We pick up from Friday in a section Mount Shoop calls "Holy Habits."
We are also the spiritual children of religion in America, a phenomena with the same gene pool as the nation builders who conquered First Nation Americans and brought slavery to this country. The visceral reaction so many mainline Protestants have to the impending chaos of being "uncivilized" is palpable when something like clapping in church or speaking in tongues occurs in church. Civilization is ours to lose!
"This concept (of civilization) expresses the self-consciousness of the West. One could even say: the national consciousness. It sums up everything in which Western society seeks to describe what constitute its special character and what it is proud of: the level of its technology, the nature of its manners, the development its scientific knowledge or view of the world and much more."
Mainline Protestant churches are and have been tangled up with this concept of civilization for much of our history.
I never looked at our religious life quite in these terms. There is a 'pecking order' of how churches go about their worship and life. The Mainline denominations have a way of looking at less 'liturgical' and orderly forms of worship as though they are not quite right and proper. But our roots - our Methodist, Lutheran, Episcopal, Presbyterian roots - are deeply bound to an 'uncivilized' history. As she notes - we wiped out the natives in this land - we stole people from one continent only to try our hardest to turn them in to animal-like slaves. We the people of find dress and proper liturgical movement and historic hymns and fine building and allegiances with the powers of today are the ones rooted in incivility and the world of brokenness and separation. How is it that simply clapping and call-and-response singing and spontaneous prayer is looked at as chaos. The real damaging chaos of our history is the one that is created with finely dressed and fine dining folk try to turn church into something it was never intended to be - an outpost of sacredness in the midst of a wilderness or a frontier. And yet, when we allow ourselves to step into a bit of stuff that looks like chaos, we are introduced to the creative edge of a holy experience. It may be that those moments among us will need to be planned - or else we simply give room for something else to become a new part of how we live together.
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