I’ve worked for the VA for almost twenty-three years. I have become numbed to the bureaucratic stupidity that I have been immersed in for all of these years. In many ways I have been beaten into submission by the system. Don’t get me wrong, I know ways to get pretty much whatever I need for my patients—it takes some extra time and energy and a knowledge of what I call “the old girls’ network” because nurses often control the back doors to services in the Medical Center. I know pretty much just who to go to get what I need. Nonetheless, as Martin Luther King, Jr., puts it, my mind and feet have been thoroughly conditioned “to move to the rhythmic drumbeat of the status quo.”

St. Paul warns us about this in the epistle today: “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect.” St. Paul is trying to teach the Romans how to go about living simultaneously in two universes at the same time. Any of us who have spent much time around churches has heard the phrase about “being in the world but not of the world;” we are probably numbed to this phrase by now and it doesn’t mean much to us in practical terms.

Dan Clenendin in an essay on JourneyWith Jesus.Net, points out our conformity to the model of this world:

Most people, says King, “are thermometers that record or register the temperature of majority opinion, not thermostats that transform and regulate the temperature of society.” Social scientists tell us, for example, that believers divorce at about the same rate as the general population, we watch the same films and television shows, we read the same books, we give about the same percentage of our income to charity as others, our teenagers have pre-marital sex at about the same rate as other kids, and so forth. The church, King reminds us, has defended slavery and racial discrimination, wars and economic exploitation. We participated in the Holocaust.

In The Mists of Avalon, by Marion Zimmer Bradley, which retells the Arthur legend from the standpoint of the women in the story especially Morgan, his half-sister and Guinevere his wife,  the Isle of Avalon, the center of Goddess worshipping pagan Britain, is superimposed, if you will, on Glastonbury Abbey, a convent of nuns. But the isle of Avalon is shrouded in mists that can only be parted and therefore entered by one of the priestesses of the Mother Goddess.  I find this image especially apt as a metaphor for what we are called to do and be as Christians: we have to part the mists of this world in order to see clearly the brighter world of the culture of God in which we are called to live and move and have our being.

“I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.” This instruction from St. Paul was very radical in the culture in which it was written. Greco-Roman culture was at best ambivalent about the meaning of the human body. Strong currents of belief held that the body was intrinsically evil; many thinkers held that the material universe was the mistaken result of the action of a “lower” god figure and not the choice of the highest divinity—spiritual existence was all that mattered. Just for the record, it is in response to this mistaken notion that the first article of the creed was written: “We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen.” This discomfort with the body resulted in a kind of schizophrenic practice: on the one hand extreme forms of asceticism that punished and abused the flesh, and on the other hand a kind of sexual license that allowed the powerful to take whatever they wanted physically from the less powerful.

In fact, a similar kind of ambivalence exists in our own culture: For good or ill, we are not so energetic in our asceticism as the ancient world was, but I think that psychological suffering is even more acute in our time than it was in theirs. Sex is used to sell absolutely everything in our culture from foot cream to flat screen televisions. On the other hand we are extremely uncomfortable with sex in practice so that young people are deprived of the information they need to protect their health and prevent the birth of children they are unable to nurture. In the United States, the huge majority of new cases of HIV infection are in men younger than twenty-five. We also have the highest rate of teenage pregnancies and the highest infant mortality rate in the developed world.

“Present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.” We are left with a puritanical mistrust of our bodies and our desires. But let there be no mistake: our bodies are important, supremely important to God. “We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come.” And God does not mistrust our bodies nearly as much as we do. Jesus was accused of being a winebibber and glutton—eating and drinking with too much gusto, beyond the pale of social acceptability. And what has he left us to remember him by: A meal replete with bread and wine. “Do this in memory of me.” And we are called not to be cautious or mistrustful with our sexual desires, we are called to be mindful and skillful with sex because it is a way to God. The angels in heaven exult whenever we use our bodies to love one another, perhaps even with a little envy because they do not have bodies to offer up in love to God and each other.

“Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds.” Morgan of the faeries, the priestess of the goddess, standing in the prow of a canoe being paddled by the men devoted to the old religion, spread out her arms to part the mists and open the way to the Isle of Avalon, the bright happy home of “the birth day of the life and of love and wings, and of the gay great happening illimitably earth,” to quote e. e. cummings.

For Morgan, this was very much an act of faith as much as it is for us, to trust our ability, infused into us by the grace of the Holy Spirit, who spoke through the prophets. To quote Dan Callendin again:

The French sociologist Jacques Ellul (1912–1994) worked with marginalized teenagers on the streets of Bordeaux in the 1950s and 1960s. His goal, he always said, was not to make those marginalized and disenfranchised kids “adjust” to the normal patterns of society. Making them "fit in" would only make them cultural conformists. Rather, Ellul said that his goal was to help the kids move from being “negatively maladjusted” to society to becoming “positively maladjusted.” He wanted them to become non-conformists....King says something very similar: “There are some things in our world to which men [sic] of goodwill must be maladjusted.”

We are not even called to be maladjusted and non-conformist even within the body of Christ: “For as in one body we have many members, and not all the members have the same function, so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another. We have gifts that differ according to the grace given to us.”

So here we find ourselves: this amazing hodge-podge of diversity—various professions, various attractions and desires, various incomes, various lifestyles, various cultures and subcultures—all mixed together in an amazing chaos that actually works, to everyone’s amazement, through the power of the Holy Spirit. And indeed in this we do, in fact, truly find ourselves, discover who we are and probably more importantly, why we are.

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