I
I spent yesterday working on a chapter for my book that's about my childhood and growing up Southern Baptist.
Pressing the memories, I was reminded by how much I loved my childhood, loved the tradition of faith that raised me, brought me into my own.
They were a people who prayed.
A people who lifted hands during the upbeat songs and lifted them higher during the mournful. They sang all the best hymns and all the best new songs, and the lyrics of those songs seasoned the way I prayed. If the Baptists do not have a prayer book, they have a hymnal, and that hymnal is its own sort of liturgy, its own sort of teaching a vocabulary of prayer and habit of being.
I will always love them, even now, as I enter into church fellowship with the Anglicans, these people of a prayer book.
They're more similar than they realise, these two families of faith, but I suppose that comes in the standing on the outside long enough, just long enough, to see them both.
II
I am becoming an Anglican because that is where I pray best, but it is not the best place for everyone to pray.
When I first shared that detail, a handful of people let me know it was good that I was coming home.
This always puzzled me. Anglicanism is not home. Jesus is home. The denominations are the houses of the interpreters, in which Jesus is always and ever but the same.
Why does this make us nervous?
Are we so bold to believe that the denomination we are in has God completely and fully and faithfully figured out? Do we truly think that we have settled in the best of all possible beliefs?
I don't understand denominations as being anything more than interpretations of the same Song. I believe in certain boundaries, in the confession of the Scripture and the revelation of God, but what I believe beyond that is that we worship a God who desires intimacy and has no trouble being found.
So the God of the Southern Baptist is the God of the Roman Catholic; and, I may put my theological foot in it with this one, but I'll chance it, in that I believe the presence of the Eucharist in the Southern Baptist church is the same presence as in the Eucharist in the Roman Catholic.
What that is, well, that is for God to know and for us to receive.
But in this I believe all Gods are one God.
So once believed the saint. And I believe the saint.
III
I have been thinking of Eliot.
At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where.
And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.
What more needs saying than that?
IV
You asked me once about my generation and its leaving the church.
You asked me if we should have more activities to reach the youth.
My generation is leaving the church because of the laser light shows and the fog machines. We are not enticed by your sensitivity to Seekers, and your circus theme or fourteen services on Easter do little more than promise that the church like all businesses is in the trade of commodities.*
You forgot to make disciples.
You taught just enough for the ultimate prize that you forgot how to tell of the journey there.
Maybe this isn't all your fault, but you haven't helped.
Aren't you tired? Don't you want to sit here for a moment and rest? Maybe we'll tell a few stories, about the God who is One, about what He hath done, and maybe then we'll circle back, samsara, to one another and to Him.
V
There are mystics on my bookshelf. Reformation thinkers. Roman Catholics. Eastern Orthodox. Jews.
I am trying to make my heart look like my bookshelf. I am trying to cobble together enough fragments of those who have encountered Him that at the end of all things I may say that though I have not seen in full, I have seen in myriad part.
It's so much bigger than heaven or hell, child.
It's so much bigger than you or I or right.
I am unconvinced that Christ's prayer for unity was about denominations. I think it had something to do with denominations shutting up long enough to listen to each other. To fill their bookshelves. To stitch together the patchwork of saints and know the joy of a God who is always and ever bigger than we ever realise.
But I am so tired of writing that out.
Would that it just be.
For now?
Oh I suppose for now it is the season of stitching. Stitching together the pieces of self.
I am listening for a common language these days. I am listening for anything that rings of Spirit. That is my measuring stick. That is enough. If it speaks of the True, then it is a language that is my own, whatever form it comes.
May it find me; and may I not be too fool, too proud, too certain, to not hear it.
I think there's something of the old stories in that. Of the old and ancient magic. Of the One and only King, who sends out His heralds in whatever manner He wills, in innumerable forms, but with the same Song to sing.
But who's to say? These are the tired days. Maybe all of this is foolishness of a kind.
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*They have their place; I think you take the overall point.
