Helen Mosher

Multimedia Storyteller and Digital Strategist

Faith

The “Oh, You Go to the Other Service” Phenomenon

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This has happened to me at every church I’ve attended semi-regularly as an adult: When I go to an event, the people at the event, when introduced to me, ask, “Oh, do you go to the 8 o’clock service?” At churches where there are more than two services, I get “So which service do you go to?” There is, I guess, an underlying assumption that in order to be a part of of church community, one must attend ONE of the services a church offers, and since they don’t see me there, I must go to the other one.

It has happened so regularly that I’m beginning to think there’s something to this, in spite of the fact that I have yet to actually meet a new person (i.e. be introduced to a strike up a conversation with someone, not just shake their hand at the Peace) within a church service.

Now, for the baggage part of that: I don’t go to the 8 a.m. service, and I sometimes feel like there’s something judgmental inherent in the assumption that if I don’t go to one, I go to the other. There’s a big part of me that feels like I got so much church service between the ages of roughly 3 and 15 that now, when I go, it’s a recitation. That’s not to say there’s not comfort in it: there is, it’s like meditation, it’s like practice, a regrounding of oneself in the pray, listen, reflect, repent, commune cycle of the Anglican liturgy.

But I really don’t go every week, at least not to one, single church. Sometimes I’m traveling and visit other churches. Sometimes I go to church in Second Life. Sometimes I flip open my prayer book right here in my office and discover something new in it. Sometimes I’m out hiking and it’s just enough to know that presence within the cricket and bird song, the rustling leaves, and the laughter of a partner who loves you pushing you along.

Truth is, I have trouble imposing structure on my life — structure tends to impose itself on me, and the results can be painful. But on the other hand, I find that I’m always in a place of discovery and delight. I think it’s part of my ENFP wiring, that I like the unpredictability of “church where you are,” and thrive on it.

So what service do I attend? The one in my heart. I’m still trying to figure out how that works in community, but I have a sneaking suspicion it has something to do with why I have so many Episcopal priests among my Facebook friends.

The metaphors in faith

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It’s fascinating to me that one of the best explanations I’ve seen of scripture as metaphor comes from a book with a metaphor in its title. And it also occurs to me that perhaps the reason extreme conservatives see scripture completely differently than I do is that they cannot understand metaphor. In the secular world, these are the people who do not grok fantasy and often eschew fiction, considering them at best unbelievable, and at worst lies.

But the title of the book, “The Heart of Christianity,” gives me something to point to when someone doesn’t understand metaphor. Does Christianity have a heart, with atria and ventricles, cardiac tissue and valves (never mind that there are mitral valves in your heart)? Of course not.

It seems to me oddly fitting that a literal heart should wither and die. But a metaphorical heart, whether Poe’s telltale one or the ones we put as central to our dearest notions, beats strong and true throughout time.

I’d like to quote a few things from this book. Its author, Marcus J. Borg, is the Hundere Distinguished Professor of Religion and Culture at Oregon State University.

When people ask, “Is that story true?” they often mean, “Did it happen?” (50)

I was recently asked this by a third grader in bible school class. “Is that story true?” And I, having been back to church after a yearlong hiatus only one week, stuttered, “It’s true in the Bible.” An inadequate answer, really, for what I wanted to convey. At the time, I parsed it as “It’s true if you believe it to be true,” that faith is what sustains us to believe the unbelievable. And then I read this passage, and came to understand that what I was struggling to convey is:

It is truth.

Not the truth, not true, but truth. But I also understood something else as a result of another thing Borg has to say: True does not always mean factual. That’s a stretch for me even in my literal mode and antagonizes everything I “know” as a journalist. But Scripture seen metaphorically becomes true (emphasis mine):

The Genesis stories of creation are seen as Israel’s stories of creation, not as God’s stories of creation. they therefore have no more of a divine guarantee to be true in a literal-factual sense than do the creation stories of other cultures. When they are seen as metaphorical narratives, not factual accounts, they are ‘myths’ in Thomas Mann’s sense of the word; Stories about the way things never were, but always are. They are thus really true, even though not literally true. (52)

Think of the difference between literature and fiction, or instance. What makes a piece of fiction become literature? Its truth.

One of the first things that my friends point to as evidence that religion is a bunch of crock is the utter unbelievability of the creation, fall from Eden, the Flood and so on in the old testament, and the christmas and easter stories in the new testament. On the other end of the spectrum are those whose fanaticism rivals the secular skepticism: people who take the bible so literally that their world really is only 6-10,000 years old and God must have a right hand because Jesus is really sitting at it.

Somewhere between those two extremes is something that I will call truth. Not The Truth. Not True. But Truth.