Today's lesson...

"The Bible, in its entirety, finds a fine balance between knowing and not-knowing, between using words and having humility about words, even though the ensuing traditions have not often found that same balance. "Churchianity," by its very definition, needs to speak with absolutes and certainties. It is expected to make total truth claims and feels very fragile when it cannot. It is the same kind of bind that a politician is in, who must pretend he is absolutely sure of himself, even though we all know it is not true. As Marcus Borg and others say in The Emerging Christian Way (see my coment in the bibliography), that is the largely impossible task institutional religion has taken upon itself. It is crumbling beneath it, in my opinion.

I understand that structural need for clarity, certitude and identity, especially to get you started when you are young. Religion, though, also needs a balancing agent to unlock itself from the inside, which most of us would call the mystical or prayer tradition. ("Mystery," "mystical," to "mutter sounds" all come from the Greek verb muein which means to "hush or close the lips"). Without this unlocking, we will not produce many adult Christians, and certainly not Christians who can build any bridges to anybody else.

Without an in-depth prayer tradition, religion has cried wolf too many times in history and later been proven wrong. Observe earlier authoritative church statements on democracy, war, torture, slavery, women, usury, anti-Semitism, revolution, liturgical forms, native peoples, the Latin language and the earth-centered universe - to name a few big ones. If we had balanced our knowing by some honest not-knowing, we would never have made such egregious mistakes. We proved whatever we wanted from one twisted line of Scripture. The unprayerful heart will always twist reality to its own liking." - Richard Rohr, Things Hidden: Scripture As Spirituality, pp. 114.

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