Phyllis and the Pope: Loving the Unlovable

Views from a Ridge

Now that the dust is settling -- or in one case, being kicked up anew -- over Pope Francis' U.S. visit, there has been time to ponder a spiritual convergence beyond the headlines.

Perceptive Christians may have noticed that the U.S. visit of Pope Francis coincided with the passing of someone I considered a colleague and mentor, religion expert Phyllis Tickle. After days of contemplation, I think I've discerned one thing: through these noteworthy people God's Holy Spirit is clamoring for attention from us contentious humans, and yet we're still focusing on our fractures rather than on our faith.

The journalist in me has watched with dismay as mainstream media and religious bloggers alike have cast Pope Francis' speeches and sermons in terms of attack and conflict rather than that of witness and persuasion. This week that dismay has been heightened by the news that Pope Francis met privately with Kim Davis, the Kentucky clerk who's refusing on religious ground to issue marriage licenses to gay and lesbian couples. At least one commentator now speculates that Pope Francis may have been manipulated into their brief encounter by conservative U.S. Catholic bishops for their own purposes. Part of me hopes that's the case, because meeting with someone who so proudly follows a prejudice at the expense of a sworn duty seems so out of character with Francis' proclamations of God's love. At one point, I wrote a personal Facebook post:

"The struggle to label Pope Francis (progressive, traditionalist or otherwise) seems to me to be the very thing that he is preaching against. In the place of our polarizing and dismissive labels, Francis espouses a loving praxis as our baseline for relationships, whether individual, social, political or corporate. This is the dilemma in which I often find myself as a Christian: I believe in, and do my best to practice, the grace and love for others that I have received myself, yet this is doubly hard when faced with those whose beliefs and behaviors so contradict my understanding. That is when my Christian discipleship most pinches – when I am confronted with those I deem 'unlovable,' for whatever reason, and am pressed by Jesus' teachings and God's Holy Spirit to love them anyway. At such times, I often think of the witness of Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. and Ram Dass. In particular, Ram Dass used to keep a picture of George W. Bush prominently displayed in his home because he said that Dubya was someone that he 'had the hardest time loving.'"

Imagine that, United Methodists. What if we were to keep before us pictures or symbols of those who we have the hardest time loving? I find it difficult at this point to imagine that some feuding bloggers would pray for one another, or that traditional Good News followers would keep progressives in the Methodist Federation for Social Action in their daily devotions. And yet, this is what Pope Francis preaches and practices: the teaching of Jesus, the Christ, that we are to pray for those we deem enemies, to do good to those who hate us, and to forgive "seventy times seven," an ancient metaphor meaning "infinitely."

And what of author-speaker-teacher Phyllis Tickle, who passed away Sept. 22 four months after being diagnosed with terminal lung cancer? Phyllis started out as a professional role model for me in 1991 when she founded the Religion section of Publishers' Weekly, the publishing industry's "bible." I watched as she, almost single-handedly, convinced the worlds of publishing and periodicals that religion was not only a legitimate topic, but also part of the great under-reported river of devotion that undergirds American society. When I finally got to meet Phyllis in person in 2008 at an Associated Church Press conference, she greeted me as if we were long-lost friends reunited after decades of separation. In the brief hours we spent together, her presence, her presentation and her person were a living ray of God's wit and wisdom. Years after our meeting, she never failed to respond to my digital and written correspondence – a trait I later discovered was her standard practice with everyone. As I have written and said in the sad hours since her passing, Phyllis was God's grace with skin on.

Pondering her contributions, I'm indebted to the Rev. Mark Woods of Christian Today magazine, for lifting up two of Phyllis' quotes that seem to have significance for United Methodists in our current struggle:

"Like a double helix rendered elegant by complexity and splendid by authority, the amalgam of gospel and shared meal and the discipline of fixed-hour prayer were and have remained the chain of golden connection tying Christian to Christ and Christian to Christian across history, across geography, and across idiosyncrasies of faith." (The Divine Hours)

"The Reformation was to answer the question 'Sola Scriptura, Scriptura sola.' While we may laugh and say the divisiveness was Protestantism's greatest gift, ours is a somber joke. Denominationalism is a disunity in the Body of Christ and, ironically one that has a bloody history. Now, some five hundred years later, even many of the most diehard protestants among us have grown suspicious of 'Scripture and Scripture only'...We begin to refer to Luther's principle of 'Sola Scriptura, Scriptura sola' as having been little more than a paper pope in place of a flesh and blood one. And even as we speak, the authority which has been in place for five hundred years withers away in our hands." (The Great Emergence)

In so many ways, Phyllis and the Pope represent the opposite poles of Christianity today: she, a prophet envisioning a vibrant, soul-stirring future church from today's rag-tag amalgams, and he, officially the bastion of inflexible traditions for a "faith once handed down to the saints." Yet both Phyllis Tickle and Pope Francis bear witness to the same loving God that Jesus incarnated and that they too embodied – the grace that energizes their graciousness.

It's the absence of such grace from The United Methodist Church today that points the way to our downfall. When only 53 percent of the 2012 General Conference delegates vote to affirm the bedrock Wesleyan doctrine that "God's grace is available to all," we are in trouble. When all we can do in print and online is snipe and snap and spar with one another like a roomful of angry cats, when we do not even attempt to see ourselves as others see us, we are in trouble. When divisively crusading for human objectives supersedes the practice of grace in community, we are in deep trouble.

As I write, parts of "Here I Am, Lord," (No. 593, United Methodist Hymnal) keep repeating in my mind: "I will break their hearts of stone, give them hearts for love alone." Dare we pray for hearts of love in preparation for the 2016 General Conference? If we are so bold, we must expect to have our stony hearts broken in humility and sacrifice, to relinquish our own pomp and power for the sake of sharing a loving gospel with a hurting world.

Flawed as he may now seem, acting graciously while upholding oppressive doctrines, Pope Francis nonetheless lifted up the heart of the gospel in his final mass in Philadelphia: "Would that we could all be prophets! Would that all of us could be open to miracles of love for the sake of all the families of the world, and thus overcome the scandal of a narrow, petty love, closed in on itself, impatient of others! And how beautiful it would be if everywhere, even beyond our borders, we could appreciate and encourage this prophecy and this miracle!"

A veteran religion journalist and a certified spiritual director, Cynthia B. Astle serves as coordinator of United Methodist Insight.