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
