I love my daughter! It's not just that she is a brilliant scholar and theologian; it's that she is an explorer - or maybe she is a guide to my own exploring. Whatever! In any case she recently noted that she was rethinking church (and truthfully, I really don't know what she was referring specifically to). But it got me thinking. Yea, church - the whole concept and set of practices we hold about church - needs a radical make over.
I am thinking that we need to turn it literally inside out. Let's just look at three simple aspects of church. First of all, what if we stopped thinking about going to church all together - I mean stopped thinking that it is some place we go. Because when we go inside the church building, we have entered into an exclusion of others - we have walls around us that hold us inside all safe and sound (not even noticing that in doing so we are walling others out). So what if we start letting church to come into us in a way that turns us outward, that tears down the walls and propels us outward toward others? What if?
And what if we stopped thinking of prayer as something that we do or even chose to do but rather that we got prayed. Richard Rohr says "prayer happened and we were there!" For years I have been thinking more like life lives us and that we are in service to the greater life force that flows through us. Well prayer is just like that. Prayer is our attempt to get out of the way and let the spirit of the divine flow through us and out into the world. What if we started getting prayed?
Then what if we stopped thinking that god was out there - as in anywhere other than everywhere, including every cell of you and me and everything everywhere? How might we act if there was no heaven apart from earth, no place to get to if we got it right? How would we act if we only had right now and recognized that we are inseparable from one another but were actually all entwined as one great living whole?
I want to be that church - that re-thought church!
Saturday, February 6, 2010
Thursday, February 4, 2010
Another One Bites the Dust
For years I have been trying to get it right (whatever "it" is). It was a journey to perfection that I thought would refine my being. If I could only get this right or that perfect, then... Then what? I would be perfect, or right, or whole? I don't think I really thought much about the "then what" part.
But lately I have begun seeing that perfection is a false idol. It is idolatrous to pursue getting it "right" in the first place. God never tells us we have to get it right or perfect - not ever. Oh from time to time in the Bible there are human references to living the pure and chaste life. But those are man-made rules, not god-rules. God's rules are simple: "If and when you screw up, you get another chance - I am the reset button, just come to me and I will reset you."
What the quest for perfection creates, in reality, is separation. It creates a state of better than and worse than - a caste system of being and doing, if you will. Seeking perfection is seeking to rise above the masses, to get better and better and to reach a level of god-like-ness. It is trying to eat of the fruit of the Tree of Perfection.
But there is an alternative path that has been coming into view. When I let go of the drive for perfection,I begin to seek union, oneness and joining of the shredded and torn-apart life we live. Unity is embracing the "bad" with the good. It is the making whole from all of those parts I want to divorce from myself and pretend don't belong to me. Unity is god's commandment - but not just out there, in here as well. Unity demands that I embrace all of me, and do away with the distinctions of good and bad altogether.
And overarching all of this, the search for perfection is a search for certainty - the quest to know completely that this is it, the best, the fullest! In such a place there can be no doubt, and without doubt, there is no need for faith. And then where would I be. When I arrived at that thought - the thought that I would have no faith if I continued my quest for perfection, the wall came crashing down. And then the wall of divisiveness, came down, and then the insistence on good and bad, and me and other, each in turn fell. And one after another, as Freddie said, "Another one bites the dust, and another one gone, and another one down - another one bites the dust." Oh happy holy day!
But lately I have begun seeing that perfection is a false idol. It is idolatrous to pursue getting it "right" in the first place. God never tells us we have to get it right or perfect - not ever. Oh from time to time in the Bible there are human references to living the pure and chaste life. But those are man-made rules, not god-rules. God's rules are simple: "If and when you screw up, you get another chance - I am the reset button, just come to me and I will reset you."
What the quest for perfection creates, in reality, is separation. It creates a state of better than and worse than - a caste system of being and doing, if you will. Seeking perfection is seeking to rise above the masses, to get better and better and to reach a level of god-like-ness. It is trying to eat of the fruit of the Tree of Perfection.
But there is an alternative path that has been coming into view. When I let go of the drive for perfection,I begin to seek union, oneness and joining of the shredded and torn-apart life we live. Unity is embracing the "bad" with the good. It is the making whole from all of those parts I want to divorce from myself and pretend don't belong to me. Unity is god's commandment - but not just out there, in here as well. Unity demands that I embrace all of me, and do away with the distinctions of good and bad altogether.
And overarching all of this, the search for perfection is a search for certainty - the quest to know completely that this is it, the best, the fullest! In such a place there can be no doubt, and without doubt, there is no need for faith. And then where would I be. When I arrived at that thought - the thought that I would have no faith if I continued my quest for perfection, the wall came crashing down. And then the wall of divisiveness, came down, and then the insistence on good and bad, and me and other, each in turn fell. And one after another, as Freddie said, "Another one bites the dust, and another one gone, and another one down - another one bites the dust." Oh happy holy day!
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