A Walk Around The Block

Organized Christianity has yet to come to terms with the fact that the direct call of God happens to individuals quite outside of the framework and control of institutions. This is the primal witness of scripture itself. The proto-Christian community recognized this. Both Paul and Peter came face-to-face with God, as did the entire Christian community - as individuals - in the first century, time and again. Over the first centuries entire regions became peopled by individuals who had encountered God. People of genuine Christian character today need to be taught that today's monks were originally laypeople; Benedict wrote his Rule living alone in a cave, influenced by others' witness. His and the likes of the extensive early contemplative communities of the first five hundred years were not the exceptions, they were the standard. Soren Kierkegaard once commented on the necessity of distinguishing this genuine encounter from what institutionalized ecclesiology had devolved into as being akin to a person who claimed that they were going to travel to the North Pole, only in actuality to go for a walk around the block, and who then went on to tout the two as being equivalent.