A Fresh Perspective

From the earliest time I can remember I was in the church house on Sundays. It did not always go well for me on Sundays. I can vaguely remember one Sunday when my parents and my best friend’s parents let us sit together during Sunday worship by ourselves. We decided to take the foil wrapper of a piece of chewing gum and make a little paper football. We had a whole side pew to ourselves so Keith went to one side and I to the other. We made goal posts with our hands and thumbs and kicked field goals. One of my kicks deviated from its intended path and landed inside a curl of the lady sitting in the pew directly in front of us. She was hard of hearing so we didn’t worry too much, but my buddy got tickled and I got tickled. Well, that was the last time we got to sit together for a while. For the next several weeks we were back at the side of our parents.   I can also distinctly remember as a kid sitting in worship as the preacher droned on and on thinking what a terrible way to ma...

In an article for the Stillspeaking Daily Devotional UCC minister Dwight Lee Wolter, who did not enter church until he was 34 years old, noted that after visiting many different churches and religious and spiritual groups he decided he needed to grow some roots. As he puts it, he did not want to be a spiritual water skier, bouncing along on the surface from one faith experience to another. He realized that he needed to be a spiritual scuba diver, exploring faith in the depths. He believed it was necessary to explore deep into the well of one’s faith, rather than just skipping along the surface. Surface religion is often the kind of religion that is death dealing, whether it is Christianity, Judaism, Islam, or whatever. But the deeper we go the more life producing it becomes. Richard Rohr has argued that what makes something secular or sacred is determined by whether one lives on the surface of it or in the depths of it. He says, “Everything is profane if you live on the surfa...