THREE WORDS: UNITY, CONSCIENCE, MEANING

In order to write to write coherently about worship/ceremony/liturgy across the category lines of religion, I am concentrating in part on the characteristics of the ecology in which the cultural religious concepts were formed and in part on the management of consciousness in the individual mind as it goes from the profane to the sacred. This is a new way of thinking that wasn’t available when I was in seminary because ecology itself wasn’t so well understood and the research through fMRIs hadn’t been done yet. So, much of the thinking was through personal reflection in that person’s own culture. Though it was self-serving, that seemed inescapable.

There is another dimension, which is just what this management of consciousness was supposed to “do” anyway. Compel conformity? Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable? Give us a rest or even renewal? Impress us with the power of the officiant? Earn you a scouting badge?

I pick up really great ideas from strange places, one of them being book reviews and advertisements for books. (Saves the time involved in reading the whole book!) I found three words in the Daedalus (book remainder house) squib for a book commenting on the Gettysburg Address. “The Gettysburg Gospel: The Lincoln Speech That Nobody Knows,” by Gabor Boritt. [Daedalus is at www.salebooks.com or 800-395-2665. I’ll take my 10% cut in books please. ;-) ]

So let’s see what these three words, which I’m sure were carefully chosen (by Ken Burns), not thrown together, and see what they can suggest to liturgy, church services. The three words are UNITY, CONSCIENCE, and MEANING. Let’s say good liturgy has all three of these characteristics.

UNITY in liturgy has meant the cohesion of the faith community held together by its common goals and usually a kind of social cohesion that comes from being educated similarly, having the same income level, speaking the same language (like English), and taking for granted certain things about how life really “is”.

There are two kinds of congregations in the Christian tradition. One is the parish, which is based on territory and means that everyone within a certain area belongs to that district’s church. In the USA the only systems like that now are schools and voting districts, political areas. The Catholic church once was like this, but the system requires that everyone belong to the same basic religion (as it was in medieval Europe) and, often, that they don’t even realize there are alternatives or are prevented by law from seeking them out, like early Protestants or in the USA early Quakers, except by leaving. The strength of this idea is that the priest becomes invested in the well-being of the greater whole: even the heretic is his business. Even the impoverished. Even the diseased. You couldn’t just exclude people you didn’t like. (If they were really awful, you could burn them at the stake.) Some of the early frontier Protestant ethnic congregations, separated from the larger world by speaking a different language and preferring different food and clothing, became parish congregations. Maybe Hutterites are a little bit like that now, albeit their parish is only the size of their colony.

Protestantism resulted in the “gathered” congregation, where people who were like each other in some compelling way, maybe in their belief in a major idea like “following the light” (Quakers) or freedom of thought (Unitarians) or universal forgiveness (Universalists), came together -- but they went to this church on their own, out of choice, and could exclude others. In a city where there is enough population density, like seeks like (Black with Black, Greek with Greek, gays with gays). Also, a congregation, regardless of denomination, may form around the personality of a minister.

The trouble with a “gathered” congregation is that it may include people looking for something but who are inclined to keep looking. Or who are simply -- in the USA -- always on the move. This led the Alban Institute to suggest that a congregation is no longer a group that comes in and sits down in the church together, but more like a “passing parade” where people join the march, carry the flag a while, then take a different direction. The UNITY of such a group can be fragile, particularly when the larger culture -- which is quickly becoming a global culture -- is morphing so rapidly that a major and worthy idea may simply collapse. What does universal salvation mean when no one believes in hell anymore? What holds a Finnish Lutheran congregation together if no one speaks Finn anymore? What do you do when “Christian” means minority?

CONSCIENCE is one of the most unmanagable parts of religion, because there are such different ways to internalize what we must do to be saved. The Old Testament depended upon rules. The New Testament is supposed to depend on principles, mostly those of love for one another. Not so long ago, we went to “situational ethics” in an attempt to figure out what to do if neither rules nor principles really works for an individual. Now that our understanding of conception, gestation, birth and marriage have all been so thoroughly changed, how do we blunder through the production and sheltering of children? But the truth is that we learned as little children a certain “way” and this is what feels “right.” Hard to change.

And how do we do the right thing when so much with devastating consequences happens where society can not get at it: international corporations with more power than the United Nations. We make legal rules but they’re easily undercut by simply not enforcing them or funding their enforcement or moving the headquarters offshore. What do we do about African chaos and starvation? Our attempts to suppress drug use, like our earlier attempts to suppress alcohol use, have simply created a whole separate underculture where the ethic is quite different than ours.

The people who can step out of this underculture generally do it only through religion, something to believe in. This is what people mean when they say that the pen is mightier than the sword: they do NOT mean that writing laws can stop wars. They DO mean that a huge magnetic idea can pull everyone together and overwhelm individual advantage or hopelessness.

Then MEANING. People who do not want to go on say that life has become meaningless. People may have had a bad goal, like getting rich, salvation by prosperity. Oh, how that grips our country and is fanned by advertising! Religious liturgy ought to give life gravitas, significance, worthy goals. If it can confirm what’s already motivating people, great. If it can call them to a greater purpose or restore lost meaning, that’s truly inspiring, breathing hope into them.

You can use these three words, UNITY, CONSCIENCE, and MEANING to test political rhetoric. As Abe Lincoln knew, sometimes politics and religion are marching together in the passing parade. When it happens, it’s mighty powerful, a true Grace. That’s when a few well-chosen words, like the Gettysburg Address becomes a liturgy, an act that binds us together.