Augustine,
I found a kindred spirit my first year of teaching with the English teacher in our small school. I was just out of college, and exploring Orthodoxy theologically, yet not attending services at that point. (Someday I'll tell you that whole story too. Someday we'll tell each other all the stories.) I hadn't yet figured out what I was, but I knew what I wasn't--Evangelical. And yet, I ended up with a job at a mostly-Evangelical school, and our Professional Development seminars that first year were...The Truth Project. My friend, KE, and I bonded the first session when we broke out into discussion groups because we just couldn't believe how ridiculous, biased, and illogical so much of it was. Yup, kindred spirit.
I got to know her better and better, and I immensely respected the way she approached her faith--through her intellect, like me. She studied classics, languages, and literature, and loved studying theology as well. I was a little nervous when I found out she was Reformed [because I had just 'escaped' that theology, the theology of my youth, and yes, at the time it felt like an escape]...but I respected her nonetheless.
As mentioned, I was studying Orthodoxy and reading Orthodox bloggers and authors, and one of the things that somehow just blew my mind was really simple to anybody who grew up with any sense of liturgy. In liturgical churches, the focus is usually on the Eucharist--that is the "climax" of the service, and it feels very much like the climax of the plot pyramid we learned way back in middle school. When I read about that, I immediately thought that it was so obvious--of course, a church service should be centered around the Eucharist, around Christ himself and his 'atoning' work (I'll blog more about that someday too. How had that been kept from me all of my life? How did that never occur to me?
Every church I'd ever really attended up to that point had been focused on the sermon--sure, there was a little worship service, in the church I attended, we did have communion once a month at least, but not every Sunday. And even in churches I'd been to that did celebrate communion every week, it wasn't the central focus of the service. It was important, but everybody knew that the sermon was the real point. I used to feel guilty in high school if I left before the sermon was finished--it was always at the end and usually at least 45 minutes, often running over, so if I had to leave early I felt somehow like it didn't count. Like I'd gone to church that week but it didn't count somehow--I knew God didn't keep track with a checklist, but I still felt like I had cheated somehow.
Because it had never occurred to me before, because nobody had talked to me about why most Protestant services are structured the way they are, and because my mind was so blown by the idea of centering the liturgy around the Eucharist--and how right that seemed to me--I immediately presumed that this would be good news to everybody else. Essentially, I believed that the only reason people didn't think that centering around the Eucharist vs. the sermon was wonderful was because they didn't know about it.
Remember that friend I mentioned? One day we got in a conversation about it, and I shared with her my excitement--immediately I was taken aback. I presumed, naïvely, that she was essentially ignorant about what I had just discovered. Quite the opposite. She instantly (and not meanly, just matter-of-factly) explained that of course Protestant services aren't centered around the Eucharist, nor should they be. They have to be focused on "Preaching the Word" and the Gospel. (A term that had been expanded for me immensely during my time at Gordon. A segue for another time.*)
I sat there a little bit stunned. I don't remember what I said, I just remember that my heart sank a bit...how could we know the same information and yet come to such drastically different conclusions about it? We had such similar 'worldviews' in many ways, it's not like we came from incredibly different parts of the world or vastly different personalities. I knew obviously that people had disagreements, it certainly wasn't the first time I encountered this experience, but I think it was the first time that I'd encountered it with somebody that I felt so deeply to be a 'kindred spirit' of sorts.
This wasn't something I could just blame on ignorance--hers or mine--of the facts. Or on a different moral compass or anything else. It's funny, too, because she's gone through some pretty drastic life changes since then and is now an Episcopalian and doesn't really find affinity with Reformed or Evangelical labels anymore. But I digress.
I've been thinking about that a lot recently, regarding politics or even just many other things in life. There are many times when we can attribute differences of opinion or politics to ignorance on one or both sides, or perhaps even just a very narrow lens--nobody seems to have the full picture or be working with the same set of facts, and it's hard to really get a clear picture even if you try to be well-read, because it's hard sometimes to really understand the proportion of things.
But even if you can actually agree on the facts, you could end up having a VERY different reaction to those facts. And that's what feels heartbreaking to me sometimes. It's easier if I pretend in my mind that the opposite perspective (on some things, but not all) is just ignorant or 'hoodwinked'...but what if they do see the facts and they just don't care? What if it doesn't mean anything to them or they firmly believe in the opposite viewpoint, just as firmly as I believe in my own?
I know how to have these conversations about religion sometimes (not always), but I don't know how to have these conversations about politics. Not when beliefs and policies have very real effects on the lives of so many people.
It feels hopeful to presume sometimes that disagreements could just be resolved if we could somehow all listen to each other. But I don't know that it's really realistic. I know that people sometimes do change their minds when they encounter another perspective--I have, I know many people who have, usually in the context of long-term relationships. But I also can think of so many times when that hasn't worked. When things haven't changed, and had to resign myself that perhaps they never will.
It feels futile, sometimes. And I hate that feeling--but like Sisyphus, I keep trying, because I don't know what else to do. And maybe eventually something will break through...put maybe I'll just keep pushing a giant boulder up a hill only to see all my work undone every day.
+Athena
*I normally don't like it when people discuss what they're not going to write about in a piece of writing. I'm doing it here intentionally because I hope to follow-through on that in this blog, so it seems fair to leave myself this reminder.
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