Organized Religion

Gospel Reading: Matthew 22.34-46
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I have come to suspect that when people complain about "organized" religion what they are really saying is that they can't stand other people.
- Kathleen Norris in Amazing Grace

When a friend and I were in Amsterdam for a few days in college, we pitched a tent at a public campground. The starkest sign that we were in Europe was not the omnipresent pile of Dutch bicycles or the strange accents or the topless volleyball players in the park (ok, maybe that was the starkest). Well, a very clear sign that we were a long way from America was in the way people camped.

In America, we camp like we do most things: as far as possible from one another. That's an overstatement. But I've never been to a campground in America where the tents were clustered together in one corner, leaving the rest of the grounds open for whatever (topless volleyball, for instance). But that's how people arranged their sites on the broad lawn.

There's a certain impulse to pitch our religious tents (or our spiritual tents) a comfortable distance from anyone else's as well. We don't want our spiritual stuff mixed up with theirs, perhaps. Creeds and Coleman lanterns may all look a lot alike. So we need to put our initials on the ones that belong to us.

But the truth is that in religion, the life seems to come from the stuff not that we keep to ourselves, but the stuff that passes through the hands and the lives of other people. And since we tend to choose distance, maybe the 'organization' of religion is part of what helps us pitch our tent closer to those others.

We tend to think that living as religious mavericks (the term o' the election season) makes for a more diverse world. But the diversity of the world is simply a fact. The question is whether we're going to let something like the organizing force of religious practice push our lives into a transformative proximity to these strange other people.

It may even happen in church on a Sunday morning. We say creeds composed 17 centuries ago, by people continents away. We read letters to churches in places like Ephesus and Galatia or stories about seas being parted or a man who saw God's back and lived.

So maybe it's our association of "organized" and "tidy" that we need to drop. And maybe we need to recover the root of religion: "ligare" That Latin word is also the root of 'ligament', and refers to something that binds or connects. Maybe the organizing force of religion isn't meant to undo difference so much as to push us all to a corner of the campground.

If we let this happen, we're likely to be surprised not by the world's sameness, but by the wonderful, transforming strangeness of the person in the tent next door.