I've nearly stopped posting and i think it is because i feel like I have to post a longish thought-out more or less coherent post. but i don't. so I'm going to just post stuff I'm thinking or working on and see where it goes.
Sonja, my wife, is in Guatemala for 10 days doing rural women's health with her friend and colleague, Eliza. That is cool, I think, and an inspiration to me to do work that matters.
Well, since she is gone, the kids think we can do things a little different, and so they brought up the idea of not going to church Sunday morning. Can't we just do a little church service here at home? So I said that today was not only All Saints, an important day when the church remembers those who have died, but also the one Sunday a month that we do communion at our new church (Presbyterian). I tried to explain why it matters that we do both together with others, and not just by ourselves. They agreed, and then as I sat through the adult class and then church, I thought about how it might be cool to write a book on going to church. like, answering my kids question. and write it for young people. perhaps write it with a young person. I just think that we literally become something through participation in church that we cannot become otherwise. partly it is the general Durkhiemian effervescence bringing us into a communal sense simply by participation. partly it is the particular notion of Jesus that St. Paul expressed as living 'in Christ'. If Jesus just comes to live in my heart, as some Christian piety would have it, then I'm not sure church matters. But if through word and sacrament I die and rise to new life in him, then I am not my own but part of this body, the church, and I live not for my self, but for the sake of the world. The anthropology in all this is so profound, and so counter-cultural, and exactly learned by not staying home on Sunday morning to do our own thing.
anon, and +peace
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