HABIT OR HOBBY?

Bishop N. T. Wright, former Bishop of York, makes the statement near the conclusion of his book After You Believe that church going used to be a habit of the many but is now a hobby of the few. After reading the statistics of church going in the United Kingdom where about 5% attend church on any given Sunday, I can agree with his observation and certainly understand his concern being a “professional religious” myself.

Church going, however, has never been the habit of the majority in this country, at least for the last fifty or more years, certainly in the 43+ years of my ministry. And while we in this country attend church more than those who live in Europe, attendance is far from what it used to be even on the traditional two high holy days, Christmas and Easter. We simply do not attend worship services as much as we used to. 

Diana Butler Bass, a sociologist of religion, entitles her latest book Christianity after Religion: The End of the Church and the Birth of a New Spiritual Awakening. In a way it is a follow-up to Wright’s observation about what has happened to the practice of our Christian faith, one aspect of it being that most Christians attended church on a regular basis certainly out of habit, most, hopefully, because doing so was very meaningful for their very lives.

Now there are those who would applaud the fact that church going is no longer a habit because they would argue that church going should come from the head and the heart. That would be true. However, we all have habits, good and bad. The good habits, like our daily regimens, are very helpful in keeping us healthful and sane. The bad habits, which we need to eliminate, do the very opposite, which is why we need to rid ourselves of them. As we have all learned, getting rid of bad habits is often more difficult that learning good ones.

Be that as it may, back to Wright’s observation, I suspect he was and is a little piqued because what is very important him to him both as a bishop and as a Christian he finds so unimportant to the people he is called to serve. I get that way sometime when attendance is down especially when the weather is good or bad or for whatever reason church goers go somewhere else on Sunday morning, if the only place they go is to the breakfast table.

What Bass has learned from her sociological observations is that the situation is not as bad as Wright thinks it to be. Yes, church attendance is down and people do not come as regularly as they once did. Where once, certainly when I was a youngster, Sunday morning meant going to church whether you felt like it or not. It was an obligation become habit. Whether I got something out of the worship was not the issue. What was was that I was there, period.

Church going on a regular basis needs to be a habit, a habit of the heart certainly. Where else can we go to find a community of love and support, an opportunity to think about and pray for those we care about and who care about us and an opportunity to collectively and individually give thanks to God for blessing received, both deserved and undeserved?

STRESS

There’s a story, a parable really, about a woman giving a presentation on stress management. She raised a glass a glass of water, and instead of asking the “half full or half empty” question, she asked how heavy the glass of water was. Responses varied between 8 oz. to 20 oz.

“The absolute weight doesn’t matter,” she said. “What matters is how long I hold the glass. If I hold it for a minute, it is no problem. If I hold it for an hour, I will have an ache in my right arm. “If I hold it all day, you’ll probably have to call an ambulance. In each case the weight is the same, but the longer I hold it the heavier it becomes. That’s the way it is with stress.”

We are all stressed in one way or another from birth to death. Stress is part and parcel of life. The only time when we will no longer be stressed is when we are no longer alive. In the meantime each day we have to deal with our share of stress of some kind, sometimes many kinds. How we deal with those stresses in our lives determines how healthy or how ill we are.

The worst way to deal with stress is to go it alone. The stresses in our lives are burdens we must bear. And the best way to bear any burden is to find someone to help carry and share the load. Doing so will not remove the load. It will simply make the load, the stress, easier to bear. Often the best way to share the load is to find someone to talk to. Keeping the stress bottled up inside only makes it worse.

Over the years my wife and I have had to deal with the stresses that came with our work and even more deal with the stresses that came with raising five daughters especially when they were teenagers. Our solution was and is to walk and talk: one to three miles walks for normal stresses to five mile walks usually brought on by the teenagers. We could not and did not resolve work issues or even teenage issues, but talking about them helped each of us share our stressful burdens.

The same is true when we put some of those stresses in the hands of God. Believing, knowing that God cares and will give us whatever strength we need to deal with those life stressors is important. God will not remove them but will help us carry them. That is what prayer is all about. To deal with stress we need both the grace and strength of God and the help and support of another, of others, often many others.

While we need to share those stresses, those burdens, we also need to lay them aside for a while. That is what vacations are for. That is what hobbies and outdoor activities and other forms of recreation are for. Recreation: re-creation. They help us recreate our body, our mind, our spirit so that we can deal with the stresses a little bit better. The better we deal with them the healthier we are.

