I think I live in a city of yogis. If you could create a filtered view of Vancouver I think the Church would be an identifiable group of people against the backdrop of diversity. Following Jesus and gathering with others in the family of Jesus-followers would show up. However, I think that upon a close look you might find a city that is more accurately viewed as a city of individualistic perspectives on religious and spirituality. A read through Henri Nouwen’s Creative Ministry has caused me to see Vancouver this way. While describing the need of Christians to get beyond the manipulation of structures and the need to still be an agent of social change, he writes:
It almost seems that being both an agent for social change and a Christian becomes a contradiction. Many ask themselves: How can I work for a better world without being tempted to conspiracy, gossip, and hatred? How can I work for the deprived black man without sharing his hostile feelings for the white? How can I help the poor without hating those whom I see as their exploiters? How can I criticize the Establishment without being conceited, self-righteous, and close-minded? In short, how can I actively work for a better world and not harm the Christian values that tell me to love my enemies as well as my friends?
Many people who become hurt in this struggle for social reform have indeed become so overwhelmed by this problem that in order to avoid becoming like the commissar who was willing to sacrifice the individual to change the structure, they choose what is in effect the opposite way: the way of the yogi. it is not difficult to understand why many people, tired by social action and disappointed with its results, have chosen the inward way. All over the country we see new centers of meditation and concentration in which people try to come to terms with this chaotic world by changing the world from within and making themselves internally free. Quite often they have turned to the East to find a new way. Many have become so deeply convinced that all the conflicts of the world find their origins in the human heart and that their internal life is just a miniature of the cruel battlefields of the large society, that for them the only real place to start changing the world is to start in the center of their own inner life.
Arthur Koestler writes: "The Yogi believes that nothing can be changed by external organizations, but everything by the individual attempt from within, and the everyone who thinks otherwise escapes from the real problem."
Nouwen wrote this in 1973. He went on to wonder if the Pentecostal movement within the Catholic church was a reaction of disillusionment in the Church organization and an expression of the yogi’s desire for change. Thirty four years later I live in a city of yogis. We are wounded souls unable to escape the desire for change that God has hardwired into the soul, yet unable to hear the one voice that brings healing–voice of Jesus calling them into fellowship with Him. It seems hard to hear this voice because He accompanies it with the call into some form of organized life, organized church.
When Jesus prayed for His followers that would emerge in the generations to come He was anti-yogi. Jesus prayed (in John 17:20-26)
My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one: I in them and you in me. May they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me. Father, I want those you have given me to be with me where I am, and to see my glory, the glory you have given me because you loved me before the creation of the world. Righteous Father, though the world does not know you, I know you, and they know that you have sent me. I have made you known to them, and will continue to make you known in order that the love you have for me may be in them and that I myself may be in them.
