Taking Out Religion

Think of it this way, it’s not about blind hope in a deity, rather an understanding of how life works and your place in it.

This is a sentence I wrote after I decided to take religion out of my novel. As I wrote it I questioned how that statement stacked up against my beliefs. On the surface you probably think it doesn’t. Yes I am aware it sounds rather new agey. I think though this statement has come out of my struggle with churchianity.

Yes it is easier in some ways to keep your faith going when you are plugged in to a church but here is the question; is that living, understanding and growing your relationship or is it merely existing – adhering to the parameters put in place by those who run the institution you choose to worship at?

I get how these thoughts in my mind can be confusing, believe me I live with them. So let me break it down a little.

I find services to be uber structured. Yes I understand the need for structure, but if the structure is too rigid then there isn’t a lot of room for God to move. I’ve been in some awesome services where music has opened the floodgates from heaven just not so much recently. Just when I feel on the brink the service moves on and we go to church news or communion.

Now communion should, you might think, not disrupt the flow. For me though I have found it has very little depth in any service any more. As much as the way it was done when I was a kid was very ritualistic, it had far more gravity. Two minutes to think ‘thank you God for saving me’ doesn’t give anyone the chance to truly meditate on the concept that you’re not supposed to come to communion with anything against anyone. Let alone consider and meditate on the breadth and depth of the sacrifice made to make it possible for us to communicate with God personally.

Moving on, we have news, and tithes and offerings. A giving Sunday I attended recently included the plea to give to these charity things we are helping with, oh and we need many times more than that for the new building we want. This conflicts me in a way. I know churches cost money to run but at the same time…

Then there is the sermon. I have gone to church for as long as I can remember and so many sermons are repetitions of what I have heard before. Often these sermons are on a very limited range of topics as well. So I ask are things kept simple only because of new people or is it also to keep our faith simple?

All I know is I find church doesn’t do for me what it used to. My conclusion…I need to feed myself. The early church, I imagine, spent a lot of time talking to each other. They met in houses and they talked. That is what I tend to be doing now. Talking. Not in specific meetings but with others, online and when I catch up with them, friends. In amongst a lot of sad stories we find golden nuggets of truth that help us. Little things that buoy our spirits, help us through and give us the wisdom we seek for our lives.

So all this comes down to understanding life, the way it works, how faith weaves through it and finding out our place in it. So my original statement is not as far from faith as it may have originally seemed.