Last week, shortly after the grocery store opened, the PA system came on and one of the women in the office wished her employer a happy birthday. Then she sang ‘happy birthday’ over the system. This was a nice gesture but I stood there for a moment. I do not know any of these people. This has nothing to do with my life. I could not make any connection with the birthday wishes that filled the entire store space.
We need to compare this experience with the experience or lack of experience that so many of our people who were brought up in the Church have. Does our common prayer life, our teachings about Jesus and the doctrines of the Church have anything to do with their lives? We may be speaking all the correct words but it does not strike their lives as anything that actually counts. There is no connection here.
In life, we all pay attention and plug into what matters to our life. We hang on to all the stories from our grandparents because they are so much a part of our identity. We have made our own the teaching and values that our parents gave us and now hand these values on to our children. The teachings of our parents connect with us. They are a part of us. We take ownership of these values that they worked so hard to impart to our lives.
We tell stories among our siblings about learning at five yers old not to pick up treats when Mom went grocery shopping. We connect with that lesson learnt years ago.
Now we must ask people, with what do you connect in our Church life? With the Sunday Eucharist? Daily prayer? The Scriptures? The teachings of the Church about justice and peace? The volunteer work with the food bank? Our spiritual need to care for the earth?
We have come out of a century where the value of the faith community and its service to the larger community was valued. People put a tremendous amount of effort into their prayer, their Sunday worship and their service to the poor of this world. They connected!
But now as our North American culture shifted to a very individualistic culture we drift from the importance of living in community. More and more it becomes ‘each one does their own thing.’
This is why we need to ask of our adult children, “Does anything of our faith life really connect with your life?” Does it make any difference to the way you think and the decisions you make?
We will find that these are wonderful human beings who have a comfortable sense that there is a God above them. But, there is no Christ in their spiritual perception. There is no cross (i.e. The self-giving of God) and no resurrection (the lived experience of Christ among us). They connect with a religious belief in God but do not connect with faith community that shares the great event of salvation, i.e., the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Start asking what you connect with in the realm of God. Ask others what they connect with in the Christian religion.
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