A little secret you may already know.
Parish life can be mundane.
Of course, when you start exploring the Faith the sights, sounds, and even the smells can be very intoxicating. If the parish has an accomplished choir even better still. You learn, you grow, everything is new and so very different. You jump in headfirst.
And yet after a time those initial feelings, like in a marriage, begin to “glow” less than they used to. Things become familiar, routine. The same Priest’s sermons. The very real people you see each Sunday. The faults in others one could easy cover up in the honeymoon now become naggingly persistent. The Chrism has dried, hard.
So, the search for that “zing” begins. Perhaps you may think it will come back by delving into theological obscurities. Maybe a hunger for elaborate ceremonial starts to grow. As always, the internet beckons with sermons carefully edited for “hems” and “haws” and production values never found in an ordinary parish. You can hide in its anonymity and learn from someone who’ll never know you in person, knowledge without community, information without the possibility of being actually challenged, and no one, ever, to say “You are the man…” in accountability. There’s also no dishes to be done or floors to sweep at St. Internet parish.
It can become like a kind of porn where people, bored of their parish like they may sometimes be of their spouse, seek the shelter of impersonal spiritual oxytocin in a make-believe world. Real people in a real parish can be hard and even dull sometimes but a good fight on the internet or a pseudo relationship with a fantasy Priest can be just the thing for filling a bored and empty soul.
Except it doesn’t work that way. Never has and never will. The reality of our Faith will always and ever be worked out in a community of people more like us than we want to admit, human, sometimes struggling mightily, and often inconvenient to our American expectation of instant spirituality.
Father “So and So” in your local parish probably won’t be as polished as the guy who gets to edit out his mistakes in pre-production. The person next to you at worship will, unlike the avatar on the web, actually demand something from you, your presence, your prayers, your work, and your love. The everyday services may not be as spectacular as the special ones on video and the arguments you may have are different when the person you want to critique is right there in front of you rather than half a continent away.
Yet it’s in this every day give and take and relationship where iron truly sharpens iron, where good deeds can be done in a personal way, and people still love you and try to help even when they can smell your spiritual farts and you theirs. And it’s there where the worship, even if it stumbles sometimes, is real, actual voices joined together in time and space sharing a glimpse of eternity.
And we need that very human, sometimes unpolished, local and real life because it’s just that; not some fantasy, not some scripted production but you and I and all our joys and struggles coming together in the real, smelly, analog world that Jesus came to lift back to heaven.
Without that reality our Faith is just a philosophy. With it we become the Church and find salvation in the best sense of that word.
