Every now and then I come upon something that totally changes my way of thinking. Most of the time, when it comes to Great Topics of the Faith, I tend to hold the middle ground until I'm good and sure I feel one way or another. Even then I tend to move back to the middle after a while, but not always. It's as if while trying to understand who God is and what's going on in this universe he created, I come to a fork in the trail. And, looking down either trail, I'm not really convinced that either is the correct route. I don't want to go too far down either one, because if it's the wrong one then I'll have all this backtracking to do and I hate that. So, I end up just camping out at the intersection until someone comes along with a map, I remember something the guide at the trailhead mentioned, or there's a clearing in the weather that lets me see what's ahead.
In college, I walked down the trail that led to Salvation By Works Gorge a little too far before I'd realized my mistake. I'd even half-considered switching to Eastern Orthodoxy because they've got the whole self discipline down to a science. But I quickly realized it wasn't really working. Life still sucked and I just had less time on my hands and way more guilt. So I gave it up. I decided that the rituals were what was holding me back. Empty shallow prayers at mealtimes, sleepily skimming the words of the Bible at dawn, chapel service after endless chapel service where we'd sing "Yes, Lord" till we where hoarse in the throat--I was done with it all. I decided that ritual was bad. Meaningless. And that I was going to follow after the Person of God. Know him as a real individual capable of being known like any other individual. And to Hell with the rituals.
I think it worked, for the most part. But I find myself often in a quandry. How do you get to know someone like God? How does that even happen?
I think there's two ways.
First, I will sheepishly admit that ritual can actually work--to a point. And the point is this: the moment you depend on the ritual to lead you to God, you're skipping down the wrong path. My wife and I decided that, even though we're married now and see each other pretty much all day ever day, we'd still set aside one night every week for "date night". We take turns thinking up something interesting to do, we get dressed up and we go out. There are certain requirements though: I have to open the car door for her. We have to talk about one of the following: hopes, dreams, fears or stories from our childhood. It's a ritual we have found to be valuable, even in our happy-go-lucky first year of marriage because it forces us to be more than just roommates with benefits and to concentrate on our mate. Because the point of our relationship isn't the marriage, it's each other. The ritual of Date Night helps remind us of that. That's the point of ritual. It forces us to stop the mind numbing drudgery of everyday life and focus on what's really important. It's like driving across the country. If you don't stop from time to time, look at a map and think about how great a time you're going to have when you get there, then it's very easy to just tune everything out and become some sort of driving zombie. It's very dangerous, both to other drivers as well as to yourself. But when the ritual becomes just another mind-numbing drudgery, it's time to change the ritual.
The second method is what I call the anti-ritual. It's the sudden and out of the ordinary, not even repeatable act of faith. It's not something you can do everyday because the very nature of it is so big that it's like suddenly hitting a right angle turn on a road you're speeding down. Sometimes these things are forced on us. My sudden loss of a job just before my marriage was one of those things. It required me--and still does--to focus on who God is and where we're going with this new fact in life. Other examples from my life are going to Romania to work with orphans while I was in college. Loaning a large sum of money to a friend that was never going to pay me back. Agreeing to lead a discussion group at church on the topic of God and Sex as a single guy who'd barely kissed a girl. These kinds of decisions threw me off balance and caused me to change my idea about who I was and who God is and what we could be together. It dragged me back to him. To go back to the hiking metaphor, it was like suddenly coming around a corner and finding a cliff in my path. I had to wait for God to catch up and show me the way or backtrack till I figured out where we'd gotten separated.
So these days I've decided to bring back some of those rituals in college that I'd left behind. A little bit of Bible in the morning. A little prayer at meals. Because I think I'm back to the point where God is the point of the ritual, not my guilt relief. Sometimes, while I'm camped out at the intersection, the real answer is a small unnoticed footpath that leads between the other two. That's the trail I'm going to follow this time.
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