Categories: uncategorized
Date: 12 February 2010 14:08:32
I had a moment of lucidity. Often enough I've sat in sermons and been told that how I behave on Sunday should affect how I behave during the rest of the week, and that I shouldn't be like those numerous people who are all pious on Sunday but complete swines come Monday morning. And those sermons never made much sense to me. I could never understand how one could even begin to think of being one thing in church on Sunday and something else the rest of the week. It always seemed obvious to me that God sees everything, and that his is the only opinion that matters, so there was no reason to behave differently one day compared to any other. It wasn't that I consciously decided to live with "integrity" (the kind of bollox word used only by politicians to undermine people who haven't actually done any identifiable thing wrong), it was just that being one thing at one minute, and being the same thing the next minute, seemed the obvious way of living. But finally, during another of those bloody sermons, it all became clear to me. After sitting through a long service that consisted solely of ritual, and ritual that, as I described before, makes no sense at all as anything other than ritual, after sitting through all of that it finally became clear: of course you'd behave differently for such a bizarre ritual. Having created church services that make so little sense on a rational level, and bear no relation whatsoever to life as we live it, of course people are going to start acting out that ritual in a way that is completely independent of the way they live the rest of their life. In short, when I wrote last time that we'd made our church services unhelpful, I was seriously understating things. We've actually contrived to make our services actively damaging to our Christian lives. Where meeting with other believers should encourage us and help us to live more godly lives, instead we've conspired to create such a theatrical charade as to encourage us to live the rest of our week in as ungodly a way as possible. Our services (a wholly inappropriate word, btw, "disservice" would be a much better one) depict godly-living as a bizarre ritual and something that cannot be connected, on any level, with our Monday to Saturday existence. What a result!