IV. Being Made a Patient People

Abstract

I begin with thanks to Professor Freeman for a helpful article, and with the admission that I am torn by this topic. On the one hand, I have shared by direct experience and that of friends the same pain Freeman describes of being unable to commune at the Saturday evening mass at the CTS/NABPR convention. I remember Sandra Yocum's words of public lament in her 2014 CTS presidential address. Some of us may remember our convention at Spring Hill in 2005 when the celebrant at the Saturday mass that year, Fr. David Robinson, who grew up a New England Congregationalist, spoke with deep anguish of his deep desire to share communion with the Baptists, coupled with the inability to do so. We had sung Susan Toolan's “I Am the Bread of Life,” hearing in our own voices Christ's promise of being raised up on the last day. And then we sensed how that day was not yet. But we should remember that the “last day” when we will unquestionably be one, if I may borrow words from the poet W. H. Auden, “is not in our present, and not in our future, but in the fullness of time.” So we ask now about the prospects of provisionally—proleptically—embodying that oneness this side of the eschaton.