I was seven years old and had just moved to a new community 2 years earlier. Blackie, a small black kitten (the imagination of an almost five year old apparently isn't well developed...lol..) came with us and became my anchor in this new place. Then one evening Blackie didn't return from the mousing with which he filled his days. I had faith though, and scoured the surrounding fields for days and weeks looking and calling for him. There was nary a faint meow! Then, although it broke my heart, I convinced myself that he had found another home that he liked better, but still might turn up eventually when he remembered me.
It was much later, years after my father died, that my mother told me he had found Blackie dead on the highway in front of our house after being hit by a car. His reason for not telling me was he didn't want me to be upset! Little did he know that telling me he would have prevented decades of my feeling abandoned by the first ‘person’ outside of my family that I had trusted myself to love.
As I still think about this today some 66 years later, I can see a corollary to this story in the institutional church of today. While I grew up in the United Church of Canada widely touted for it’s inclusive and current theology, it was still a church where the minister who told his confirmation class that the old Testament was written by ‘J’, ‘P’ and ‘D’ instead of Moses, didn’t last much more than a year in our small town church and where the flannelboards used in the Sunday School lessons showed Jonah living inside the whale even to having a lit candle on the table that was in there with him.
Why is it that the Christmas stories all include a virgin birth, and the creed we say on Sunday talk about a bodily resurrection? Why does the church talk about the gospels being written by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, as well as giving St. Paul the credit for writing 1&2 Timothy, Titus, Ephesians, Colossians and 2 Thessalonians, all of which are disputed by scholars. Why are we not told that St. Paul, who by his own admission never met Jesus, wrote his lettres first to be followed by the gospels, written by people who were probably already familiar with his writings? And I could go on and on. 
The answer is, I believe, that the church ‘thinks’ that if we don’t have the promise of heaven, that if we actually knew where theology had gone in the last hundred years, we would leave the church. [similar to my father not wanting me to know that Blackie was dead, because that would upset me].
Instead what has happened is that people are leaving the church because they can no longer accept these things. They can no longer live in two worlds, one on Sunday, that the church upholds, and one the other six days that is supported by current scientific knowledge. For me, my religious understanding has to be in sync with the knowledge in the world around me. Yes, that means my understanding will change! No, that is not a bad thing!
Comments
Post a Comment