Get this:
It's the sheer frivolousness of this that gets me down----the light, unanalytical handling of sacred things and sacred text----and the complete disregard of the need to approach spiritual matters mindfully, with reverent care rather than happy clappy frivolity.
I am particularly amazed that these self-styled teachers don't take seriously what Christ seems repeatedly to have said about people who make a feature of their own righteousness---"They have their reward now." Therefore, he said, no further rewards await them in the kingdom of heaven. He speaks of silent prayer in private. Do they think he didn't mean it or that somehow or another he changed his mind?
Yes, I know the arguments about why what he said about sanctimonious hypocrites and displays of piety doesn't apply to them. But I don't believe it. If one thing in the gospels is clear, it's that Jesus was not at all fond of the conspicuously self-righteous.
No intelligent person can stomach piety and mawkish sentimentality in the spiritual realm; and Jesus was obviously an abnormally intelligent man. If you read the words attributed to him in the gospels, it's that following his rethinking of the ancient laws is a difficult and challenging undertaking.
I hate to see indoctrination of the sort apparent in this film. It's disturbing to see little children being taught that "speaking in tongues" means shouting out lugubrious nonsense that would embarrass a chimp.
God knows---and doubtless shakes his head in wonderment at the spectacle---that well-meaning religious people everwhere believe that religious training means indoctrination. It means drilling out-of-context quotes from random books of the Bible into heads too young to understand the context even if they were given it, and it means teaching them to "believe in" events that defy human understanding.
It's the way it's been approached by organized religion since early in the church's history: begin force-feeding them the received wisdom when they're still too young to understand what's being done to them.
It's sad to see children being told how to have a religious experience, partiularly in circumstances in which they are subjected to groupthink and peer pressure.
It's sad because they'll never know the authentic experience from the enforced exercise in mass hysteria. They're being told or shown how to feel and what they're being told isn't particularly consistent with the actual teachings of Christ in the Gospels.
I was fortunate in being brought up in the Episcopal Church at a time when that church, like the then Republican party, was comparatively moderate in its stance and tolerant in its views. We were taught church doctrine, but we were taught that it was the church's official policy, not "the truth." We were taught about what people in other religions believed. I can still remember the words of the wondrous Mrs. Doster: "God takes people where he finds them."
And this was in a little South Carolina milltown. Looking back, I marvel at my luck. Had my mother not been from the hifalutin low country, I'd doubtless have been sent to one of the less spiritually open and tolerant churches and have wound up either a raving atheist or a raving fundamentalist.
Instead, I was permitted by my parents and my church to work out for myself what my relationship with Christ should be. For a long time, I refused to have any relationship with him at all; but all along I had a sort of Christ consciousness stemming from a strange experience as a child of seven when, lying on the grass at the park across the street from my house, I had a sudden vision---a flash really---of the Crucifixion. It didn't come with any accompanying insight or appear to mean anything in particular, but I never forgot it any more than I understood it or understand it now. Nevertheless, it turned out to be something I could never forget or dismiss.
I found the connection over time and by degrees and completely without the aid of organized religion. I found it through the gnostic gospels, the four books of the New Testament, and through extended thought and prayer.
Once when I was 13 a friend invited me to attend a "youth revival" with her at one of the fundamentalist churches in our town. My mother wasn't too keen, but she let me go. The minister called all those who wanted to be born again and witness for Jesus to come to the front of the church, where he put his hands on their heads and shouted a bit. Some of them were baptized on the spot. Eventually I was the only young person left sitting in the congregation. My friend was chagrined and horrified. I was shaken, but unbowed.
"I don't believe any of that, what he was saying," I told her. "That's not how it works. I don't think God cares at all about all the yelling." "You're going to Hell," she told me.
"Just for saying that?" I said. "I don't believe it. I don't believe you know a thing about Hell and I don't believe "Brother" Bob does either." After that, she never spoke to me again; her mother told her not to.
In resisting the plea to be born again, I wasn't primarily motivated by courage or any particularly lofty motive; instead, I was---just as my friend's mother said----primarily motivated by a combination of pride and stubbornness and unwillingness to engage in what appeared to me to be outlandish, undignified behavior. But there was one tiny part of me arguing that Jesus himself would be embarrassed by the spectacle confronting me. I still think that, incidentally. I think he would definitely throw the snake handlers and faith healers out of the temple and perhaps also a good number of revivalists. "My temple should be a house of prayer," he might thunder, "but you have made it a three-ring circus! And not in a good way!"
It definitely wasn't the last time I was to be told by another child that I was destined for perdition. Eventually I came to agree with the principle of Mark Twain's quip, "Heaven for climate; Hell for society." If heaven was as represented to me by the unstoppably pious, I wanted no part of it. But I never, ever believed that this was the case.
My resistance to fundamentalism came from convictions just as deep-rooted as any fundamentalist. The one time, while staying with a cousin, I did allow myself to be pressured into audience participation at a revival-style service, I suffered paroxysms of shame afterward. By that time, I'd accepted that what was right for one Christian needn't be for another; and I felt deeply and unshakably that my attempt to imitate their apparent transports had been a piece of the deepest hypocrisy.
Lately, I've begun to wish I was a Christian of a different cast: one whose method of worship consists in singing, spirituals (thinking here of a documentary about Annie Lamott I recently saw) and grooving on the Holy Spirit. But it's still not for me.
But I think you have to let people come to Jesus on their own----especially children. He said, "Let the little children come to me," i.e., voluntarily, because they are drawn to it. I don't think he'd endorse teaching them to imitate the mystery of the pentecost before they've matured into sufficient understanding of its meaning.
I hated to see the mystery and depth of Christianity reduced to a room full of hysterical pre-adolescents bellowing gibberish under the impression that this is what the original pentecostal experience consisted of.
It's so sad. And also frightening, at least when the kids were carrying on all shiny-eyed about growing up to bring the nation back to Jesus. After all: The Handmaid's Tale. After all my years on the planet it still takes my breath away how little like Jesus are the people who insist that they're going to drag him back into history, whether he's ready for it or not.
Comments