There is no Beige Season

Earlier today, I happened upon a thought of Bishop Robert Barron disparaging what he called the 'beige church.' It has stuck with me through the day.

Beige is a neutral color. For many, such as myself, it is a boring and non-descript hue.  It is the color of winter where I live.  It is a color without statement...inoffensive, bland, non-threatening.  The Church uses many different colors to inform us of a liturgical reality. They are meant to incite some spiritual response.  The inform us of a liturgical season.  In my parish, we talk of Mass settings specific to seasons, which I lump into the Green Season, the Purple Seasons, and the White Seasons.  There are no beige seasons.  There are no seasons of the Church that are meant to lull into a inoffensive state of niceness.

Yet, a fair statement might be made that so many in leadership, both lay and cleric, strive for a beige church. The beige church is one of comfort.  It is easy.  It demands little spiritually.  It gives nothing spiritually. It wraps itself in a bland corporate visage.  It preaches as if the goal is to soothe into a hushed silence or comatose spiritual state of existence.  It plays like a new age ditty, repeatedly hitting the three same chords over and over again until the listener has either gone mad  or fallen asleep.  It is uninspiring and easy to leave.

Its churches are not churches any longer, but worship spaces.  They are paeans to mediocrity and even ugliness. They lack either the soaring heights of the gothic, the swirling arches of the baroque, or even the stark majesty of the Cistercian. The beige church lacks either the regal simplicity of chant or the bombast of organ, it lacks the color of procession, the urgency of preaching, and the scent of holiness.  All replaced for the tidy look of a bank lobby, the easily dismissible mundanity of beige walls, singsong Muzak droning in the background, and condescending banal messages masquerading as homilies.  Neither the thundering theophany nor the still quiet voice find a home here. The senses are anesthetized into a spiritual coma content on the sound of its own breathing.

Given the rich heritage of artistry and theology we have been given, to reduce the Church to a beige entity is to bleed her dry.  Those that bled her dry were not beige themselves.  No, they ran crimson with malice, emerald with envy, and soaked with scarlet in their lust.  The colorful spectrum that disperse the light that had the ability to overshadow these garish hues had to be painted over by a nice coat of beige.

I have yet to ever see a beige battle standard.  Battle standards often stand out for their brilliant and bold shades meant to hearken its followers to courage and its enemies to fear. The thunderous message of Christ Crucified and Resurrected should spur us to the field of battle; our anthems blaring like the hosts of heaven. Even our silences should roar like the thunder of a coming storm.

There should be no room in our parish life, in our personal lives, nor our spiritual lives for the blandness and inoffensiveness of beige.  God's grace does not leave in such a colorless place. The Blood of Christ runs a brilliant red, not beige.  The Church is to actively soar to the heights, not sleep like a winter field.  Its rhetoric is there to compel conversion, comfort the afflicted, and spur the troops to victory. Like bold colors, it offends the sensibilities of the comfortable. It stirs up and shatters the darkness boldly and without apology.

Give me this church and we turn the tide.  This church, and not the church of beige, captures the attention of a warrior's heart and valor. Give me the Church that stands boldly against oppressors even in the face of certain death. Give me the Church that can have the soft stir of a symphony and its booming movements as well. Give me a Church that assaults my senses instead of numbing them.  Give me a Church that possesses all of what Christ gave us...in all His strength and boldness.

We can send the beige church to a liturgical ash heap and dismiss it as an experiment in niceness and mediocrity that failed miserably.  We better do so quickly while there are some left.