February 8, 2006
Quicksilver
It’s an ancient stumbling block, religion, especially when it’s organized. Articulating faith is hard enough. The years have shown that defining it is so next to impossible that it might as well be. But we never seem to learn that so long as we’re human, the two — religion and faith — will be such as to require one another.
Religion is that corporate human endeavor to render faith both memorable and manageable. (The same may be said of government and justice, education and truth, medicine and health, marriage and love, and on and on.) Trouble is, faith will have none of it. Like mercury — which isn’t called “quicksilver” for naught — faith is often characterized by rapid and unpredictable changeableness. Nailing it down simply makes it into something it’s not. Yet, faithful is what we’re called to be, and religion is as good a way as any to be it.
Thus does religion remain a noble venture, but it’s not and never will be the same as faith. The Episcopal Church’s management system is a product of religion and is called General Convention. It remains, to the confusion and frustration of many, generally conventional.
On the other hand, our inescapable human “beingness” is centered in our freedom to choose. The least our religion — and that of others — can do is to respect and honor that freedom. And as has been warned here before — perhaps too often, but never, I suspect, often enough — we mustn’t let the grace grow under our feet.