Friday, July 14, 2023

Summertime Conversations about Faith


Dear Friends,

Continuing our summer series, we turn in this week’s blog to conversations about religion at picnics, parties, while driving together long distances in the car, or when reuniting with friends who are back in town for a visit. On these occasions, we either talk about religion or we assiduously avoid it.

Last week I was with a study group that focused on the legacy of Jesus – discipleship and a community of believers. One of the people there was Greek Orthodox and a weekly communicant in her church. As she talked about her frustrations with her church experience, I thought, “she could be talking about the Roman Catholic Church as I experience it: declining numbers, very few young adults, children absent because their parents are absent, questions over what is expected of believers, the priority some express for spirituality over religion.”

“It's nobody’s business but mine whether I go to church or synagogue or not.” True, but conversations about religion, gently engaged in, can be non-threatening, enlarging, revelatory. Someone else’s life with God could well reveal something about our own life with God. Nuggets from history sometimes tell us why a particular practice developed as it did.

For all of us Christians, our welcome into the faith tradition began with baptism. Baptism, most properly celebrated at the Easter Vigil, unites us to the dying and rising of Christ. As part of the baptismal ritual itself, the newly baptized is clothed in a white garment. The baptized person, still him/herself, becomes new, capable of embracing Christ, taking a place in the community, with all that this means. The baptized person now lives as a member of the Body of Christ. Baptism in its richness takes a lifetime to unfold.

Hard to understand? Yes. But in the 11th century, St. Anselm put the task before us succinctly: “I believe in order to understand.” What he meant is that it is only in living faith that one comes to grasp its meaning better. Staying off at a distance doesn’t help. Belief comes before understanding.

Another important aspect of faith is to acknowledge the mystery of God, the mystery of life, the mystery of human beings exploring God’s life. All of these unfold when we keep company with God, when we listen to God speaking to us in prayer.

The road of faith is hard, and we can’t do it alone. That’s why we need the beloved community, as John Lewis and Martin Luther King called it. We can’t walk away from the beloved community without losing something essential to our lives.

To repeat the point: these summer conversations about faith seeking understanding need to be gentle. We are not called to swap horror stories about negative church experiences, or to mull over answers over unanswerable questions. The difference in us will come when we encourage one another to seek a new moment with God who is always ready to go forward with us, meet us where we do not expect to go.

~ Sister Joan Sobala 

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