Sunday November 25, 2009
Learning the moves
By Jim Taylor
Our family has found its routines upset by Joan’s chemotherapy recently. So I’ve been diving back into my archives, and finding columns that are worth repeating. Here’s one of them.
Joan bought me a CD of hit songs from the 1950s. If you’re anywhere near my age, you may remember Perry Como singing
I knew all there was to know
I knew this-a-way, from that-a-way,
Now I don’t know what’s goin’ on…
Sociologist Reg Bibby believes that the downturn in church attendance may have bottomed out. The continuing decline among younger people seems to have slowed. There may even be a slight upturn in attendance. (That’s in Canada; the U.S. has not experienced the same precipitous slump.)
Reg attributes this turnaround to a renewed interest in religion. Reg is a smart man. But I think he may have missed the point.
Church (and religion) is a social phenomenon, like cocktail parties, bingo, and bridge. If you don’t feel comfortable in that milieu, you won’t take part.
I recall taking Joan to a baseball game on a beautiful balmy summer night, long before we were married. Lights made the field glow emerald against the surrounding dark. I remember the crack of bat on ball, the thunk of ball in oiled glove, the raucous rulings of the umpire, dust rising behind the spikes of a runner racing to steal second…
Joan was bored. She didn’t understand baseball.
The tables were turned on me, when I watched an outdoor chess game. The player I thought was losing, because he had fewer pieces left on the board, made a move. The bystanders burst into spontaneous applause. Checkmate!
I didn’t have a clue what he had just done.
If you don’t understand the moves, it’s all gibberish. Whether it’s baseball or chess.
Or church.
Struggling with gibberish
On those occasions when non-churchgoers find themselves trapped in a worship service – mostly at weddings and funerals, but also at Christmas and Easter — I watch them fumble with bulletin and hymnbook. They don’t know what page to turn to. They don’t know when to stand, when to sit.
Regular churchgoers have some sense of what to expect. But for a stranger, the language, the symbols, the actions might as well be gibberish. Why these colors? Why these gestures? Why sing dirges accompanied by asthmatic organs? Why, in fact, read from a Bible, instead of from, say, Buckminster Fuller, Mark Twain, or Deepak Chopra?
Once upon a time, everyone was familiar with the chess moves of the church. They didn’t necessarily care much, but they knew what was going on.
But today, church is an unfamiliar environment. Most people, I suspect, find themselves more comfortable with the conventions of the casino or the curling rink. Church makes them feel awkward.
Like Perry Como, they “don’t know what’s goin’ on.”
So they stay away.
And they will continue to stay away from churches that expect them to learn a foreign culture before they can feel comfortable.
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Copyright © 2009 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
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Your Turn
Thank you to several writers who expressed appreciation for last week’s column, on the “sound of a heart breaking.” Old friend Glenn Witmer wrote that he was deeply moved by it. Carolyn Davidson wrote, “It was heart felt. I am celebrating 19 years with my second husband, 11 of those since his heart bypass surgery. He is a part of me.”
Nancy Price shared these thoughts: “I hear and share the pain of this kind of loss. At a recent — my very first time participating — high school reunion, #61 for my class, I was surrounded by this kind of grieving, along with the true joy of seeing old friends. But as Barth once said, don’t cry because it’s over, rejoice that it happened.”
That may be the first time Karl Barth has ever been quoted about something so mundane as a high school reunion!
I had commented in that column about babies hearing in the womb. Bob Stoddard supplemented my knowledge with this factoid: “On NPR last week, they reported a linguistic study about the crying patterns of newborn babies. Those in France had a different pattern from those in Germany because of the rising vs. falling end of words and sentences of their mothers.”
I’ll keep this correspondent’s name confidential, just in case: “Oh great. Now you’ve got me crying. I have come to love very late in life. It is unlikely that we will have the 50 years of companionship that you speak of. Sometimes I grieve that I couldn’t have met her sooner but that’s silly. It terrifies me to think of her gone.
“At the same time, we will never be allowed to marry within our spiritual community, to have our commitment to each other supported and celebrated, to make those important vows in a holy place. And that grieves me terribly.
“The losses that you describe are felt deeply by all who love. It is my fervent prayer that that love, and inevitably that grief, could be honoured in all of God’s children.”
Bob Walker also shared some of his experience: “Thank you for your awareness of grief when one’s spouse dies. I’ve undergone the loss of both parents and both brothers, leaving me the sole living member of my birth family; however, the death six years ago of my wife of nearly 49 years remains the greater breaking heart’s silence than anything of what I previously experienced.
“Death stole Mardy’s life because of the vicious attack of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a cancer that kills 50 per cent of its victims. Surrounded as I am by loving children and grandchildren, along with many friends, the silence in that void holds nonetheless.
“What is also held is anger over my nation’s priority given not to medical research and care, but to the weapons and personnel whose purpose is to kill and accept being killed. Recently, you called our attention to the horrific truth that between 70 and 90 per cent of those who die in today’s wars are not the protected soldiers, but the defenseless civilians. Ghastly is my helplessness to stop what the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal (as they were labelled by the fired Secretary of State Colin Powell) has destroyed billions of dollars better spent for human aid, education in the way of peace, the care of the earth and its residents, and those like my beloved Mardy who might be stalked by cancer and other misanthropic diseases.
“Yes, the sound of the broken heart is silence, but it is heard deeply in that heart, and must be heard by the rulers (including my President) perpetuating wars that cause untimely deaths on battlefields and in medical wards lacking the means to end cancer and other illnesses.”
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About My Paraphrases
Occasionally, I get frustrated by the Bible. Not usually by the message, which is timeless, but by the language and metaphor. Contemporary translations update the language, but not the metaphor, so the text still expects us to respond to images of deserts and tents, camels and droughts, kings and concubines. Whatever we’ve learned since the Bible was written — about psychology and evolution, about quantum physics and astronomy, computers and fossil fuels – is simply left out.
At such times, I start paraphrasing. I don’t pretend that these paraphrases are true to original texts. They are, rather, my way of writing what I think the original writers might have said IF they lived today. Sometimes I stick close to the traditional versification; sometimes I take liberties.
My paraphrase of Paul’s letter to the Romans attempts to put Paul’s sometimes convoluted words — and argument — into a contemporary setting. If Paul were writing today, to the Christian church, I’m not sure he’d worry as much about the failure of the Jews to follow Christ as about the failure of Christians to follow Christ, so I have rephrased in those terms. I suspect he would also make use of quotations from the Gospels — which of course didn’t exist when he wrote his letters — rather than using quotations from the only scriptures he had available, which we call the Old Testament.
I also have paraphrases for Ecclesiastes and Job. Ecclesiastes sticks pretty much to the biblical flow of verses – though with, I hope, some sense of humour. Job cuts 42 chapters down to about three pages. I found the speeches in Job interminable; the only way I could make sense of the various characters’ verbal meanderings was to turn them into television sound-bites.
I make all these available on the honour system. You send me an e-mail and request the file you want. I’ll send it. If you like it, and want to keep it, you send me a cheque for $5 by snail mail. If you don’t like it, simply erase it from your hard disk and send nothing.
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- Charlene Fairchild’s United Online site,
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