The opposite is just as true. If we do nothing about the stressors in our lives, we will lose our health. How we deal with stress is vital to our physical, spiritual and mental health.

WE ARE A PEOPLE OF...

It’s been a while since I took part in a conference led by Father Bud Holland from West-by-God-Virginia, as they say in those parts, and a seminary classmate of Bishop Price. Bud is a wonderful conference leader (I’ve been to two) who tries to put the conference he is leading into its proper perspective. He begins by helping the participants understand who they are as a people and as persons.

Bud says that, first of all, we are a people of the context. In other words, all life, all ministry, everything we do takes place in a specific context, that context being where we live and move and have our being, as one of the Sunday Collects puts it. Our context is not where someone else lives and moves and is but where we happen to be at this moment in time. It is only when we both are aware of and understand the context in which we live that we can even begin to understand who we are as a person.

Once we understand that we are a people of our own specific context and know and understand what that context is, the next reality of which we must become aware is that we are also a people of the gathering. In other words, we are also part of a community, in fact, many communities. We are not meant to go it alone in this world, in the context in which we live. We are always part of some sort of gathering even when we choose to be alone. As God says in Genesis, “it is not good for human beings to be alone.” And so we are not.

For us as Christians one of those communities in which we gather is our faith community, our church. We come together to worship, to fellowship, to learn, all in love and support of one another. We come together to be fed, fed both by the Eucharist and by one another in the very many ways we do in deed feed one another. Without that spiritual and supportive nourishment we would not be able to live out our faith and thus fulfill our baptismal promises and responsibilities to seek and serve the Jesus we meet in every person, as an example.

In other words, or our specific “church words”, we are, in Bud’s words, a people of the table. That is a wonderful analogy in that is only when we can come together around a table to share a meal – the Eucharist, pot luck or even a banquet – or only a cup of tea that we can become and grow as a community of any kind, let alone a spiritual community of faith.

Finally, we must remember that the wider community in which we gather is part of our context, for the church always exists in and is part of the wider community. In other words, as Bud reminds, we are a people of the dismissal. We gather as a community of faith around the table, strengthened by the Eucharist and one another, and are dismissed back into the wider context from which we have come to “go in peace to love and serve the Lord.”

We are a people of the context, the gathering, the table and the dismissal: all four. Understanding and living that truth is what we are called to do every day.

WORDS OF WISDOM FOR ALL OF US

E. J. Dionne, a writer for the Washington Post, was the graduation speaker at Allegheny College this year. I like Dionne’s writing and especially his politics. Many, of course, do not. But all of us can agree with his closing words of wisdom and challenge to those graduates. He said: “Never lose your desire to transform charity into justice, division into civility, selfishness into generosity, cynicism into hope.”

Dionne assumed hopefully that the young men and women gathered before who were now ready to leave the safe confines of college life and set out into that confusing and sometimes terrifying and often selfish and divisive world would do what they could to change this world for the better and not become like so many: cynics who have lost all hope that any kind of change for the better is possible.

The status quo is unacceptable, not only for those graduates but for all of us who call ourselves Christians. Yes, as Dionne attests, we are charitable people. It is part of who we are, namely, children of a good God, who innately want to help those in need. We give of our abundance and sometimes, like the poor woman in the Gospel, even give sacrificially. We need to do more.

So many of those in need in this world suffer because of social injustices that are beyond their control or their ability to change. And unless and until justice reigns, as kind and generous and charitable as we are, that unjust suffering will continue. We need to transform our world into one where justice for all and not just for some is the rule and the way of life.

And, yes, there are divisions in our world and in our country. There are those who agree, for instance, with Dionne’s politics and there are those who disagree. Nothing wrong with that. We, as a society, should be about unity and not uniformity. No two people think, believe or act alike. Each of us is unique, meaning that we will disagree about issues, small and great.

Our disagreements, however, do not have to degenerate into uncivil discourse as it has and as it is quite evident in this political season we are now enduring. If we cannot agree with one another, at least we can agree to disagree civilly. Dionne doesn’t think that is too much to ask and neither should we.

Yet civil discourse comes difficultly when we our mindset is “It’s about me.” When our wants and our desires don’t take center stage, we can become quite disagreeable and make that feeling very evident in the way we talk. It is also hard to be generous when the only needs we see are our own. 

The world into which Dionne, with his words, was sending those young men and women could make them quite cynical and lose any sense of hope that they could make the world a better place for all, a world where justice for all, civil discourse and generosity were the standards. Let’s hope not and let us help them make those needed changes.