BLOGGING-THOMAS

Organized religion keeps itself in the news all too often these days by the plethora of reports of its imminent demise.

Seldom, however, do I read one of those reports of impending extinction and come away with a new, or at least renewed, insight about how to think about the tide of larger cultural forces into which religion is periodically swept up.

The post-modern tsunami warnings are out.  It’s just not yet clear whether the ongoing shifting of humanity’s cultural tectonic plates will do more this time than shake us destructively.  The historical quakes of the past century have grown more frequent and terrifying in the past few decades, but no one yet has learned how to predict just when the ‘big one’ will take place for ‘organized religion’.    Is it now?  Or not yet?  Prophets of doom abound.

Then I just read a BBC piece entitled, “Religion may become extinct in nine nations, study says” — By Jason Palmer Science and technology reporter, BBC News, Dallas.

That caught my attention, especially since I found myself after reading it to be more hopeful than before.  The doomsayers this time were members of the American Physical Society meeting in Dallas, TX, who took census data stretching back as far as a century and invoked what is called “nonlinear dynamics,” which in their words can be used “to explain a wide range of physical phenomena in which a number of factors play a part.”   The BBC compared their work to a study by Daniel Abrams of Northwestern University, who “put forth a similar model in 2003 to put a numerical basis behind the decline of lesser-spoken world languages.”  Then when the APS applied nonlinear dynamics to the growing percentage of the world’s population who identify themselves as ‘not religious,’  “the indications were that religion was headed toward extinction.”

Whether or not you understand, much less agree with, this sort of extrapolation of data to explain complex social and cultural movements, I found myself left asking, “do we churchgoers speak a dying language,” one that has lost its grip on the meaning of post-modern life, thus contributing to the emergence of a post-Christian, or even post-religious, reality?    And can religious realities continue to be knowable at all, if the language used to conjure them for our imaginations is eventually no longer spoken anywhere?

I found myself paradoxically-buoyed by thoughts about what it would look like if — as ‘religious’ people, members of churches, believers in creeds, practitioners of prayer — we decided to do something to turn this tide?   Doesn’t it help us, I mused, if the threat of linguistic extinction spurs us to reclaim the “narrative-,” story-quality of our language, its power to render present and manifest a whole world of meaning and possibility?

I’m not against evangelism, but I guess I’m asking myself whether it really helps if all we decide to do is to try to get more people to speak  our “dying language”?  Perhaps instead we should be re-learning together how to tell with power the stories of that world that only religious language can render real, and meaningful, and life-changing, and world-altering?

I was reminded of a Hasidic story that I think I first heard from Elie Wiesel, about the old man, hobbled by such pains of age that he could barely walk with the aid of a cane, who was asked to tell about the Master, the Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidism.  And Wiesel recounts that as the old man told of how the Baal Shem Tov would sing, and dance, and twirl around in mystery and joy during prayer, he, too, did the same — and when he was finished, he was healed of his infirmities.  “Now that’s the way,” Wiesel concluded, “to tell a story.”

May it be so with us, on our Lenten journey together.

During Lent at St. Thomas’ Parish we’re reading together at 10 a.m. on Sundays Dennis Maynard’s book, Forgive and Get Your Life Back. The five week series, The Journey of Forgiveness, continues tomorrow, March 20, with a session entitled “Forgiving and Forgetting.”

If I weren’t helping to lead the series, I might just stop with my knee-jerk reaction to the session title, which is “HA! Fat Chance!!”  It’s what my skeptical side has always felt when I read Psalm 103:

The Lord is full of compassion and mercy,
slow to anger and of great kindness.

God will not always accuse us,
nor will God keep his anger for ever.

God has not dealt with us according to our sins,
nor rewarded us according to our wickedness.

For as the heavens ar3e high above the earth,
so is God’s mercy great upon those who fear him.

As far as the east is from the west,
so far has God removed our sins from us.

I’ve always been puzzled by the fact that the one thing many, perhaps most, religious people can’t abide is belief in God’s forgiveness of us; and maybe it’s why so often we can’t imagine really forgiving, much less forgetting, the sins of others against us.

That’s the challenge we’re taking up tomorrow.  Come join in the conversation!

Lenten Study Group – Sundays 10 a.m.
St. Thomas’ Parish, Dupont Circle

Resource:
Dennis R. Maynard
Forgive & Get Your Life Back

Facilitators:
The Rev. Nancy Lee Jose & Wayne Floyd

March 13
HOSTAGES OF REVENGE

Forgiving Others
Being Forgiven

March 20
FORGIVING AND FORGETTING

The Role of Anger in Forgiveness
Forgiveness Takes Time

March 27
REPENTANCE AND RECONCILIATION

Choosing to Reconcile
The Imperfection of Reconciliation

April 3
RESTORATION AND CELEBRATION

Completing the Restoration Process
A Liturgy of Forgiveness: Celebrating Healing

April 10
NURTURING A FORGIVING HEART

Burying the Past
Seeking Forgiveness

The church lost one its greatest preachers … ever … last night when Peter Gomes died in Boston. If you don’t know about Peter Gomes, he was pastor at Memorial Church on Harvard Yard.  Two generations away from his ancestors in slavery, he disappointed his father by foregoing work in the cranberry bogs in order to become a minister. “When I told my father I wanted to go into the ministry he said, ‘I had hoped my son would do honest work’.  … He expected me to go into the bogs like he did. I have spent the rest of my life trying to persuade father I was doing honest work.”

He believed that Jesus turned everything upside down, but the church had turned them right back up where they were, putting success and power back on top.  “So much for the missionary position,” he told Stephen Colbert.

Peter was a black preacher with an aristocratic Harvard demeanor — a radical Republican who later in life changed his party affiliation to Democratic — a gay Baptist who came out in protest to an article in a conservative student publication at Harvard condemning homosexuality.  As he put it in 1991, “I am a Christian who happens as well to be gay. … Those realities, which are irreconcilable to some, are reconciled in me by a loving God.”

Professor Gomes was as engaging a writer as a preacher.  Try either The Good Book or The Good Life or The Scandalous Gospel of Jesus (download it to your Kindle or iPhone).  Now there’s wisdom.

He also knew how to laugh, starting with himself; you can get a glimpse why thirty years of Harvard students loved him in this clip from the Colbert Report.  We will all miss him, whether or not we knew him in life, because uniqueness like this just won’t happen again.