Reclaiming awe at least for an afternoon...

"The pastor who wants to offer God's grace" to those who are wounded, writes M. Craig Barnes, "begins by inviting them to remember the old yearnings for beauty, delight and wild adventure."  This is a call to "rediscover reverence" - awe - mystery and humility in an age of bottom lines, busyness and imaginations that have atrophied.  For far too long our tradition has avoided and feared the mystical.  And while I would never abandon our embrace of reason - faith without reason is "helpless" writes Rob McCall just as "reason without faith is heartless" - it becomes ever more clear to me that contemporary Western society's  addiction to being in control has nearly extinguished the intimacy with mystery that once was at the heart of our religion.

What, for example, forces us to confront the power of death?  We don't host initiation rites for young men any more - ritualized encounters with our own mortality - and most of us don't live close to the land.  Getting a driver's license - or our first credit card - is the closest we come to a rite of passage.  So death is trivialized on countless computer games and motion pictures but never allowed to reach out of the darkness and grab us by the throat with all its power and terror.  Until, of course, a loved one dies - and then most of us still never go to the hospital or hospice - so we gather awkwardly in a sanitized funeral home and stare at the floor until the rent-a-minister pronounces the benediction.  Then it is back to work and life in the fast lane.  We may take a "personal" day off to regroup, but please: no extended grieving is allowed, ok?  That's too raw, too dark, too mysterious.

No wonder Rob Mccall wrote:  "The challenges to faith in our time are not challenges to living faith as much as they are to dead religion. " Robert Bly and Marion Woodman called ours a "sibling society" where people have physically matured but nobody has grown up:  there are NO adults anywhere to supervise all the children who are peers and siblings. There is no one is in charge, no one to take responsibility and no one to pass on the wisdom of the past.  Parents want to be friends to the children, teachers want to be liked and pastors have to keep the congregation pleased because, as Stanley Hauerwas has written, contemporary clergy are supposed to live as "a quivering mass of availability."

So, on this stunning autumn day in the Berkshires, I'm going to go pray by walking through the woods.  These hills are old - THEY have matured even if most of the rest of us haven't - and they speak of being still and taking in the awe of it all.  For the past three days, I've been repeating in my heart the concluding words from one pastor's Easter rant.  It goes:

I don't care what you believe. I care what you love. If you love the Creator and your neighbor and yourself and your family and your dog and your enemy and the Great Mystery, then what in the world do you need beliefs for?  And if don't love these things, what earthly good will beliefs do you anyway?  We are what we love far more than we are what we believe. All the beliefs in the world in all the ages of time cannot embrace the Mystery, while love can embrace it effortlessly in the twinkling of an eye. Mysteries are revealed unto the meek... That is what we are doing here, if you ask me, embrace the Mystery. We try to love each other, through the cloud of unknowing, with God going on before us...

As summer slips into fall, deep calls to deep and it is time for a stroll into the mystic...