Symbolic Diabolic

               

In a church I have loved with all my heart I recently went on sabbatical from taking the Eucharist in an effort to find substance over form.   When the liturgy becomes theatre I still enjoy the show, but what I long for is love.  Love does not come from waifers we order from Almay or wine bought on Base and stored in sticky jugs in the sacristy cabinet.  It does not even arrive with the proper placement of these elements. 

I love the symbols of my church.  I hate the meanness of my church.  The opposite of symbol is the diabolic.  Symbols integrate; the diobolic disintegrates.   As we move toward Advent we prepare for the next disintegration, the yearly fight over greening the nave.  Who, By God, will get their way this year?  Yet this and all fights are not about greening naves.  The fight is about who owns the church, who can take back their church and who keeps undesirables outside the gate. 

What are the crosses of my church?  Different expressions of the same Truth, alike but different; beautiful forms disintegrating under corrosive fear; form seeking to unite, yet disintegrating in substance.  Because of me.  Because of you.  Because tensions are too high, and we keep on crucifying and know not what we do or do not care what we do. 

Violence continues to unite us in a primitive form of "us and them" bonding at my tiny church beautifully placed in the Southern landscape in the home of the brave and the free.  But we know not freedom of soul.  Rene Girard's Scapegoat Theory is played out year after year in a 150 year old stone church, and its crosses and membership disintegrate while nestled in the arms of dogwoods and hollies, two of nature's lovliest symbols of love.  The potential will break your heart; the meanness will break your spirit.

I do not think that my church is so unusual.  I think it is this way everywhere.  It is more common than unusual to hear stories of people destroyed in churches where they went in search of love and found fear instead.  The symbols disintegrate before their eyes, and they tentatively, if at all, re-enter houses of worship seeking theatre and a private form of worship that seeks first to do no harm or suffer no harm.

Faith looks to the past.  Hope looks to the future.  Love is right now.  It may be the greatest of of these, but only if we have eyes to see.    

If the Eucharist will not resurrect me, maybe avoiding it will.