It's Easy If You Try

Dear Kate,

I've been asking this question various times variously, sometimes painted with a stroke so broad that you would think it must be for the vigorous minds only, other times maybe a bit too personal, too incisive for you to wish them to be anything but rhetorical.

Whichever I way I put it, I know mostly I was talking to myself.

Yet here I am, doing it again, knowing you were likely getting defensive already after the first paragraph, and, as civil to me and my writing as you are, you will need to plunge right back to the things that were, the life that is, and the prophecy that will come to pass, I'm still here, sending away each lonely word like Hagar and Ishmael to the wilderness, trusting only in this: that God is there too, where the wild beasts are.

Yes, the question.  And how did I ask it before?

I asked What is the meaning of life?  What's at stake for you?  What's in it for you?  What is your human vocation? your vision of human flourishing?  Or, simply: Why?

What would you say if I am going to narrow it down for you today, a Sunday, and ask, Why church?

I assume you keep being religious in a thoroughly secular society speaks something about your self-understanding.  I further assume you see meaning significant enough in your weekly tribute within the bigger picture of your life's meaning for it to go on for another week.

Life does not need to go on for another week: a thought philosophical, hence with implications remote, until, of course, it happens.  And then all thoughts will be too late.

Have you ever considered the possibility of leaving church and the whole God thing behind?  "It's easy if you try," John Lennon suggested.  I think he was onto something with his ham-fist.  What difference does it make, what good does it do you, to hold on to an idea, if you have better ideas in mind?

You have better ideas in mind.  You might think you need a God to validate them, but, if there really is a God who validates, his endorsement must be mediated by the human agents you pay homage to outside of your one-hour Sunday morning tribute.  You must dance around people to dance around your god.

The day will come when you can no longer dance.  You step on someone's toe.  Someone step on your corn, the blister you hide under your foot.  Or you finally come to your honest sense and see the dance has hardly been any party at all: no one was dancing, only a mirage of harmony, a make-believe togetherness, a rumored garden of delights.

People leave career, marriage, friendship, church, even family.   "It's easy if you try."  The choice is yours, when the option is but the only one.  You do what you need to do to dance—to create the illusion that you are dancing, for the world to see through a prism fragments of you at once pleasant, productive and purposeful.

If only it isn't a broken mirror.

Yours, Alex