This is simply a reflection on the experience of visiting a new church
When you visit, whether a place, a person, or an organization, there are three things that inevitably happen:
My recent, and deeply sad retreat from 12 years of lay leadership in a church, and the subsequent full departure from that church (a process documented in numerous blog posts, e.g. voices of the dead), was completed with the end of 2016. I've now started visiting elsewhere to explore future avenues to Christian community (whatever that really means: the church is dead, long live the church). Sadly most (first) visits are dominated by (1) and (2), because one is hyper-conscious about one's comfort zone. Visiting a church is perhaps one of the more discomforting experiences, as the pressure to be visible among the "in-crowd" of regulars can be quite strong, and the organizational culture is still a bit of an unknown. "If you're a visitor here this morning, please raise your hand so we can give you a welcome packet (and make sure we identify you to nail you in conversation afterwards)". All well intentioned, I know, and having experienced it from both sides, it is critical to break the barriers of self-isolation if the visit is to be of much benefit. But it can be unnerving to some. So some quick comments on this morning's visit from the perspective of the three "visit-elements" given above, first about (1) and (2), and then more importantly about (3). Form and function: this is not critically important, so long as it is not so alien that the content becomes inaccessible. This is the classic problem with traditional church; the language and rituals make the content extremely opaque to most contemporary visitors. My visit today found things very accessible given my eclectic experience and exposure to church cultures (albeit I wanted to tell the the person on the sound mixing desk that "there's a control for mid-range frequencies, please use it"). The music was appropriately competent, the people were genuine, and the focus was not on the organization, but on the community of faith that brings us together. The talk was challenging, pointed and relevant. One could quibble; for example, my years of teaching has taught me at least one thing, that a 40 minute monologue leaves 80% of the people unable to remember 80% of the detail. But overall, great. Choosing to engage: there are two aspects to this; participation in the corporate expression, and thinking about how one might engage if one joined the community. The former is predicated on (1), and today it was really great to be able to participate without the over-burden of layers of tired ritual and esoteric ecclesiastical jargon. The second aspect, that of how I could possibly be a participating member of this community, cannot be explored in one visit, and of course subject to what God wants of me, certainly there appeared to be opportunity. The bigger picture of fundamental purpose: Christians gather to collectively express worship, to publicly evidence their faith, and to serve one another in relational community. The church service is one expression of this. This morning's visit was really refreshing from this perspective, and I realized how unreal some my church experiences of the last year had been. As in all gatherings, today a range of degrees of engagement was evident: in the row in front of me two kids playing first-person-shooter games on their cell phones, while further along teenagers clearly immersed in the worship, and then there was the lady in a wheelchair taking extensive notes during the talk. Overall the dominant expression from most was "for me this is real", and the theology on which it was founded (as best I can tell) was orthodox (literally meaning “right teaching”, not a tradition of ritual and institution). And that's what makes Christian faith exciting: the individual experience of a reality cannot be denied. Of course it can be abused, and it can be emotionally hyped. But when built on reason, and where the heart rationally chooses the values and foundations of a God-relationship, this contains something that all society appears to yearn for. Sadly, many find Christ's cost to the ego too high.
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Someone liked my tweet about my previous post. So I followed her twitter account, and then onto her blog, and there saw a link to the above RSA video. This dovetailed with a topic I had been thinking about.
I have a number of friends in the USA who are emotionally devastated about Trump (and that is overstating it), while others are deeply wrestling with personal challenges about what they face in 2017 (life in a developing country can be complicated!). I want to empathise with them, and some I can (like those traumatised by Trump) while others are not so easy (like the one struggling to sell a complicated business setup so that they can retire). My measure of empathy is largely conditioned by whether I have some personal experience which I can draw on to help me understand where they're at. It's not easy sometimes, even if I choose to try to be empathetic rather than the less-than-helpful sympathetic. This raises a question for me: how do I empathize when I have no personal experience to which I can relate the struggles of others. Children being seriously ill took on a new meaning when my daughter nearly died. Tragic death took on a new meaning when my mother was murdered. Living without either parent had a different meaning when my father subsequently died. It was after these events that I could better empathise with others because I had relatable experience. The negative side of not feeling empathy is that this can result in becoming obsessively focused on oneself. When one cannot empathise (or chooses not to), it is the personal vulnerabilities of our own lives that fill our vision, because we've failed to make space to feel the vulnerabilities of others. This, perhaps, is one of the root causes of abusive leadership in our nations and institutions. Trump has no affinity for the blue collar worker (and bizarrely, why did so many vote for him?), and so what does he care about developments such as this one, where the USA is losing the lead and consequently millions of potential jobs in renewable energy? I imagine he cares only to the extent that such events touch his own insecurities, because in Trump's emotion-filled world the vulnerabilities of concern are those of his own ego. My own president (Zuma) is a good African counterpart ... seemingly having no capacity to feel guilt, no capacity to empathise with those impacted when his actions hurt the