One of my favorite miniseries is John Adams – done by HBO in the past few years.  The reason that miniseries is compelling is because I get to view history as a participant, in that case, as John Adams.  This fall, at the Mirrors and Maps conference, we get a similar opportunity.  She may not be the second president of the United States, but Phyllis Tickle has been “standing on the street corner, pad and pencil in hand, paid to count the traffic as that animated and sometimes raucous parade [American religion from 1992 – 2004] went by.”

As she describes it, hers is “a first-person account of religion in those twelve years of passionate upheaval”.  Tickle paints several pictures in her three books: Greed, Prayer is a Place: America’s Religious Landscape Observed and finally The Great Emergence: How Christianity is Changing and Why.  While the Great Emergence is the first book in which I met Phyllis, her other two have been as helpful or more.  One of Tickle’s greatest gifts is providing a lens through which to see Christianity in the context of everything else – including history.

In Greed, she breaks the past 2000 years into roughly three blocks:

• 0 – 1500 AD – Physical Imagination
• 1500 – 1900 – Intellectual Imagination
• 1900 – Present – Spiritual Imagination

Having given us those blocks, she compares our present time – that of spiritual imagination – to as wrenching a time as Luther tacking up his 95 theses a few hundred autumns ago.

While Tickle’s historical contexting gifts are significant, perhaps her most poignant picture is that of religion as the cable of meaning.

She defines this cable of meaning as being comprised of 3 strands: spirituality, corporeality and morality.  Covering these three strands are two sleeves: the inner (mesh) sleeve is that of common imagination and the outer (waterproof) covering is the story a community lives in.  This cable of meaning connects us, as mere mortals, to that which is higher and greater.  Tickle describes this holy tether as

a cable of meaning that keeps the human social unit connected to some purpose and/or power greater than itself.

What I found particularly helpful in this picture is that this cable of meaning (like ordinary ones) can be opened and its components can be exposed to our view.  Occasionally this cable gets a rupture and such examinations by as us, as those human units, takes place.  Such times are excruciating on many levels beyond religious, the tremors will rumble through economics, politics and culture like so many waves.

In fact Tickle believes that this rupturing of the cable of meaning has happened to Christianity about every 500 years or so.  She makes the point that examining the rope forces us to answer one central question – “Where now is our authority?”

However there are two more questions that are particular this central “Where now is the authority?” one and for the Great Emergence, her complementary questions are:

1)      What is human consciousness and/or the humanness of the human?

2)      What is the relation of all religions to one another – or put another way, how can we live responsibly as devout and faithful adherents of one religion in a world of many religions?

Besides these questions, I think Phyllis Tickle’s attendance at our Mirrors and Maps conference is congruent for a final reason.  Like Off the Map, she describes herself as a conduit or spiritual sociologist.  In terms of the conduit, Phyllis writes this about herself:

The unexpected consequence of my more general and ever more public role as a presence in church and interfaith conferences has been to turn me into a kind of conduit.  Through those experiences, flowing in one direction out to general religion audiences, is knowledge-based information about where pop culture is, has been over the last few years, is going in the near future, and about what difference that is shortly going to make in naves, synagogues and auditoriums.

As a final picture of the importance of this witnessing to history that Tickle offers us in November, I offer one last picture from her book The Great Emergence – the gathering center.

My personal belief, having been part of Off the Map the past two years, is that this gathering center is consistently what draws me to Jesus and our events.  Regardless of our past ‘cables of meaning’ we each meet each other and each others’ stories in this gathering center.  Come join the Off the Map gang, Phyllis Tickle and the gathering center as we move from Mirrors to Maps this fall.