Episode 396 - Chapel in the Pines

About this Episode

I'm thinking about ecclesiology today. Rarely do.

But a combination of J.B. Priestley's "low anthropology", a couple of recent lightning bolts from outside space and (present) time, and a fresh glimpse of the touching statue of "The Compassionate Christ" outside Cathedral Church of the Advent in Birmingham:

Well, they got me thinking of what the Christian Church is centrally and anchoredly about. Add to that the third verse of Lou Christie's number-one song from 1966, "Lightnin' Strikes"; and it's probably all there. One's ecclesiology, I mean.

"Dangerous Corner" by J.B. Priestley, which was first performed in London in 1932, unmasks the human tragedy of self-serving, manipulation, and deception in about as unrelieved a manner as could be imagined. The last scene but one, which leads directly to a character's suicide, surely rips the curtain off our world's endemic conspiratorial malice. It is almost a pure enactment of the "low anthropology" that is endemic to us.

But the playwright offers us no hope. He actually, explicitly dismisses the antidote of faith in God. I so want to enter that scene myself, speaking sincerely and personally, and address the desperate "hero". He's got it mostly right, you see; his diagnosis is accurate. But we believe in God -- and not a "deistic"/hands-off sort of force, but rather: Pure Empathy, Pure Sympathy, Pure Mercy, Pure Grace.

Our ecclesiology, therefore, is the Church, in whatever form, as Embodiment of One-Way Love. That's PZ's ecclesiology. That's Lou Christie's "chapel in the pines" (1966). That's the churches of refuge at the end of War of the Worlds (1953), that's 'Mr. Carpenter' in Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), that's the Isaiah 2, verse 4 climax of The Colossus of New York (1958), that's the hymn chorale at the end of The Space Children (1958), that's the Christ-figure at the conclusion of The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957). And so it goes.

When the curtain is ripped away on life as it really is and people as they really are, all that's needed is One Helping Hand, One "Next Voice You Hear" (1951), One... Man from Galilee (Ocean, 1971/Elvis, 1972), One Jesus Christ Superstar. LUV U.