The Project - Day 18

Today is Sunday, so let’s talk a little religion. I was raised mainline protestant, fairly low church, meaning not a lot of pomp and circumstance and occasionally someone would sling on a guitar and sing in the front of church. It was a far cry from today’s praise team style of worship that permeates all denominations, but it was casual and accessible and the church always seemed full of people.

These days I work for a Catholic Church, one of the oldest in the area, singing in the choir as a section leader and honking out the occasional solo. It’s a very traditional service with a diverse crowd in attendance and follows all the liturgical standards of the Catholic faith. While I know I will never be a Catholic (The reasons for this are another page of writing) I find myself strangely comfortable there.

What I love about the Catholic church, and its relations in Protestantism, the Lutheran and Episcopalian churches, is the liturgy. Ironic, since in my low-church upbringing, I was taught to mistrust canned liturgy. We learned that real prayers come from the heart, spontaneously, and aren’t just the same words repeated over and over each week, each year.  Although it wasn’t at all clear to me at the time, it seems pretty obvious now that I was being taught that the great liturgical traditions of the church, were rote and inauthentic expressions of faith.

Fast forward twenty years and I am surprised to find I am more comfortable in services at my Catholic gig than going to my home church contemporary worship. I don’t mean to say that this is a judgment of either liturgy, I know that people find meaning and spiritual connection in both types of worship. However, for me, I’m at a place now where I can feel more sincerity in repeating the same words every week, words that have been repeated for centuries and are repeated across the world by millions of people. I believe that words have power and that there is something to be said for the “little c” catholic aspect of a traditional liturgy. It might be true that it requires less creativity to repeat the same words every week and it might be easier to check out, especially on those mornings when the coffee has not yet hit the bloodstream. Still, the repetition of familiar words creates a resonance, a meaning that can exist outside of my own paltry attempts at meaningful intention.

My thought is this, no matter how deeply I feel worship, no matter how sincere my silent and individual prayers, I will always fall short when I stand before God. The idea that we don’t even know how to pray, not really, was always a compelling thought for me, and I have always believed that the entity of the Holy Spirit exists to fill the void between our human inadequacies and God’s divinity. So, if I know I will always be falling short of a true connection with God, then the issue then becomes to try and remove as much as possible that adds to my self-consciousness and separates me from God, rather than to find a “right” connection. The earnest nature of the contemporary “praise team” style of worship, the colloquial prayers, these make me very self-aware, not a state I associate with spiritual development. For now, being able to say with brothers and sisters across the world, “we believe” takes me out of my individual nature and into the corporate body of Christ. Credo is a corporate confession that does not allow for self and anything that releases self creates room for God.