October 30, 2002

• Dwaber asked "what would you say if you had courage?"  I don't have much courage, but I do have an answer.

  
  

  To be above
  With the saints I love
    Oh, that will be glory
  Here below
  With the saints I know
     That's a different story.

  
  

  That Exmortis is tearing up my comments section leaving quips that get me started thinking about more and different tangents.  Yesterday, he worried that gawd's faithfull masses equate his will with war and intolerance.  I can tell by this statement that he's never attended a Wednesday night business meeting of the local faithful masses.  

  
  

  Let's say that hypothetically, God lit up a neon sign reading, "It is My will that you kill your neighbor."

  
  

  65% of the congregation would miss it because they don't show up.
  10% would offer to form a committee to see how this suggestion could be worked into the five year plan.
  5% would declare on the spot that there was no budget item for a neon sign this year and that God should bear the cost.
  7% would notice that the word neighbor is spelled "n e i g h b o u r" in the King James version and would demand that the sign be altered to reflect the one true and Authorized Word of God which everyone knows is the one that Jesus used.
  3% would protest that the pastor had put God up to it to fulfill his own hidden agenda.
  3% would say this is why the pastor doesn't need a raise this year.
  2% would say that they need a new building to carry out God's program.
  5% would vote to adjourn to the kitchen for coffee and pie.

  
  

  Can you tell that I'm not a huge fan of churches?  Oh, I understand that as a Christian I'm automatically enrolled in the Church spread out through time and space, rooted in eternity.  I rather like that.  The church I have a problem with is the one aroudn the corner, you know the one I'm talking about - the Baptist Methodist Episcopalian Presbyterian Church of God, Jesus, Mary, and the Holy Spirit Community Fellowship of Catholic Orthodoxy.  The Great Church is largely invisible in day to day dealings with local congregations made up of bad tempered men and women who sing off key, have shoes that squeak, wobble their chins when they speak, and wear odd things. 

  
  

  I'm not surprised when I turn on the evening news and see destruction, degradation, and despair.  See I believe (along wth Carl Jung) that the Judeo-Christian-Muslim doctrine of Original Sin makes more sense of the observable world than all the sophisticated humanist philosophy I was tested on in school.  I get the whole God thing.  I get that humanity left to its own devices will naturally gravitate toward muck and misery.  I get that God in compassion reaches out to individuals.  I get that there is nothing I can do to attract His attention, I already have it whether I want it or not.  I get that through God's grace I have an invitation to a relationship that will do no less than transform my life.  I don't get that when God sets me down in a group of other people who've RSVPed that they too want to attend the party, they immediately start to ... fight.

  
  

  See I'm really cool with God.  He and I get along fairly well most of the time, seriously.  He tells me jokes.  He has a wicked sense of timing though, put me in a room full of serious pray-ers and sure as anything He'll whisper something in my ear that gets me giggling.  I get a lot of weird looks, but I'll tell you, God is funny and He does a dead on Bill Cosby impersonation.

  
  

  Church has the capacity to be cool, I can't imagine anything better than a group of people with a Friend in common getting together to celebrate that friendship.  I've been a part of small circles of the Friend's friends who are more concerned with staffing the red cross disaster kitchen than they are with whether they are on the committee to choose new carpeting.  I've been a member of communities who literally go all over the world building hospitals, schools, and homes.  I've been to celebrations of the Friendship that were so real, intense and beautiful that all I could do was cry. 

  
  

  None of the things that make church cool have anything to do with religion.  They are all about relationship.  As a general rule when I write about religion, I try to make sure I use the term in a positive sense.  But, the truth is that I don't place much stock in religion, and especially not Organized Religion.  It seems to me that religion is just rules and regulations that try to outline the one acceptable relationship to Friend, and that makes no sense to me.  I don't have the same relationship with my husband that anyone else has with him, I don't have the same relationship with my son that anyone else has with him.  Can you imagine anything sillier than trying to write out a list of rules for the one and only true way that you can interact with Tim based on my interactions with him?  (I can promise you that Tim doesn't want that either.)  Why do we try to do that to God?

  
  

  At least this is what I might say, if I had courage.

  • 10:38 am
  • 31 Comments