The Gate of Heaven Is Everywhere

Award-winning poet and essayist Fred Bahnson interviews several modern-day contemplatives, including Nashotah House alumnus The Rev. Adam Bucko (‘19) for Harper’s Magazine. Bahnson considers Bucko’s involvement in reviving the Christian contemplative tradition. For the last several years, Bucko has become a leading voice for a growing population within American Christianity, particularly among those drawn to Christianity’s more ancient, mystical expressions. For Bucko, who offers a weekly contemplative service at the Cathedral of the Incarnation in Garden City, New York, bringing a “new monastic” ethos to community “takes the best of Christian monastic traditions and translates them into an engaged path of contemplation and justice for those who no longer feel at home in the church.” 

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By Fred Bahnson

All happy religious families are alike; each unhappy religious family is unhappy in its own way. 

The family of American Christianity has been unhappy for quite some time, so much so that it's hard for many of us to imagine that it could be otherwise. The past four years have brought these feuds into the open. For Catholics, there is the glaring pedophilia scandal. For evangelicals, there is disagreement over church leaders' alliance with power, their unwavering fealty, since 2016, to the crotch-grabbing Caligula of Mar-a-Lago, whose every abuse of office made them double down on their support.

For mainline Protestants like me, the discontent has been less visible. Denominational squabbles over human sexuality have made headlines, but across every denomination a certain lassitude pervades, a general lukewarmness that makes it feel as though Protestantism has run its course. When the five hundredth anniversary of the Reformation rolled around in 2017, a few academics published monographs on Luther, and a commemorative study Bible appeared, but with church membership declining in every mainline denomination, Protestant circles shrugged. We knew there wasn't much to crow about. What was it, exactly, we were still protesting? 

Outwardly, it might look as if the family dynasty is on the wane, a decline that deepens with every new Pew study. What of the alternatives? A growing number of people are simply leaving the Christian household altogether, becoming Spiritual But Not Religious. Among some conservatives, there is talk of “strategic withdrawal” into tiny neighborhood enclaves. In The Benedict Option, Rod Dreher asserts 

that serious Christian conservatives could no longer live business-as-usual lives in America, that we have to develop creative, communal solutions to help us hold on to our faith and our values in a world growing ever more hostile to them.

Dreher laments “the breakdown of the natural family, the loss of traditional moral values, and the fragmenting of communities," which he blames on the flood of secularism." But the Ben Op, as Dreher calls it, feels a lot like old culture-war stuff repackaged with a catchy title; what Dreher really means by "our values" is protecting the Christian family from “the LGBT agenda." By accepting gay marriage, his argument goes, the church has failed. “I have written The Benedict Option to wake up the church ... while there is still time,” he warns. 

Meanwhile, those on the Christian left are also digging in politically. The primacy of race-class-gender (in the world of progressive theological education it's often said breathlessly, as one word) as an interpretive grid, the focus on political advocacy, the intense energy directed toward voter registration or climate justice or affordable housing all of this can make it feel as if progressive churches have become religious versions of MoveOn. The drive to stay politically relevant makes it hard to talk about prayer or salvation or Jesus, unless it's a prayer that everybody at a rally can get behind, a salvation that exists in this world, or a Jesus who is just a political rabble-rouser. If conservatives like Dreher fear assimilation, progressives fear being too Christian. Having grown up in one camp (conservative), I long ago threw in my lot with the other (progressive), but my point here is not to promote camps or criticize platforms. It is precisely to say that religious life, to its detriment, has been reduced to a platform.

Like the Kardashians, the American Christian family has become obsessed with its own profile. It has become faith as public spectacle, faith as political engagement, as party affiliation, as reputation-anything but faith as paradox, as mystery, as the hidden and seductive dance between spiritual desire and satiation, the prolonging of a hunger so alarmingly vast and yet so subtle that it disappears the moment it's made public. 

In early monastic Christianity, that hunger was acknowledged and channeled, given shape and form and expression. It went by different names — contemplatio (silent prayer) or hesychia (stillness)—which led first to an inner union with Christ, and then to a deep engagement with the suffering of the world. The order was important. In John Cassian's Conferences, a fifth-century account of the early Christian monastic movement in the deserts of Egypt, a certain Abba Isaac describes how the monks modeled their prayer on Jesus' practice of going up a mountain alone to pray; those who wished to pray “must withdraw from all the worry and turbulence of the crowd.” In that state of spiritual yearning, God's presence would become known. “He will be all that we are zealous for, all that we strive for," Abba Isaac said. "He will be all that we think about, all our living, all that we talk about, our very breath." 

What the early monks and the Christian mystics who followed sought was union-an intense experience of inwardness that is glaringly absent in what many of us get from American Christianity today. Perhaps this absence is the real reason for the mass exodus from churches. Perhaps it is not Christianity that many followers are disappointed in, but Christendom. 

To read the complete article, “The Gate of Heaven is Everywhere,” please click Harper’s Magazine January 2021 link here. 

The Rev. Adam Bucko, Minor Canon, The Cathedral of the Incarnation, Garden City, New York (‘19), has been a committed voice in the movement for the renewal of Christian Contemplative Spirituality and is a co-author of two books, Occupy Spirituality: A Radical Vision for a New Generation (North Atlantic, 2013) and The New Monasticism: An Interspiritual Manifesto for Contemplative Living (Orbis, 2015). He currently serves as a director of The Center for Spiritual Imagination at the Episcopal Cathedral of the Incarnation in Garden City, New York, and is a member of The Community of the Incarnation, a new monastic community dedicated to democratizing the gifts of monastic spirituality and teaching contemplative spirituality in the context of hearing and responding to the cry of the poor and the cry of the earth. His website is www. SpiritualImagination.org. Fr. Adam trained for priesthood at Nashotah House in Wisconsin, and will be featured in Nashotah House’s forthcoming Lenten and Easter Devotions 2021. You may follow him on Facebook at @AdamBucko