Nothing, but nonetheless, everything

When the floor under us collapses, dare we make an act of faith to save ourselves?

A journal called Image works hard to provide answers to that kind of question by providing a forum in which today’s religion and today’s art meet, sometimes to shake one another’s hands and other times to shake their fists at each other. Toward the closing pages of Image No. 98 (fall 2018) I was struck by a couple of lines and paragraphs that first dismayed me and then offered me hope.

The dismay came in single sentences from each of two poems by Douglas Luman. The first line is from a poem entitled “Kneses Tifereth Israel Synagogue, Port Chester, New York,” and the second is from “The Rothko Chapel, Houston, Texas.” Forgive me for simply sharing the words that struck me without giving you more about their context. What hit me were the few words by themselves:

… I have nothing to pawn but grains

of sand.

and

… the world owes

you nothing, but gives it anyway.

Nothing to pawn…nothing owed…nothing given…anyway.

The words emptied me of my human pretense that I am owed anything or (much more devastating), that I have anything to exchange for what desperately think I need.

Then I read the next article, Homo Liturgicus: On the Presence of Ritual in Contemporary Fiction, a review by James K. A. Smith of two books. Again, without context, some near-concluding lines:

Sometimes the things we do that make no sense turn out to be the things we need to do in order to withstand the heartbreak that makes no sense, the tragedy that shouldn’t be, the evil that doesn’t deserve a place in the cosmos. These rituals–the things we do over and for “for no reason”–mysteriously build a capacity to do the things we’d never dream of doing–the things we have to do that we’ll try to forget and hope never to do again. …

… a line from “A Father’s Story” by Andre Dubus…succinctly encapsulates what I’ve been circling around: “For ritual allows those who cannot will themselves out of the secular  to perform the spiritual, as dancing allows the tongue-tied man a ceremony of love.” …

What if rituals are the way we dance with the love that drives the universe?

The last couple years I’ve been worshipping in an Episcopal Church. For a cradle-Presbyterian this has been a bit of stretch, and I am only being honest in sharing that it was not the heightened ritual that brought me there, nor is it all that keeps me there. But I have come to appreciate the rituals I’ve learned to accept and even to anticipate. They link me to something greater than the mere secularity of my daily life.

At our best we Presbyterians have our rituals, though they are neither as elaborate nor as lengthy as those of our Episcopal siblings. And Presbyterians don’t have to do them, as seems to be required by more liturgical churches, so you never know what you will get when you worship with Presbyterians.

One day I will probably return to a Presbyterian Church, but for now, I worship where I need to be. and I am compelled by the ritual.

Returning to Douglas Luman’s poems I focused for first time on a quote by Dominique de Menil printed under the title of the Rothko poem:

“When the floor collapses, it’s time to make an act of faith.”

To “make an act of faith”…to do faith, not just to claim, say, or believe something. Perhaps not even to do something good or just and identify it as an act of faith, as important as that is. But to find a welcoming community of healthy and holy spoken and enacted ritual and, no matter how strange or foreign it sounds or looks the first couple of times, to give it time to speak to you. And to give yourself time to hear.