Religion: The Search for a Church

I know some people think religion is a big waste of time, especially "organized religion" or "institutionalized religion". Then there are the people who don't believe in a god or goddess based religion at all-- you know, the "religion is the opiate of the masses" types. Throughout most of my life I've been an adherent to one or another type of "organized religion". I've also been an anti-organized religion religionist, thinking all churches were corrupt, self servince, and all the rest. Even at my most Leftward trajectory (somewhere along the same point of the spectrum as Professor Chomsky) and at my most radical feminist (Catherine McKinnon comes to mind) I considered myself a Christian. Maybe that meant I really wasn't truly Leftist or Feminist, because I held onto that bit of partiarchial, capitalist brainwashing, but I never lost my faith.

After having our first child, I felt the need to go back to CHURCH. Since I was raised in the Lutheran Church-- the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America to be exact. That's the very liberal-to-left leaning one for those of you unfamiliar with the political views of the leadership of the ELCA. So we did that for a while. My husband, who was raised in a completely secular household with no knowledge of his family's religion/cultural tradition eventually saw the light and joined up. He was baptized when our oldest was christened.

Being Lutheran was okay for a while. Until we started to have liturgical dancing in church, and other things with which I didn't feel comfortable. It also didn't hurt that we were becoming increasing conservative on issues (abortion, the military, national security) and the church as a whole and our pastor in particular were on the other side of many issues. So we moved to another ELCA church. We liked the pastor. His political views were unknown to us, but he left the church and it wasn't very small-child friendly. Onto another ELCA church, a rebel church, but again, Leftist politics were being preached in the church during the service by congregants, and the national church leadership was moving "Left", while we were moving "Right". We wanted something stricter, with clear boundaries and a set liturgical style, not something that changed with the current intellectual zeitgest so you ended up with people in leotards dancing around instead of singing the Great Thanksgiving before communion, or you had the Trinity (Father-Son-Holy Spirit) being replaced with feminine terms (Mother-Child-Womb) as was proposed by the Presbyterian Church.

After a very short detour to an Episcopal church, we were off to an Evangelical, non-denominational church, a very large church We liked the pastor's preaching style. We liked most of his message. It was a church where you could be pro-life and supportive of the military and whatever its current mission was without being sneered at as a stupid redeck type, a war monger, a racist, a sexist, or any and all combinations thereof. I didn't like the worship style. Singing praise and worship songs was too much like a pop concert to me, especially with the clapping. They said they weren't legalistic, and the church didn't take positions on what you and your family could listen to, read, watch, whether you observed Halloween or not, but if you did do Halloween, or read Harry Potter, watched South Park, watch out. While there was no official stricture against it, let's just say peer pressure came into play.

We have a neighbor who is a very observant and knowledgable Roman Catholic. We even agree on a lot of political issues. As a family, we've been to a few Masses-- mainly for our children's friends' First Holy Communions. I liked the Mass. My husband hated it. "It's too ritualized," he would say. "There's no interaction with God like at our church." But after a while, he too, was feeling increasingly let down, empty, alone after church services. Part of it was the constant preaching on the End Times that was occuring at our church. Part of it though, was the very pop concert like atmosphere-- the excitement, the stirring up of emotions, and the psychological ploys used during the altar calls. And yes, church isn't about ME or YOU, it's about God, but our church, despite the literal Biblical teaching, seemed to be more about ME and my acceptance by God rather than God's acceptance of ME. There seemed to be a very therapeutic ethic in our church, and from reading many Christian fora and message boards, this seemed to be the case in many similar churches.

So we were churchless for a while. We read the Bible. We prayed. We listened to Contemporary Christian Music and Christian alternative music. I began to read and research on the Roman Catholic Church. Husband was still firmly ensconced in his anti-Rome biases he had had since he was a teenager, and which had strengthened in our Evangelical church.

By chance, our oldest daughter and I attended an Indian Orthodox Church, St. Thomas, as a school field trip. The service (I didn't know the correct terminology then) was amazing. It was truly a God-centered, worshipful experience. We didn't understand a word of the liturgy as it was done in the Indian dialect of the majority of the congregation. However, the sermon was presented in the native tongue and English-- for our benefit I'm sure. It didn't meet the forty-five minute verse by verse studies in our former church, but I found it far more edifying, uplifting, and focused on God and His word.

No one was interested in pursuing that option. The service wasn't in English, and all the bell ringing and whirly-gig tingling aside, we needed a service we could follow. That there were other, similar options didn't occur to us for several long months...