Doug Kings over at Cyber Spirit Cafe has an interesting article quoting the daughter of Billy Graham regarding how creeds, rituals, and churches get in the way of connecting to God.
…she frankly says that religion is one of the greatest impediments to finding God.And by “religion,” I don’t mean “faith.” I mean rituals, creeds, traditions, and often leaders–all of our means of trying to connect with God.
Lotz somewhat confusingly still thinks Christians should belong to a church.
Yes, creeds, rituals, traditions, leader, etc.. they can and do get in the way. Simply because they do get in the way for some does not mean they must, and it certainly doesn’t mean we cannot rediscover their meaning in our own lives. The problem is that people and institutions tend to take themselves, their creeds, and their rituals too seriously. Ritual and creeds get in the way of our experience of God when we let them become idols. Such things point to God, but they are not, in and of themselves, holy. They are simply the edifice we decorate the experience of God in, scaffolding to protect us from the mysterium tremendum, the awesome mystery of God.
Our creeds and rituals hold no Truth. Our words and prostrations are nothing. They allow us to participate in the Holy but are, ultimately, about us – not God. This is the place in which we must enter ritual, the place where we must whisper our creeds – surrendering to their experience without creating idols.
What do you think?
Hmmm. Creeds are one thing and I leave them aside. But rituals and traditions are more practice than anything else, and religious practice, which stretches back tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of years, clearly has much deeper roots in the human endeavor to experience the divine than religious theory (I’m willing to except narrative.) In fact, without such practice, I don’t see how any such experience is possible. Ms Lotz’ theorizing–an approach that is at best perhaps 2500 years old, simple as it is, may be more likely to blcok our direct experience than is the practice of rituals and traditions.
I was waxing poetic and didn’t really explain myself well. I’m not talking about rituals by themselves.. rather I mean the content of specific rituals, rather. We may find meaning for them, and God knows I find great meaning and peace in a strong ritualized worship. What I’m getting at is the idols we make of ritual and prayer, that these specific forms of ritual or prayer have more power than they do.
Some, of course, might be formulated so wonderfully that they speak to the most people with the most power, but primarily that is not the case. I think ritual is vital, and we’re losing it more and more in our daily lives, but would not insist on particular rituals.
[...] place, but are given to being an excuse to take glory from the God of Life I still find myself uncomfortable with them. So I dreaded ever composing one of my own, dreaded how I would try to pair down the [...]