She is a broken system. Yet she lives and breathes.

She chokes the beauty and the life out of that which she is designed to administrate, her patron, if you will. Her patron is good, is life-affirming, is a representation of what it means to be human.

She is not.

And yet her patron has become seemingly powerless to stop her. We have created a monster, and it is overpowering us.

She is a monster, but we need not demonize her. She is not fully to blame. She was given power and entrusted to use it to the benefit of her patron, without self-interest.

But she is composed of human beings. Fallen human beings. And there has never existed, in the history of humankind, a system composed of fallen human beings, entrusted with power and asked to administer it for the benefit of others who did not, eventually, become corrupted by that power. Some more than others, but all corrupted. Such a system will naturally, in a fallen world, in good time, operate not for the interests of its patron but for the aggrandizement of its own power, its own comfort, its own wealth.

We are partly to blame for thinking it could work any other way.

Eventually, her self-interest will become so blatant, the essence of her patron so absent in her, that change will become inevitable.

It has happened to her before, and it will happen again. That is the natural order of things.

But she is wise, as are all human systems fattened by power. When the inevitable revolution occurs, she will realize that she cannot resist it without destroying herself. So she will appear to acquiesce to her own resignation. She will pretend to step down.

But she will not. She is simply hibernating, laying low until the temperature subsides.

At which time she will re-emerge. You won't recognize her, for she will change her outward appearance in furtherance of her ultimate end.

But there she will be again. For we are humans, fallen humans, and we require structure and order. And she is happy to provide it.

At a cost.

Let us continue to strive to fix her where possible, confront her when necessary, cry out when her injustice becomes too great to bear. That is our task, our duty, as her beneficiaries.

But let us not become so engulfed in that endeavor that we lose sight of her patron, that good thing that she is badly administering. For whatever system is designed to administer that good patron, she will also endure, in her pure form, and continue to provide delight, joy, human-affirming moments. Certainly, those moments will be diluted, their frequency lessened, by the corrupt administrators.

But let's continue to celebrate when they do occur.

They are what this whole show boils down to.

Grace and Peace,
Raffi

The BCS and the Institutional Church: Kindred Spirits