I heard a story at the beginning of the week about an Episcopal priest that I can’t seem to stop thinking about. I’m not at liberty to disclose the details, but basically it’s about how the priest is refusing to cooperate in even the smallest ways with other Episcopal parishes in his community. What’s striking is that the same priest will, on the other hand cooperate with other churches outside the Episcopal Church, just so long as they share the same theological outlook that he does. It doesn’t matter that they are in communion with him or his parish or not, just that they disagree with what his colleagues within the Episcopal Church are doing.

As I mentioned, I’m not really at liberty to say what the issue is, but trust me, it’s extraordinarily petty. It’s the sort of thing that congregations do with each other all the time, and the sort of thing that I’ve done for other congregations in the neighborhood as long as I’ve been a priest.

I’m reminded of something that Bishop Christopher Epting told the Primates of the Anglican Communion when he spoke with them at their meeting in Tanzania; that people within the Anglican Communion are treating each other with significantly less respect than we would ever treat a church that we were either not in communion with or with which we were even in direct competition. There’s a great deal of truth in the observation that fights within the family are much nastier than fights with outsiders.

But my concern is less that we behaving badly, it’s more about what our behavior is doing to our souls. The long and protracted arguments, the claims of righteousness and charges of unrighteousness, the glee that is felt when one’s opponents misstep is slowly creating a family system that is addicted to this conflict. And this conflict seems to me to fast becoming an idol that we’re focussing our attention on rather than on serving Christ.

I used to think that conflict was good for the Body of Christ in that it forced people to think through what they believed and created passion for doing the right thing. However, of late, I’ve realized that our “curvatus in se” has trumped whatever good comes from debate about doing the right thing. Instead people are constantly telling me how tired they are of the fighting – and how desperately they wish we could get back to doing mission or focusing on evangelism.

The problem is that simply walking away from the conflict is as fraught with dangers for the Church as staying in the midst of it. The issues we’re debating seem to me to actually be “kingdom issues” and of such weighty importance that to simply disengage and get on with working with the people we agree with and abandoning those with which we disagree feels like the coward’s way out. It’s not the way of the cross, it’s the way of the following our personal bliss. We are called, I believe to stay engaged with each other, even in the midst of the nastiness and pettiness and all the attendant ugliness.

But, while we do that difficult but important work, we really need to remember that our souls need to be cared for in a much more intentional way than would otherwise be the case. The fact that we see other people being petty or mean can cause us to give ourselves permission to act the same way because “they did it to me.” A Christian in such a situation turns the other cheek and returns anger with kindness, hatred with love.

Doing that is hard, hard work. And it can only happen when our prayer and spiritual life is fully formed and firing on all cylinders. So take time to care for yourselves. Get thee to your spiritual directors. Take some time each day or week to disengage from the unpleasantness. Pray. Sing. Paint. Walk. Do what you need to do so that you can daily draw closer to God and to his Church.