Wonderful people I respect have sought to innovate secular forms of community to replace the goods religious congregations bring. They are incredibly hard to sustain. (If you have counter-examples I’d love to know about them.) Enduring communities of real interdependence and mutual care tend to gather not for their own sake, but around something. It is the shared attention to what might be beyond us, the collective practices and rituals in service of a story bigger than our immediate needs which provides the glue. It looks a lot like these goods are not, or not wholly, reproducible within a purely immanent frame.
[Psychologist Richard] Weissbourd shies away from this conclusion, because, of course, he can’t “suggest.. that we should become more religious.” I am not doing that either, not least because I have very mixed feelings about that word. I am just trying to find a place to rest between the two stories I am hearing. I need a way through what often feels like a binary choice when institutions disappoint us: adopt a “see no evil” denial about their failures and defend them from the barricades, or give up on them altogether. I think we’ve seen, as a society, where that second choice leads.
Ultimately, I go to church. I show up at this “wholly fallible, deeply weird” gathering of fragile, annoying human beings, and attempt to tolerate the tensions. I am becoming aware that part of why it’s annoying is it is full of people Not Like Me. They come from different backgrounds, socio-economic strata, political and theological perspectives. The formation of my culture has trained me out of being around people Not Like Me (NLM), encouraged me to forget that it is possible to hold together respect, even love with deep disagreement. This discomfort is part of why “institutional” church seems more likely to form me into the kind of person I want to become. The kind of person the world might need. It reminds me I am also fragile and annoying, and that seems healthy. I need to regularly let this gathering move me past my obsession with everyone else’s faults and compassionately draw my attention to my own. It’s the only way I can find healing for them. I want to be growing up my soul, moving ever closer towards the Love that comes to meet me.