nation, and being a misogynist to boot. And because I profess a Christian faith, I also have to point a finger at the global church. Where is the church's empathy for the spiritual malaise of the post-modern relativist in a deeply polarized world of unstructured violence? Is the church leadership unable to empathise - with all that the word entails? Is it because the church leadership has so decoupled themselves from society that they have little comprehension of the secular post-Christian life experience? Is it because, they too, have filled their vision with the vulnerabilities of an institutional ego? http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/spirit.png More details here How is your existential crisis doing? Mine is in a rocky place (again). A few years ago I had a conversation with a man facing death, a man who had lived an exemplary Christian life of deep faith. As death approached he asked the question "Is God real?". I thought then that this was perhaps not the best time for him to have that question surface again, but in hindsight I think it was simply healthy thinking. In general, most Christians don't like to get existential ("just believe it"), and such resistance does not strike me as healthy because we grow by questions. My current existential crisis is in a place where its not about whether there's a God or not, its about assessing the meaning of my moments, and what this says for the future. Is my current life compatible with my understanding of my existence? There has a nice analogy in weather forecasting. In the absence of external information, the best forecast for tomorrow's weather is persistence. That is, statistically speaking, if weather forecasting was a betting game you'd win most often by betting on the persistence of today's weather. In that sense weather forecasters try to use additional information sources to forecast how tomorrow will be different from today. Of course, because tomorrow's weather will be some combination of past experience, this helps the forecaster limit the possibilities and focus on the probabilities. With existential crises we have no such comfort. For example, the past is full of evidence about the meaning of the moments we experience, and this has relevance if such experiences recur. But it provides little ground for understanding the meaning for the range of possible future experiences; there is so much that is unknown about what could happen tomorrow, in 2017, or in the next decade, that our future experiences or discoveries might be so unexpected that they force a complete re-evaluation of our understanding of ourselves, From childhood we live this ongoing existential crisis, even before we even know what the word means. Its amazing to me that, for all the education we receive, and no matter how old we get, we never complete the answer to the meaning of life - in fact we're all expected to either simply accept someone else's explanation, or are left to discover it for ourselves. Unless, of course, we conclude that life is meaningless (or accept 42) and so give in to nihilism, or anarchy, and our hedonistic propensities. Some people, perhaps most people, manage to avoid this angst most of the time, viewing it as merely a passing fad of their teenage and university years. Yet, however expert we become at suppressing the question, like an unwelcome friend it manages to crop up again and again. For each individual and age the question varies; for some its forever wrestling with the raw baseline of whether life's meaning is self-ascribed, or externally defined? The first conclusion is a safe and attractive one, albeit a somewhat depressing close cousin of nihilism (and nihilists don't often make good friends). Its the view of philosophers like Jean-Paul Sartre: "Life has no meaning a priori… It is up to you to give it a meaning, and value is nothing but the meaning that you choose.” It's a slippery path that leads one of two directions; either toward lifestyles of egoism, racism, nationalism (even ISIS), or else it leads to an equally problematic position of extreme progressives who "tolerate everything except intolerance". The second option, that meaning is externally defined, is deeply uncomfortable. For to say that meaning is defined from outside of oneself is to acknowledge absolutes in values that are defined by what is probably best described as a God. I live by this second position; and even more so by the orthodoxy of the Christian God (remembering that "orthodoxy" literally means “right teaching” or “right belief”, not a tradition of ritual and institution). And so back to my existential crisis. I'm trying to deal with the pre-conditioning of meaning that came through an upbringing in the strictures of 19070's evangelicalism. There's a lot in that experience which, by reasoning and examination of evidence, I sincerely accept as "right teaching" about God. But there is also much that I was taught that I begin to view as an artificial constraint on how a life in community should evolve, founded on my continually-examined conclusions about the meaning of my existence. Chesterton wrote a century ago, “Christianity was reproached with its naked and hungry habits; with its sackcloth and dried peas. But the next minute Christianity was being reproached with its pomp and its ritualism; its shrines of porphyry and its robes of gold. It was abused for being too plain and for being too coloured.” Today we might speak of mega-church tele-evangelists, the co-option of the Christianity brand by conservatives, or of neo-hermit mystics. Christianity is full of paradoxes, which superficially examined makes Christianity seem wrong in opposite ways and for opposite reasons. Chesterton continued with a conclusion that "Christianity must be something even weirder and wickeder than they made out” until he reached a point when all his examination of atheism and the life's experience simply turned him to orthodox Christianity. The challenge is how to separate the real yet illegitimate paradoxes in the institutionalized faith from the apparent paradoxes of a God-defined meaning of existence. And this then is the 2017 manifestation of my existential crisis, to re-examine the expression of the collective faith in the context of an absolute meaning to individual life, not defined by secular measures of achievement and accomplishment, but by relationship. |
Why?
Probably the best therapy is to express yourself. Why do you think psychiatrists make you lie on the couch and talk, while all they do is murmur "hmmm", "uhuh", or "go on"? Archives
May 2017
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