New York Diary

the first line says it all

religious practice... making the world safe for the sanely religious... eating together as elemental, Communion as not... this Christianity as an empty religion... the problem of mystery: its unbelievability and its desirability... I like hymns

RLC asks me why I "did the whole Lent thing." (I gave up sweets, desserts, mochas from Starbucks, that sort of thing.) He wonders why I'd go to church on Easter, much less Good Friday. He points out, correctly, that I don't really seem to believe in God and that I don't have a pre-existing religious community here in New York to which I might be bound by ties of friendship, kinship, or local tradition (as I might be bound to certain congregations in Florida and Connecticut, for example). Moreover, he wonders if the broader ties of tradition that do exist provide any real good to me or the world generally; he points out that the Lord's prayer may be a valuable but not unique memory exercise if there is no Lord in the first place, while Communion without belief is an empty gesture characterized by cardboard-like wafers and poor-quality wine. Other, more do-gooder aspects of the church are in no way inherently religious, he maintains: you don't need any kind of religious faith to work at a soup kitchen.

RLC's reading of my religiosity is quite accurate. Ask me if there's a God and my answer is something like "I don't know, but I sincerely doubt it, and at any rate the question has little practical influence on my life." This is not to say, of course, that I am not concerned about doing good in the world. It's not even to say that I don't care about going to church every now and again or about knowing the Bible as an important cultural reference. Simply, it's to say that the reasons that I think we ought to care about acting morally and about maintaining many of our religious traditions don't have that much to do with the carrot and stick of a heavenly or hellish afterlife, or even of God's pleasure and displeasure.

But then, back to RC's question, why do the whole Lent thing? Or the whole religious thing more generally?

My responses are really of two very different types: a personal, "but I like it" response, and a broader, making-the-world-safe-for-the-sanely-religious response. I also sometimes think about the preservation of human story and history, though I don't think that this itself could ever be enough to successfully urge me into personal religious practice.

Let's take these things in order. In the first place, and about Lent specifically, I think the institution of the Lenten fast is a good one. There is, of course, the fact that we often choose to give up something which is bad for us (or which we think of as bad for us): candy, alcohol, cigarettes, soap operas. That constitutes a very real and practical good. More important to me, though, is the exercise of will that is inherent in the choice to do without (or to actively do) something (like exercising, talking to your kid more often, something like that). For me, an awful lot of the appeal of Lent is the ability to say: "Sure, I love Breyer's ice cream, and I eat it often because I have the luxury of sufficient income, sufficient metabolism, and sufficient exercise to make that not unreasonable. But just because I have ice cream every few days doesn't mean I must have ice cream every few days." A time-delineated personal sacrifice gives us a ready-made mechanism for reminding ourselves to want to do that which we do do. I want to eat ice cream because I enjoy it, not because I'm in the habit of it, or because I don't feel like cooking supper, or because I can't help myself. The fact that I can give it up for a month and a half makes that more obvious. (For the record, unlike some, I don't give up for Lent that which I mean to give up permanently. I want to reinforce in myself the idea that I do what I choose, not the idea that I can wait until Lent to stop doing things I shouldn't be doing in the first place. Moreover, I don't mean to give up things I enjoy forever; rather, I mean to question whether I actually enjoy them, or whether I am doing them out of habit or instinct or addiction or something. Let me tell you, I enjoy Breyer's ice cream. Ergo, I am now pleased to be eating it again.)

More broadly but still in the "but I like it" category: I like hymns, I love evensong services and I think some liturgical music is absolutely fantastic, and I am strongly moved by many religious spaces. I go to church, on the rare occasions when I do, for deeply-held aesthetic reasons. I do not think that this is a bad thing.

There is another reason why I go to church and, moreover, why I like to present myself as a person who sometimes does so. It's the reason RLC knows I was celebrating Lent in the first place. That is, I want this country to be a place in which normal, sane, doubt-filled, non-ideological people might self-identify as Christian, with all the history and rhetoric that entails--and, conversely, I want it to be a world in which people who self-identify as Christian might aptly be described as normal, sane, non-ideological, and even doubt-filled. I fear that the Evangelical movement has cornered the market on the church in America. Certainly Evangelicals have every right to be a PART of American Christianity, but any religious movement ought to be tempered by questions from within, because without those voices one can't help but be ideological (simply because religion is founded on a premise of absolute morality and truth). I don't like the politics of God that characterize "Christianity" in America today. At the same time, though, I fear that much of the political left has become decidedly anti-religious as a backlash to the megachurch movement (instead of as a considered position). It seems like the more education one has, the more likely one is to forget the very real good things that are linked to religious practice--from touchy-feely good feelings to very real incentives to help others or to not steal even when no one is watching. Moreover, by coopting the term "Christian," Evangelical Christians may have successfully built their movement, but it also makes it too easy for atheists to paint all Christians with a single brush--which usually comes out as something like "they're all crazy" or even "they're all bad for America." Not true--so I don't like the anti-God politics, either. Making it clear that I am Christian (by upbringing and familial background, at least--certainly I'm not Muslim or Jewish or Bah'ai or Hindu or anything else), that I occasionally go to church (I'm a stereotypical Christmas-and-Easter type), that I'm celebrating Lent, and that I know the Bible stories--but also making it clear through my actions that this is a cultural and religious identification and not a political one--places me firmly in the middle ground. I want this shrinking middle ground to continue to exist, to mediate between the crazies on both sides of the religious divide. I think that those of us who think that Christianity can be real, good, yet neither all-consuming in life nor absolutely determinative of our morality, have an obligation to live a life that points to that fact. It would be great if we as a nation could care deeply about morality and character without automatically being assumed to care deeply about, say, the Bush presidency. There is a space for such sentiment within religion (any religion), and it would be nice if some Christians would choose to occupy it on occasion.

All that said, it's hard not to feel that traditional Protestant Christianity is an empty faith in America today. There's not much spiritual sustenance in a sparsely populated church, and this is all the more true when religion is made devoid of mystery as seems to be de rigeur these days. Frankly, I'd rather have the arcana and doubt its worth than have the religion say nothing but believe it.

Nowhere is this more obvious to me than in the sacrament of Communion. For Protestants, even those who believe doubtlessly, the sacrament is nothing more than a symbol. A priest stands up there, says some stuff in English, you go up, eat a wafer and drink some wine, and then you reflect on being a part of the spiritual body of the church. It's a ritual with important significance theologically, but very little significance experientially. Compare this with the Jewish tradition of praying over the bread and wine, washing before eating, and breaking the silence with the food (an obvious comparison at Easter, to me, because of the fact that the last supper was a Passover meal). The contrast is startling. There is something elemental about eating together, and that thing is absent from the "bread" and wine of Communion. Moreover, the linguistic shift (into Hebrew for the prayers) unites Jews everywhere and makes you a part of a larger religious body in a very obvious way, while the subsequent shared meal means that those who pray together over the bread later talk to each other and enjoy each other's company--meaning that, in other words, they actually DO form a community. Taking your wafer and getting the hell off the kneeling pad so somebody else can get on is not actually very communal, and can't hold a candle to a real meal when it comes to the practical interpenetration of religious tradition and real life.

posted by Skay @ 2:04 AM