Loyalties

To belong to a church is to be loyal to many things, not just to one thing. A healthy member of a church community does not pick, in an either/or fashion, between having boundaries or emphasizing freedom, between believing in defined doctrines or emphasizing individual conscience, between the gift of legitimate institutionalized authority or the importance of individual charisma, between the needs of the local community and the needs of the larger universal church, between what the gifted artist brings to the community and what the poorest of the poor brings, between liberal and conservative, between old and new, or even between what is being said by those church members who are alive and those others who have died but with whom we are still in vital communion. To be a member of a church is not to choose among these. It is to choose them all. Like our God in heaven, we too need a heart with many rooms. The true mark of church is wide loyalties.

Ronald Rolheiser, The Holy Longing: The Search for a Christian Spirituality. New York: Doubleday, 1999.