What we Hear

Today I was listening to Fresh Air on National Public Radio. Terry Gross was interviewing a poet named Natasha Tretheway. She won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for poetry for her book Native Guard. Good stuff. Her latest book is Beyond Katrina: A Mediation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, a book of poetry and prose.

The part of the interview that I heard included the poet speaking about her grandmother's faith and her funeral.

GROSS: You describe yourself as not a religious person. But do you ever wish that you could have religion like your grandmother did and therefore, find some kind of holy meaning in the most horrible things that have happened?

Prof. TRETHEWEY: I think, you know, she had such a faith and I understood it as a great comfort to her. And there are times that I think that I wish I had such a comfort.I remember when she was being remembered at her service, the preacher looking directly at me and saying, grieve not as others grieve. He was sermonizing about how the faithful don't have the same kind of grief, because they know that there is something else. And so I felt indicted as he looked at me and said "grieve not as others grieve," as if he was pointing to me and saying, I know that you are not the faithful and because of that you have a different kind of grief, the wrong kind.

GROSS: And were you changed by that at all? 

Prof. TRETHEWEY: Oh, I was angry.

GROSS: Angry at him for making you feel that way when you were grieving.

Prof. TRETHEWEY: Yes. I...

GROSS: As if there were a wrong kind of grief.

Prof. TRETHEWEY: I think I wanted remembrance of her and I wanted comfort. I mean, I think funeral services are for the living in some ways. They are to remember the dead, but in the face of the living, beloved. And so I didn't feel comforted. 

I was so sad listening to this. I wasn't there, but it seems to me from her telling that it is possible this minister was offering to her comfort and hope when he said "grieve not as others grieve." However, she certainly didn't take it as such. She took it as judgment, an indictment.

It seems that for some any word from a religious leader is a word of judgment. And it is true that up to and including now, most of the words of religion have been judgmental.

These are the questions I am pondering:

Why are religious voices always heard as judgmental (and I am specifically using "religious" and not "spiritual" here) even when they may not be? Is it only because of our horrible history? Or, is there something going on inside a person that makes them feel indicted by God?

How can we change our religious language so that those around us understand and experience that "God sent his Son into the world not to judge the world, but to save the world..." (John 3:17 NLT)?


I would love to hear your thoughts!

Convicting Quote

I'm reading a book (among several right now) titled The God Evaders: How Churches and Their Members Frustrate Genuine Religious Experience by Clyde Reid, a staff member of the national setting of the United Church of Christ. I was pointed to the book by a quote from it in Dallas Willard's book, The Divine Conspiracy. God Evaders is old (1966), but it good have been written this morning. Reid quotes a pastor of the time, John Heuss, and it has been ringing in my ears for the past few days:

The ordinary day-by-day life of the average successful [there were still a few successful ones back then] local parish makes a mockery out of it's world-influencing revolutionary claims.

It is customary for all of us to lay the blame for the public indifference to religion at the door of the secularism and materialism of our age. It is my personal opinion that neither of these does as much harm as does the constant parade of trivialities which the typical church program offers to the public. This program is only rarely related to the real issues which are clawing the soul of modern man to shreds. This program speaks with no commanding voice to the multitudes perishing for lack of certainty. This program gives the distinct impression that it is concerned exclusively with its own preservation.

What most parishes are habitually doing is so prosaic and so little related to anything except their own hand-to-mouth existence that the public cannot imagine in what way they can possibly influence the great affairs of the world. What the local church has become makes it impossible for the average American to take its life-shaking Gospel seriously. Its day-to-day triviality is its own worst enemy.

Great Sunday

In a quiet, but miraculous way, we noticed God moving at church this Sunday. God, in God's incredible grace, gave us, I believe, and I know gave me a glimpse of what could happen in our church. Our worship Sunday was good. Then some of us gathered to talk about worship, what worship is, how worship is meaningful to us. It was a wonderful conversation that really gave us something to work with as we move forward in our worship planning. And then Sunday night, we rocked. In an almost surreal scene, a rock band, and a pretty good one at that, Southbound Fearing, from Toledo, Ohio, treated the 20 or 30 of us gathered to an ear-splitting, bass-feeling concert.

The days activities nudged us just enough outside the norm to be able to imagine something different. And it was good.