Twice in recent days I’ve had conversations with people in ministry about their spiritual life, and the idiomatic phrase “seeing how the sausage is made” got used. Here’s a (paraphrased) example;
After I became a minister and saw how the sausage is made, it changed my relationship to the church.
I love idioms, although as a vegan I suppose this one isn’t my natural favorite! But I love how evocative it is for “seeing the messy process that’s usually behind the scenes.”
Even as a longstanding vegetarian, I remember enjoying sausage in my carnivorous youth (and I still enjoy eating the plant-based sausages that are readily available — although I’m not sure I want to see how they are made, either!)
So that’s the power of this idiom: when we really like something, but then learn more about it that maybe changes our perspective (and not for the better), what do we do then?
Church is a lot like theater — or even many businesses that have a public face and a behind-the-scenes reality. For so many people, their experience of church is limited to Sunday morning worship and maybe participation in a weekly Bible study or some other type of educational offering. Perhaps they volunteer to help maintain the buildings and grounds or to teach Sunday School. Even people who end up giving many hours a week to their church may not necessarily get to see how the sausage is made.
Behind-the-scenes leadership is usually limited to the paid staff (clergy and lay employees) and the leadership council (usually a group of church members who are elected or appointed to an official leadership role in the community). Churches that are part of a larger denomination (like the Catholic Church or the Episcopal Church) also have ties to the larger church community through regional, national, and even global leadership and bureaucracy.
So why should it be a big deal to see how the sausage is made? Aren’t churches by their very nature spiritual organizations, implying that people in positions of leadership will bring a mature ethical sensibility and a commitment to spiritual values to the work they do?
Ah, if only…
Navigating Disillusionment
We live in a time when more and more people have become disillusioned, not just with churches, but with institutions and large, influential organizations in general. People are suspicious of large corporations, of the government, the military, the healthcare system, and yes, the churches.
I think “seeing how the sausage is made” as far as church is concerned is the simple recognition that religious organizations are just as susceptible to power politics, bureaucracy, petty rivalries, abuse, and protection of the institution even when that causes harm to others — pretty much just like any other institution.
But we expect more from organizations that claim to be promoting spiritual values and ethics. So the disillusionment that comes when we see how the sausage is made just stings a lot more.
Many people have conscientiously chosen to disaffiliate themselves for religious institutions. They have stopped participating in church and often have ceased to identify as Christian. Some simply become secular; a small number may gravitate toward other faith traditions like Buddhism, but many simply begin to think of themselves as spiritually independent or spiritual-but-not-religious.
Meanwhile, many people (and not just those who work for the church) try to keep some sort of connection to the institution, because of their deep and strong loyalty to the wisdom teachings of Jesus and the great saints and mystics down the ages. Frankly, this is who I’ve been for much of the last twenty years.
But the more I see the sausage production, the greater I find cognitive dissonance between my love for the wisdom teachings of the Christian tradition and the challenges of being part of a culture that has seemed to undermine those teachings so frequently.
Hey, I’m no saint, the last thing I want to imply is that I’m somehow better or holier or more advanced spiritually that people in church. On the contrary! In fact, I do believe that many, perhaps most, people in churches tend to be sincere folks who genuinely want to cultivate their spirituality and rely on the church to guide and teach them.
The problem, it seems to be, is with the system — there’s something about institutionalism that seems to undermine the radical nature of Jesus’s teachings and instead promote values that seem to be, well, just ordinary human values: values based on power, on identity and conformity, on systems that reward loyalty and punish those who don’t fit in. In other words, the kinds of values that Jesus himself often challenged.
I am not saying we should all give up on the church. I don’t think it’s wrong to keep working within the system. But I also don’t believe it’s wrong for some people to conscientiously leave church.
I don’t have any answers here. But I just want to acknowledge that this is a problem that I don’t believe is going to go away anytime soon.
The Contemplative Perspective
I called this blog post “Contemplating How the Sausage is Made” not only because this blog is about contemplative spirituality, but because I think this is increasingly going to be an important task for all of us who are drawn to contemplative practices and values. Whether we are affiliated with a church or faith community, or not, we need to be aware of how the sausage is made.
We need to remember that churches struggle with the same power dynamics, internal competitiveness, egotism, abdication of responsibility, and other problems that beset any other large organization. It’s a myth to assume that churches are going to be better than other institutions. Because increasingly, I believe institutionalism itself is the problem — or at least a big part of the problem.
If contemplative spirituality matters to you, and you are still part of a church community, please take the time to see for yourself how the sausage is made. And make it a priority to consider how you can safeguard your love for contemplative spirituality even while dealing with the messy humanity of the church.
If you are not part of a church community, please don’t judge those of us who are — try to understand how the institution operates so you can sort out the difference between our individual human foibles and how institutions seem to have a tendency to amplify our collective weaknesses.
Most important of all, be faithful to your contemplative practice. Sit in silence every day. Read and study the mystics. Participate in contemplative gatherings like Centering Prayer groups or monastic oblate communities. Just because institutions are so broken doesn’t mean we don’t need community. We need community more than ever before.
Here’s a prediction: in the next one to two hundred years, entirely new models of community organization and governance will emerge, not only within Christianity but within the human family in general. For Christians, this will represent a new opportunity to be faithful to the message of Jesus while hopefully avoiding the shadow side of churches as they exist today. Whether this means we’ll have a new reformation, or entirely new churches/models of community will emerge, I don’t know.
But I think if you love the mystical tradition but have given up on the institutional church, try to do what you can to remain faithful at least to mystical spirituality and contemplation. Because whatever the church (as a structure) looks like in a century or two, it will need contemplatives and mystics. So it’s up to us to do what we can to keep that wisdom alive.
Featured image by Silar; licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.
