DAY 15
From the devotional book Beyond Words by Frederick Buechner
“x + y = z. If you know the value of one of the letters, you know something. If you know the value of two, you can probably figure out the whole thing. If you don’t know the value of any, you don’t know much.
Preachers tend to forget this. “Accept Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior and be saved from your sins,” or something like that, has meaning and power and relevance only if the congregation has some notion of what, humanly speaking, sin is, or being saved is, or who Jesus is, or what accepting him involves. If preachers make no attempt to flesh out these words in terms of everyday human experience (maybe even their own) but simply repeat with variations the same old formulas week after week, then the congregation might just as well spend Sunday morning at home with the funnies.
The blood atonement. The communion of saints. The Holy Ghost. If people’s understanding of theological phrases goes little deeper than their dictionary or catechetical definitions, then to believe in them has just about as much effect on their lives as to believe that Columbus discovered America in 1492 or E = mc 2.
Coming home from church one snowy day, Emerson wrote, “The snow was real but the preacher spectral.” In other words, nothing he heard from the pulpit suggested that the preacher was a human being more or less like everybody else with the same dark secrets and high hopes, the same doubts and passions, the same weaknesses and strengths. Undoubtedly he preached on matters like sin and salvation but without ever alluding to the wretched, lost moments or the glad, liberating moments of his own life or anybody else’s.
There is perhaps no better proof for the existence of God than that year after year the whole God enterprise survives despite the way the professionally godly promote it. If there are people who remain unconvinced, let them tune in their TVs to almost any of the big-time pulpit pounders almost any Sunday morning of the year.”
my reflection Reading this made me want to rise from my chair and cheer. What he says in this devotional is oh so true. In my formative years I had significant exposure to the Catholic faith by virtue of me attending Catholic parochial junior high school and then Jesuit high school and college. I wasn’t raised Catholic, in fact my family weren’t really churchgoers at all. While I’m thankful every day for my excellent Jesuit education, I never felt at home in the Catholic church. I remember attending a funeral Mass for a friend several years ago. I hadn’t set foot in a catholic church for more than 20 years before this. I remember being really bothered by the call-and-response pattern of the service. Everyone saying the same thing at the same time put me in mind of something else far removed from religion or spirituality. “We are the Borg.” I finally understood why Catholicism never felt like a good fit to me. There was just way too much rigid ritual. And how many of those people droning those words really, I mean really, understood what they were saying? I know this ritual is meaningful in and of itself for a lot of people, and I’m not trying to minimize that, but it just never was for me. Going to church and mouthing the same words, week after week after week, in perpetuity, just doesn’t do it for me. For me it has the same signifcance as a first-grader dutifully saying the Pledge of Allegiance. They have no clue what the words mean (except in rare instances), so what’s the point? When religion started to cause me to think, to stretch my beliefs and be open to new ideas and notions, is when my faith really began to take flight. And I’m so glad it did!
- Our Weekend Getaway - January 22, 2024
- So Long, Mom, And Thanks For All The Spaghetti - November 10, 2023
- Thoughts On The Chogaffirm Petition - June 3, 2023
- Rhonda - June 3, 2023
- Beyond Words Day 23 - April 4, 2023
- Beyond Words Day 21 - April 1, 2023
- State Of The Household - January 9, 2023
- Book Review and Miscellany Thoughts - November 18, 2022
- Initial Thoughts On My Writing - September 13, 2022
- Beyond Words Day 19 - September 11, 2022
