Let Us Read Together

I have this month's issue of my church magazine - The United Church Observer - right here, and within it's recycled and responsibly printed covers you can find both what I love about belonging to a liberal Protestant denomination and what makes me want to knock myself deliberately into unconsciousness about THE VERY SAME THING.

Let us begin with the Letters page!
First we have one reader complaining about the heinous and obnoxious changes to CBC Radio 2, and another reader complimenting said horrible changes. The second letter writer is wrong.

The Rev. Douglas C. Moore writes: Did you not perceive that the people who organized the atheist ad were hoping that some church group would denounce it? Did you think it clever to try the old "turnabout is fair play" trick? I don't take atheists for fools. The current crop is not playing at it.... God is not running for office. Belief is not a popularity contest.

I have to sit here and be depressed for a moment. The United Church of Canada has spent a lot of time trying to engage atheist groups in ways which I think are foolish and naive beyond words. I don't - you'll note - engage in religious debate online, because people who WANT to debate belief are not normally people who want to have their views of the opposing side changed. No, online religious debaters are generally people who think that the other side is either a bunch of banjo-plucking toothless hillbilly morons OR the eternally damned (and I'm not saying that's what all religious people or all atheists think - of course not! - but people who go seeking out debate online? GENERALLY, YES.). And I don't think that's a profitable conversation, REALLY.

Onto the My View column, where the author writes about Chicago's Willow Creek Church which calls itself an Acts 2 church, and then goes on to describe the United Church as a James 2 church:

14What good is it, my brothers, if a man claims to have faith but has no deeds?
Can such faith save him? 15Suppose a brother or sister is without clothes and
daily food. 16If one of you says to him, "Go, I wish you well; keep warm and
well fed," but does nothing about his physical needs, what good is it? 17In the
same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.
18But someone will say, "You have faith; I have deeds."
Show me your faith without deeds, and I will show you my faith by what I do.

Well, all right. But that also just reduces the message of Christianity to "Be a nice person and help other people!" which is also the message of kindergarten. The whole issue of salvation has apparently been discarded by the United Church as not befitting a people as sophisticated and worldly as ourselves.

Then there's a piece where the a minister scaldingly replies to a questioner who was hurt by a reference from the pew referring to the Nativity as "a myth". "This is an issue of your need to grow in the faith... Grow beyond your Sunday School understanding. Mature in your faith," chides the writer. And then I said something that I won't print on my blog.

Here's an article you can actually read, which writes about the some of the positives of our current economic good times - everyone being too poor to go anywhere means fewer air flights, which is certainly a good thing for the environment, and perhaps this will give us all some time to rethink our lifestyles and consumption patterns, although my wild consumption patterns have been limited for most of my adult life to buying groceries on a weekly basis. It also says, in a piece of startling understatement, "For those on the front lines, being philosophical can seem a bit of a luxury." YOU THINK?

Sheesh.

Onto "Windows on The Divine" - Five Canadian artists who "take us into the realm of the infinite", starting with... oh, for Pete's sake, Leonard Cohen. Moving on!

Next up, we have Margaret Laurence, who I have not read since high school, but who is part of my stirring argument that in order to be a female writer, you really should be named either Margaret or Alice. Huh, she was a practicing Christian. I did not know that.

Anne Michaels is next. Perhaps her MIDDLE name is Margaret or Alice. The article quotes here as writing that "God can be called "getting over fear." I stared at that sentence for a while and then dismissed it.

Blah blah blah, Glenn Gould and painter of mucky landscapes, Emily Carr. My mom had me read "The Book of Small" as a youngish sort of person and even now the title makes me flinch away from the twee.

Sad article on Native Residential Schools. There's the big shell of one of them not too far from here, Mary standing forever alone in a niche, her face grieving. And I'm going to stop at the sad article, since it reflects what I do love about my church - the attempts to be honest about past wrongs, the attempts to honestly atone for things that have happened. I do not believe that earnest niceness will save the world, but I am touched by those who do. I DO think that attempts to be culturally relevant can end up undermining the very fabric of faith, and at the same time I'm glad that there IS a church that welcomes a wide variety of people and beliefs. The magazine, however, is kinda lame.