The occupation movement has, at its heart, the unmasking and unveiling of true identity. Through the shared communal practices and liturgies of general assemblies, common language, shared music, disciplined endurance, and a willingness to suffer, Occupy Denver seeks to reclaim not only physical public space, but also, a deeper sense of communal identity. It seeks to make visible a different kind of world, and a different kind of life together.
Which made me wonder: isn’t this what the church is supposed to be in the buisness of doing? What if the church also sought to reclaim and re-occupy the sacred spaces and identities that are too often dominated by Caesar and his ideology of consumerism? What if, like the occupiers, its not through pre-made programs and paradigms of church growth, but through a shared commitment to communal practices, the church could re-occupy time? By creating opportunities for silence, Sabbath, and other deep spaces of contemplation and grace, spaces too often claimed by the oppressive nature of a competitive society bent on occupying every waking and dreaming moment of our days?
Noticed in the comments:
May we stop and first be inhabited by the God who will then enable us to faithfully inhabit the world.
Which tends to bother me. It seems to push the envelope back into “getting right with God BEFORE we act”, which more often than not leads to not ever reaching that point of action, since we never feel “ready”. Whatever happened to reconciliation as what happens in the midst of action?
I acgtually did not even get a sense that the author was introducing any “SEQUENCE” issue here. But as soon as the “spiritual” is mentioned, then people immediately grasp that as license to demand we do that part “FIRST”. I think this misses the point the author was making. I sensed that he was praising the results of the communal activity of Occupy that built up around the “Occupation”, and so calling the church to tap that insight and emphasis upon the occupation of communal space.
