage and here I think of some words from Thomas Merton, who says, “It is not a question of either/or but of all in one, of wholeness, wholeheartedness and unity which finds the same ground of love in everything.” 

The openness to paradox and  God’s project.

The question of entering into God’s project, the missio dei, the mission of God, prayerfully requires that openness to love on every level of our being without which we simply cannot be faithful to God’s own intent.  As we allow that transformation to occur through the work of the Spirit it means repentance.  It means conversion.  These classical dimensions of the spiritual life have to become real for us.  As we are transformed, and we are able to receive and welcome as well as to give.  And that’s a capacity so essential if we are genuinely to participate in God’s ongoing work of reconciling and redeeming, or if we are to proclaim by word and example the good news that all has been reconciled to God in Christ through the blood of the cross.  So our own capacity to embrace paradox with a compassionate and catholic heart draws us then personally and corporately more deeply into God’s mission. 

There is a sentence that has been extremely helpful to me and continues to be, particularly in my present role, and it comes from a disciple of Thomas Merton, James Finley.  It goes like this, “A simple openness to the next human moment brings us into union with God in Christ.”  I think of this openness in missional contexts that may surprise, disconcert, overwhelm.  I think there is a real temptation for us  to panic and resist and push back and try to explain too quickly.  We say: “If I could just figure it out then it will make sense.”  But often the act of figuring it out is a way of distancing ourselves from the full impact of the experience we are being invited to have and enter into.  So if I, or any of us, could simply hang on to a simple openness to the next human

moment, even this has the potentiality of bringing me into union with Christ in ways I can’t possibly understand or anticipate but simply leave open to occurring.  That openness can do amazing things which allow us to situate ourselves gracefully in any number of places, not simply as proclaimers of a message but as livers of a gospel reality. 

I think here too – and this is more in the area of paradox – of Rumi’s wonderful words: Beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field.  I’ll meet you there.  And the field, I think is the field of God’s imagination, which passes certainly our understanding.  I mean people will say to me: well, how can such and such ever be reconciled?  I don’t have the faintest idea but it certainly isn’t beyond God’s possibility.  And you know what, it has already occurred; we simply haven’t caught up with it yet.  Here’s the field of God’s imagination which passes all understanding in which all things have been reconciled and enfolded by the risen Christ’s stretched out arms of love. 

The urge to take to the Field.

Now this understanding of what has, in fact, already taken place in Christ calls forth from us our own response, our own response of love.  But it is not my ability to love that is the basis of that response.  Rather, it is the love that has been poured by God into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, as we are told in Romans 5:5.  And that love poured into our hearts then is caught up in answering love, and it carries with it all that we are in one response of praise, worship, and action or practice.  So duty, or our own psychological effort or active imagination, is not sufficient ground for participation in God’s redemptive activity, God’s work, God’s mission.  Only love is. 

And here I think of Paul’s cry in 2 Corinthians, “For the love of Christ urges us on.”  What was the impetus that drove him?  The love of Christ urging him on and that is the heart of all authentic participation in God’s mission.  Does the love of Christ urge me on or is it possibly some sort of lesser reality that comes out of my own ego?  Now, of course, we’re all mixtures of things so there is no such thing as a completely unsullied intention, but mindfulness - being aware of where my own needs are caught up in something that is demonstrably selfless - and being able, simply, to name it is very important. 

As part of a process of being vetted as a potential nominee for this position as Presiding Bishop I spent a time at the Menniger Clinic, where I was psychologically tested.  I remember the physician who was doing the examination towards the end said to me, “So if you got this job what satisfactions would it give you?”  And I thought “Oh this is a terrible question.  It’s not a question of satisfaction.  It is a question of service and self-donation on behalf of the body.  But, there are actually some things I would enjoy doing.”  So I listed three or four things that I thought would give me a great deal of pleasure if in fact I were elected and he said, “Phew!  Good you’re healthy.”  And I said, “What do you mean?”  And he said, “Well if you had no ego invested in this whatsoever you’d be sick.” 

