We attended an Easter service at the local Lutheran congregation not far from our house. The first thing I noticed was the underwhelming attendance scattered about in such a large nave. The next thing I noticed was that the Prelude was too loud.
I still possess certain sensibilities and tastes when it comes to the music at the beginning of a service, when people are getting settled. On Easter morning, scripturally, the women who reached the tomb were not aware it was Easter morning. There was still a cloud over the proceedings as they went to prepare a body for burial. I feel as though the prelude music should reflect this—it doesn’t have to be in a minor key, necessarily, but something at least that hints at the quietness of an early morning when the events of Good Friday are still weighing heavy.
The second prelude piece yesterday brought us prematurely to the end of the service, with all the stops literally pulled on the organ and everyone within a half mile of the church pulled fully awake from a sound sleep. In my mind, it wasn’t time for that, yet. And it was an assault on the ears.
Anyway, the service progressed in a familiar manner, the pastor had a good sermon, we received the bread and wine, we ended vociferously, with full stops and brass and violins and… an acoustic guitar? The pastor greeted us in the hallway outside the nave, we greeted a couple folks, got our plastic, candy-filled egg from someone dressed as the Easter Bunny, then headed home, somewhat content in the knowledge that we at least had attended worship on such a high holy day.
Of course, all the preceding verbiage is prologue to what I really want to talk about, which is the almost total absence of inspiration that I have been left with every time I’ve gone to church since retiring, including yesterday. I go hoping for some switch to be turned back on, or maybe tripped for the first time in my life.
I know that it was a good thing that I retired, because I couldn’t stand in front of a congregation anymore and speak with anything approaching conviction about anything biblical, even as the scriptural contributions of Paul remain the only things standing between me and abandonment of the faith.
I was there, at yesterday’s celebration of resurrection, as a skeptic, as a doubter, as someone who wants to believe but is having an increasingly hard time doing so. And it’s not just because I’ve been influenced by the Harari book—this questioning stance, this doubt, has been with me for a long time.
Believing, to me, means taking a step that I guess I’ve always been reluctant to take. It means letting go of reason and logic and what can be seen—what is real before my eyes. I’ve never been at peace with the dialectic. And I certainly don’t want to cede an act of desperation, as in “what have I got to lose?”
3 Cents' 