Well, One Can Dream...

[poliphilo]

The dream was mainly about being surprised. Usually when I dream I'm in church it's faintly nightmarish. I step up to the lectern and can't find my place in the Book- things like that. But this time I felt at ease. Suddenly there were no obstacles to my being a Christian again.

I had found a way of squaring my pagan/feminist/liberal beliefs with Christian orthodoxy. O joy. I had a home again. Gold leaf and gothic spires and friendly women bishops.

Forget it. In the waking world it's getting harder and harder to be an intelligent Christian. The yahoo fundamentalists are gaining ground- even in the dear old Church of England- and to be thoughtful about one's faith, to seek some sort of accommodation with science and scholarship and secular morality, is to run the risk of abuse and persecution.

The witch hunters are back.

It's one of the many ways in which the world has grown stupider since the turn of the millennium.

Comments

[sorenr.livejournal.com]

Come to Denmark; we have a female bishop... LOL

-And the C of D does still seem to be among the more liberal churches, even if it is an established / state church. (Medieval concept; will somebody please give me disestablishment NOW!!!)

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I'm in two minds about establishment. It's because it's a State church that the Church of England has- historically- been so inclusive and civilised.

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

I went off-track, but I want to think a little more about the moment of truth in organized religions.

Taking a very broad view, it does seem as if Fundamentalists are gobbling up mainstream churches, but many people may simply be dropping out because the churches offer them nothing anymore.

As it happens, my mother and my daughter and I were together yesterday, and we began talking about Hell.

My mother said, "I find, at my great age, that I no longer believe in the divinity of Jesus. Then I worry about it, because I was raised a Baptist, and we were expected to know the hour and the minute we were Saved..."

And yet, she says, she prays all the time, to God.

I sense, she said, a loving God, yet there's also a God who tricks me by giving me a mind to think, and I do, and then I'm damned for it.

She says, Why do I go to Communion?

And then she answers her own question: because I feel close to God, through ritual.

--

I think we're living in an extreme time, a sort of Armageddon of the Church, when Zealots furiously defend their beliefs, while more and more people simply give up and drop out, because the mainstream churches offer them social interaction.

Underneath all the weird prayers (in our Evening prayer service, we ask God to protect us from Christ at the Judgement), there's still a yearning to communicate with and know our Creator.

Finally, our religion may be a personal, inner one.

There's no doubt that Protestant (and probably Roman Catholic) churches are undergoing a major shift. They may not survive. But something always will.

We will always need to surround the spiritual with structure.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

For a while- back in the 80s and early 90s- I believed in all that dawning Age of Aquarius stuff.

But New Age spirituality is so wishy-washy, so lacking in any kind of intellectual rigour.

At present I am without any kind of formal religion, but my dreams reveal that I hanker after it.