Grace Notes: Complications and Wayward God-Seekers
By Natalie Costanza-Chavez
1:05 a.m. MT Mar 28, 2008
Sometimes words poke at me like the spiny protrusions of a fat puffer fish—poke, poke, poke. Many people have written about Barack Obama and the church Sen. Obama chose to attend for 20-plus years. I read a lot of it, all interesting, and some of it irritatingly pokey. My column today has nothing to do with Sen. Obama, but everything to do with attending church—any church.
I read more than one column that suggested, or outright insisted, that to worship in a church or a temple or a mosque, you have to endorse all the words spoken there. Some voices suggested that you can’t be a practicing Catholic and also be pro-choice or pro-gay marriage. Or that you can’t be a coffee-drinking Mormon, or a shellfish-eating Jew. The point of such opinion was that if you don’t adhere to, believe in, and support every word spoken from the pulpit, you don’t get to claim said religion.
And now, my completely opposite opinion: I do not believe worship means you endorse all the words and actions of a chosen church. And no one has the right to say you’re in the wrong place. No way. No how.
Each of us lives in a light that is not complete. We are human—and thus no religion run by men has it all right. Only God is fully bright, fully radiant, clear and crisp as a window glinting. The rest of us can try to see Him by peering through as best we can. But, we won’t ever see clearly, no matter how powerful, or rich, or smart, or religious we think we are. Any religion that claims to be perfect, and perfectly right, is already wrong.
Religious organizations, as any gathering gaggle of humans, do many things right, and many things wrong. They can, and should, be living, changing organisms; they do not have to be cold, or dead, or written in stone. With the help of the people within them, they can have the strength and sheer guts to listen through their own reckonings of prejudice, abuse, hurt, hate and pain—and then change.
We aren’t so different from each other; we are loyal, or periodic or not-until-hell-freezes-over churchgoers. We are temple-goers, mosque-attendees, fire-and-brimstone enthusiasts, and wayward God-Seekers. Some of us sit beside each other in a house of worship every week, sometimes involved, sometimes detached, or drawn, or weary or wary. Some of us attend services at Easter and Christmas, or Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur or Ramadan—with children drooling sweetly from our shoulders or thunking the kneelers near our feet—searching for small cars gone astray, Cheerios, their fat storybooks. We aren’t so different from each other.
The poke for me is when people say that if you don’t believe X, Y, and Z, then you can’t be a Catholic, or a Christian, or a Muslim, or a Southern Baptist; I believe they are wrong. They are oversimplifying and quite conveniently skipping the muck and messiness of the hard human questions, trying to snuff them out with dogma, as if each question had only one answer, always and every time. Good Lord, we all know there is more to it than that.
It’s complicated. You can leave a church, a temple, a religion. Or, you can remain, and speak from within that house, not always happily, with a god-voice that is all your own. God is about a kind of holy that has nothing to do with the rules of others. Perhaps that is, ultimately, what saves us. I know it is what saves me.
My hope and prayers and opinions are multiple, come from deep within my conscience, and sometimes stand in stark contrast to the dogma of any individual institution. I believe a church can guide me, or try to teach me, or even try to sway me, but my conscience is my own—I will not be bullied from within a church, or from people standing outside of one assuming that those clapping and praying have to be identical and obedient in their thinking. Like I said, we all know there is so much more to it than that.
Natalie Costanza-Chavez can be reached at grace-notes@comcast.net. Read past columns at www.gracenotescolumn.org
