Companions on the way: Creating and discovering the congregational subject

Encounter, Winter 2002 by Lyon, K Brynolf

Clark Williamson pictures the church as a movement of "companions on the way."' Through this image he wants us to see the church as a communion of persons "in the presence of Jesus Christ" seeking to extend the love of God and neighbor throughout all creation. Williamson's imagery is evocative: the church is a communion of companions headed toward a goal, a goal defined by the presence of Jesus Christ among us. I want to take my lead in this essay from Williamson's image in order to reflect on certain aspects of the concrete, historical communion that constitutes congregations. In particular, I want to examine briefly one of the effects of the process of "companioning" in congregational life and its theological significance: the emergence of a "congregational subject."

Congregational members talk about - and exhibit in their behavior - feeling any number of different things about their congregations. They may feel "at one" with it, excluded from it, stifled by it, comforted by it, bored with it, challenged by it, longing for it, afraid of it, disappointed with it, angry/guilty/shamed/joyous/sad/jealous in relation to it. But what is the "it" in these cases? What is the referent for the intense and complex feelings people can have toward "the congregation"? The answer to this question is not always straightforward. I will suggest in this essay that the "it" is not simply the congregation as a physical space, a location in a socio-cultural geography, a set of languages and practices or, even, particular people gathered together in a particular socio-cultural location engaged in those languages and practices. Rather, I am concerned with those dimensions of the emotional and spiritual salience of the congregation in which it is all of these as they are embedded within an affect-laden construct, what I will call the congregational subject, which is partially individually and partially communally built, sustained, and transformed.

To put it differently, my experience with congregations leads me to believe that the feelings that congregational members have toward their congregations are not only directed toward some consciously understood entity of which they can talk about directly.' Those feelings must also be understood in the context of a largely unconscious, intersubjective matrix of complex relational patterns and "motivated irrationality" through which experience in the congregation is channeled in response to the emotional and spiritual challenges of congregational life.' While it is no doubt true that "God works in strange ways," it is equally true that "strange ways work with God." Congregations, one might say, are dense with ambiguity and promise.

POLLS AND IDIOPOLIS

This emotional and spiritual density of congregational life is constituted by the coming together of two spheres of human life in the creation and sustaining of a third: the gathering together of the publicly intersubjective and the intrapsychic in a privately intersubjective sphere. A useful way to understand this is to borrow a distinction from, and extend the argument of, the philosopher and psychoanalyst Jonathon Lear. Lear discusses what he calls the polls and idiopolis as dimensions of human life. Polis refers to the world of public meanings and practices. It is the brute "thereness" of our common lives - the practices and institutional structures of our life together that, while they were created in part to gratify (and continue to bear on) our psychological states, are not simply psychological projections nor can they be fully understood in purely psychological terms. As Lear puts it, "Although the polis is dependent on our enduring commitment, and although it reflects our collective psychic activity, it is not just psychology. Rather, we have created an environment which our psyches can, for better or worse, inhabit." This shared quality of the polis means that we can reflect on, argue about, and seek to reform or transform the polis and not just be talking past one another's intrapsychic worlds. In Lear's words, "A social world is open to reflection, to debate, to testing in thought and action, and to the possibility of consensual endorsement."' The polis, in other words, is publicly intersubjective.

Distinguishable from the polis in Lear's perspective, however, is the idiopolis. The idiopolis refers to the emotional inscape of our lives, the world of mostly unconscious meanings rooted in one's particular life trajectory, peculiar to the individual. One of the implications in this is that the world of shared, public meanings does not exhaust the meaning that beliefs and practices have for the persons who share them. Rather, we bring to the polis a range of conscious and unconscious "patterns of expectation" that are not shared among the other members of the polis yet exert significant influence on the ways we experience life within the polis.6 Beliefs and practices carry distinct nuances, associations, anxieties, and anticipations that have emerged in our individual life histories, and these things shape and are shaped by the meanings we share with others. As we speak the shared language of the polis in which we live, Lear notes, we also speak an idiolect.