Finding God

Each morning when I open up my Google News page, I see a daily culling of stories from the media that involve the Episcopal Church in one way or another. These stories typically fall into two piles. First, there are stories that show the church in action. These include things like a church in Boston holding a prayer service to bring calm to a gang-ridden neighborhood; a group in Minneapolis translating the Prayer Book into Hmong; a mission trip; a refugee settlement; or a group of cyclists raising money for a water project in the Sudan.

The other pile contains things like who has sued whom, what this court said about who owns which church’s property, and--perhaps most strangely--where and when the P.B. can wear her hat. The writers of this stuff usually take strong, polar positions on what, at least to them, are issues central to the faith. In a recent post on her blog, Diana Butler Bass has interesting things to say about this lot. You can read it here.

If you want to learn what the Episcopal Church is all about, I beseech you not to try to find out by reading about it. Instead, take a month and visit a different Episcopal Church in your area each Sunday. I suspect that each of the four will be different. You’ll probably like one better than the others. But if you take a look at each of them, you’ll find Christ present in what’s going on there. It won’t be earth-shaking; it won’t change the world. But it will be real, it will be relevant, and it will be helping to build God’s kingdom on earth. Those are the folks to whom I’ll tip my hat.

Will the real Christians please stand up

The New York Times has carried two stories recently that give hope to the idea that thoughtful commentary on thing religious still exists. The first was an article about Krista Tippit’s NPR program Speaking of Faith, recalling how a remarkable woman has managed to blend, “the child of small-town church comfortable in the pews; the product of Yale Divinity School able to parse text in Greek and theology in German; and, perhaps most of all, the diplomat seeking to resolve social divisions.” In doing so, she attracts a sizable regular following. You can read the whole story here.

The second article was an Op Ed by the Dalai Lama in which he challenges the premise that the world’s religions have nothing to learn from one another. He recounts his early meetings with Thomas Merton, and their discussions about how one can learn from one religion while remaining faithful to another. He goes on to say, “I’m a firm believer in the power of personal contact to bridge differences, so I’ve long been drawn to dialogues with people of other religious outlooks. The focus on compassion that Merton and I observed in our two religions strikes me as a strong unifying thread among all the major faiths. And these days we need to highlight what unifies us.” The entire story is here.

The Episcopal Church is full of examples of this sort of productive, inspiring contact with other denominations and faiths. We will do a much better job of spreading the Gospel—in whatever form—by reaching outward, focusing on these commonalities and ignoring those who would chastise us for the ways in which we are different from them—and therefore, presumably, somehow less Christian.