So I simply say that to suggest that there is no such thing as utter and total altruism; we’re mixed up in things and that’s okay.  God doesn’t expect some kind of self-obliteration to occur.  God uses us as we are, but mindfulness is very important and awareness of the deeper force that urges us on.  That’s why our own prayer, our own companionship with Christ, is so crucial and essential, so that things don’t become thin and we become, as a Benedictine monk once said to me, “technicians of the sacred” as clergy.  And laypeople involved in the things of the church could equally become technicians of the sacred and lose that living relationship with the One in whom all things cohere, namely the risen Christ.

This brings us back again to our own union with Christ in all its rich diversity whereby our minds and hearts are transformed and conformed to the heart and mind of Christ through word and sacrament and participation in the missio dei.  Through all these things, to use Paul’s vivid phrase, Christ is formed  in us, not for our own satisfaction but for the sake of God’s project.  The contemporary French Orthodox theologian, Olivier Clément, expresses the unwavering great tradition of East and West when he writes, “There is not one blade of grass that does not grow within the Church and not one constellation that does not revolve within it around the tree of the cross, the new tree of life and the world’s axis.  There is not one person who does not have a mysterious relationship with the Father who created him but the Son, the ultimate man, and with the breath, the Spirit that moves all things.” 

The realm of constant surprise

We must approach participation in God’s work open to the possibility of constant surprise, and the joy of discovery that God, in some profound way, is already present when we think we’re supposed to bring Christ to that place.  And so that reality, that truth, keeps us from imposing the Christ we bring, conditioned by our own culture and experience.  That openness keeps us from imposing our own sense but rather listening for the echoes of Christ present where we are so that we can name and celebrate that presence and that reality, albeit hidden in a culture that is different from ours. 

Max Warren, that great missiologist said, “It takes the whole world to know the whole gospel.” The full Christ is everywhere and the full Christ embraces all things so we can’t possibly know the full Christ, the catholic Christ without opening ourselves to Christ being present everywhere.  Everything is sacramental by virtue of the incarnation.  Cultures are sacramental.  Other religious forms are potentially sacramental.  So solidarity, being with, is essential to participation in God’s work, God’s project of creating, redeeming and sanctifying, which for us includes companionship with Christ expressed in availability through personal and liturgical prayer and encounter with Christ the Word who is at the heart of the word of Scripture and the enacted word of the sacraments. 

This encounter with Christ then issues in deeds that reflect God’s justness.  I’m not using the word justice because I think justice has been used too much from a kind of fairness point-of-view.  “I know what’s just, I’ll tell you what’s just.”  But God’s justness is not a human category of equity or fairness but is God’s way of being God in the world.  And so to participate in God’s project is to participate in God’s justness as it is formed in our own hearts and minds.  And it may be much more straining than some kind of equity or fairness, but it is an absolutely essential dimension of any kind of mission spirituality. 

And so we – in solidarity with our brothers and sisters who live in different contexts, in solidarity with God’s project – we enter into God’s intention, God’s intention to reconcile, God’s intention to bring about mutuality, God’s desire to live the fullness of God’s own Trinitarian life in God’s world in terms of forgiveness, proclamation, service, and expressed in the fruits of the spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and yes, selfcontrol.  This availability, this capacity for God’s mystery, this willingness to listen with the ear of the heart leads to encounter with the very One we seek to proclaim at a much deeper level. 

And here I think of the words of Albert Schweitzer at the conclusion of “The Quest of the Historical Jesus,” which I go back to again and again. 

“He comes to us as one unknown, without a name, as of old by the lake, he came to those men who knew him not.  He speaks to us the same word, ‘Follow thou me,’ and sets us to the tasks which he has to fulfill for our time.  He commands and to those who obey him whether they be wise or simple, he will reveal himself in the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings which they will pass through in his fellowship and as an ineffable mystery they shall learn in their own experience who he is.” 

May those words indeed become true in our own lives.

Published in 2001 by the Global Episcopal Mission Network. May be copied freely, but attribution please. Additional printed copies from GEM Network, PO Box 246, Newark, DE 19715-0246

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