Jeff Reimer, in a moving essay entitled “How Not to Be a Schismatic,” ruminating on his ecclesial pilgrimage and his unsuccessful attempts to find a church with a plausible claim to orthodoxy, unity, and visibility:
I want ecclesiological rest, but a quality of rest available only to the eschatologically reconciled body of Christ. What I have been searching for is a perfected church. I have been looking not so much for the wrong thing as for the right thing in the wrong way, and at the wrong time. To be sure, there are still myriad theological conundrums to sort out and corrections enough to undergo. A lifetime’s worth. But what I have been yearning for is to pull a future cleansed of all error and wrongdoing prematurely into the present and to claim it for myself. Every one of my failed attempts to convert to this or that tradition has thus been a failure by God’s grace to find the “perfect” church, the right story, the all-encompassing ecclesiological narrative without remainder. The terms under which I was searching were setting me up for disappointment no matter where I landed. In a sense, then, my tethering myself to my community and to my tradition did just the work I intended it to do: it did restrain me from my own worst impulses. Sometimes God uses our best ideas against us.
It turns out that the most hopeful thing for wayfarers of all kinds to do might be to deflate their expectations a little. The tidier one’s story of the church is, the more likely it is that one has lost hope—whether from despair, losing sight of the destination, or from presumption, thinking one has already arrived. I don’t say this to undermine the self-understanding of any given tradition but to insist that any account of the church, whether Protestant, Catholic, or Orthodox, must always in some sense be an account of a wayfaring church (even if they conceive of wayfaring differently—and they do). […]
I suppose all that just makes me a Protestant, though maybe a weird one. Another of my Catholic heroes, Walker Percy, says, “In the present age the survivor of theory and consumption becomes a wayfarer in the desert, like St. Anthony; which is to say, open to signs.” So I remain alert, muddling through the in-between, bearing in myself the wounds of division—casualty, perpetrator, and penitent. Wounds that can be mended only by seeking the healing draft of Christ’s blood and the nourishment of his restoring flesh.
