A Ramble About Balance

"Water, Earth, Fire, Air..." So begins the cartoon series "Avatar, the Last Airbender." It's been one of my family's favorites, and not our only. I knew of a therapist at the children's home where I worked that used episodes from the series to talk about different virtues and how to deal with loss and tragedy.

In this series, there are four nations or ethnic groups defined by one of these four elements. There's the fire nation, the earth kingdom, the water tribe (northern and southern), and the air nomads. Each nation has a martial art which is woven into the fabric of their culture called "bending" which allows them to move and shape their element. Each nation is supposed to live in a balance with one another, respecting the rights of the other three to live peacefully and practice their own beliefs. One special bender, called the Avatar, is continuously reborn through a cycle of reincarnation in order to keep this balance intact. He is the only one who has the ability to bend all four elements, and he also keeps the peace between the material and the spiritual worlds. When the avatar dies, another avatar is born and trains in all the forms of bending to take his place.

In the first series, the world has been thrown completely out of balance because the fire nation launched an aggressive world war aimed at conquering the other nations and extinguishing the other forms of bending. The avatar, a twelve year old airbender having awoken from being frozen for a hundred years, has to master the other three elements quickly in order to stop the fighting. He does, and the long process of rebuilding commences. In the second series, the world is more or less in balance again, and a new Avatar has been born. Once again, though, that balance is threatened by corruption, ignorance, and misunderstandings.

As I was watching the first two episodes of the second series online with my family today, I couldn't help but be so reminded of the Church today. We are very much like these four nations, and we have been so thrown out of balance it's unbelievable.

The Pentecostals emphasize miracles and sign gifts. The Catholic Churches emphasize sacred tradition and the communion of the Saints. The baptists and many evangelicals emphasize Holy Scripture. Some of the Orthodox Catholic Churches emphasize asceticism and contemplation. Some protestant Churches emphasize missionary evangelism. Messianic Judaism emphasizes Christianity's Jewish roots and heritage. There is nothing wrong with any of this. All of these things are the common spiritual heritage of all Christians.

The error comes in when we emphasize any single one of these things to the exclusion of all else. All of these things are the manifestation of the life of Jesus Christ through His people. True heresy is when we refuse to see Jesus manifested in the brother who has a different gift or emphasis from us. When we make the declaration, "oh, he's one of them therefore he isn't saved!"

The ancient Church wasn't quite so out of balance. They kept the Sacred Tradition, the Sacraments, and the Apostolic Succession as a sacred trust, they also practiced contemplative prayer and asceticism, they immersed themselves as much as they could in the Holy Scriptures, they understood that those brothers and sisters who were absent from the body were still a part of the Body, and they demonstrated and used the charismata, the grace given gifts of the Holy Spirit, to show the world that Jesus Christ was the way, the truth, and the life. Many of them died as martyrs in horrible deaths singing hymns and forgiving their executioners.

Corruption, greed, ignorance, and misunderstanding threw the one, holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church of Jesus Christ out of balance to where we will no longer even look at the other "martial disciplines" of the Church outside of our own, and as we are divided, so we also fall to our own sins and indulgences until those on the outside looking at us shake their heads in wonder and pity.

I realize now how blessed I have been to have experienced and trained in so many different Church traditions and denominations. The Lord has allowed me to see Him working through Catholic and Protestant alike. Through Orthodox, baptist, non-denominational, or messianic Jewish. I have even seen Him working through Mormons (go figure), and they seem to have the Church's social safety net for its people down to an art form. I really wish others would willingly open their minds and hearts to experience this as well.

In order for the Church to be unified once more, we must restore the balance that we once had that was lost. Unlike the four nations, we are all capable of reclaiming our entire heritage if we would be willing to set aside our own divisions and learn from one another. This is what the enemy truly fears. Our divisions, our true heresy, is what keeps us from really showing Jesus Christ to the world, and this is the heresy from which we must repent.

As St. Paul said in 1 Corinthians 13, it doesn't matter how great you can speak, or how much you know, or how many good works, or even how many miracles we perform. If we aren't bound together by allowing the love of God to flow through us to each other and the rest of the world, then we have nothing and are nothing. The love of God overcomes all such prejudices and discriminations which we harbor against one another.

Our spiritual ancestors from so many long centuries ago knew this, and they wrote much of it down for us to learn from as well. In order for the Church to truly be the Church we must restore the balance we have lost.