traveling churches

I went to two church services at separate churches this morning. I figured if I can go to two physical exercise classes in a day, I can go to two spiritual exercises. I went to First Plymouth Church, which is Disciples of Christ. It's in a beautiful building, and the church's rituals involve the singing of hymns, live classical music, and organ playing.

I was taking notes on what the pastor was talking about, and he started out by saying that conservatives and liberals were making a big mistake in taking on this us versus them mentality. We're all after good ideas. We may disagree about courses of action, but ultimately we're all looking for good ideas. He said all relationships are a struggle, and then went on to talk about the Great Religions and how they developed many ideas of God.

What he was saying was resonating with what I'm reading about, which I can still hardly articulate what I'm beginning to absorb, about the philosophical convergences that the pastor referred to today as "the fertile crescent" (you know which place I mean). There were many ideas of God then as now, and one group starting calling theirs Yahweh and said that he is stronger and truer than the other gods. At that time, Alexander the Great was bringing Greek ideas over from Socrates, Aristotle and Plato, and the Trinatarian notion of God was developed. Then the pastor quoted an idea of Jim Carp's, from Yale, who wrote a book about the characteristics of true religions. What he found to be the most defining characteristic of great religions was their longevity. A religion's longevity with a coherent identity over thousands of years begs the question of why true religions last so long? His answer was that they are utterly filled with words, that they have an extravagant morality. In the great religions, there are so many articulations of faith that keep drawing people together in the mystery of the great questions. For example, we think of the concept of justice and believe that God loves justice. We may never come up with one answer for what justice is (hence the frustrations in the law and law school and politics), but communities can gather and think about the divine in our own heart and look at questions that emerge.

True religion draws people together in mystery, wonder, and awe and in relationships of goodness and greatness, and that is God. And then there is the question: do you want to be right or in relationship?

So, I don't know that he told me much that I hadn't already thought myself, but it was nice hearing all of that said in a group somehow.

Then I went to a "new church" held in a movie theatre. The pastor was up on a stage with a band set up, etc. He had a power-point of sorts to go along with his Good Samaritan re-telling. People sang songs and felt emotional about Jesus loving them. Afterwards, I quickly decided to give a homeless man my leftovers from lunch.

So, what did my efforts bring? Well, I was more easily able to be a good person, and I felt better about the people around me. One insightful thing the pastor at the second church said (a re-telling of be right or in relationship) was that to love God, we have to love people. It's not one or the other. So, I was reminded that I've already learned a lot about loving people, and in the process loved God... I still don't know about heaven or hell. There's not much motivating me to believe in those things. I guess if I really felt I were a good, devout Christian, I'd like to believe in heaven.

As for the political spectrum, I think we all want to be safe and want to be able to pass on a healthy world to our children. The healthy world thing is tough, though, because people tend to want to make as much money as they can, and America has been so prosperous that people expect more of the same and more and try to create it. I'm thinking we probably don't need more Coke so badly, but this society is very great at creating new addictions, when of course just water will do. We'll have to value water more before it becomes a more valued commodity, I guess.

I don't know. I guess that's as much as I know for now. I do like Eckhart Tolle and am re-reading The Power of Now after learning yesterday that Clint's mom is also reading it. I think there is wisdom from the East that is coming into the West... I want to understand more about the good and bad of Western thought. I'm interested in the Christian existentialists because they were sort of positive existentialists. Unlike Nietsche and Sartre, they didn't conclude that the world is absurd and meaningless. I'm not sure what they concluded yet (still reading), but they believed in God and felt that faith didn't have to be rationale. I like ideas that value subjective experiences of spirituality, even though the rationalist West under the intellectual legacy of Aristotle felt that it wasn't real if you couldn't prove it. I think that makes the atheists' plight understandable. It's what the currents of valued Western thought has set us up for, though it doesn't make for much happiness beyond catching the next game or the next flight, as far as I can tell. And then once you get there, what are you going to talk about anyway other than the last or next game? I guess meaning as we find it.

I think meaning is out there and inside and possible. I think it is emotional. I think we are all part of everything and therefore not so divided. I wish schools were run differently, I know that. But I'm not ready to give up on the public. I think it's pretty easy and understandable to be lost and searching. But I really liked the passage by G.K. Chesterton the preface to The Everlasting Man way back in 1925 where he addresses how it's easier to find value in someone else's tradition:

"In the specially Christian case we have to react against the heavy bias of fatigue. It is almost impossible to make the facts vivid, because the facts are familiar; and for fallen men it is often true that familiarity is fatigue. I am convinced that if we could tell the supernatural story of Christ word for word as of a Chinese hero, call him the Son of Heaven instead of the Son of God, and trace his rayed nimbus in the gold thread of Chines embroideries or the gold lacquer of Chinese pottery, instead of in the gold leaf of our own old Catholic paintings, there would be unanimous testimony to the spiritual purity of the story. We should hear nothing then of the illogicality of atonement or the impossible insolence of an invasion of the laws of nature. We should admire the chivalry of the Chinese conception of a god who fell from the sky to fight the dragon and save the wicked from being devoured by their own fault and folly. We should admire the subtlety of the Chinese view of life, which perceive that all human imperfection is in very truth a crying imperfection. We should admire the Chinese esoteric and superior wisdom, which said there are higher cosmic laws than the laws we know; we believe every common Indian conjurer who chooses to come to us and talk in the same style.

Now the best relation to our spiritual home is to be near enough to love it. But the next best is to be far enough away not to hate it. It is the contention of these pages that while the best judge of Christianity is a Christian, the next best judge would be something like a Confucian. The worst judge of all is the man now most ready with his judgments: the ill-educated Christian turning gradually into the ill-tempered agnostic, entangled in the end of a feud of which he never understood the beginning., blighted with the sort of hereditary boredom with he knows not what, and already weary of hearing that which he has never heard."

Still don't know how I will approach wanting to read the Bible. Since I can basically take undergrad classes for free, I may take some in religion. I think ending up in a religious calling would be cool. Some students I taught in public school were up on stage today for a mission. Dealing with people inside a religious institution more divorced from pop culture would be nice in relating with the higher parts of them, the parts that are willing to leave their technology to go out on a mission to help people who are suffering.