Previous- Leaving Death in the Dust- Home
“The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.” -Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk
I’ve had a love affair with church for as long as I can remember. This is probably because my parents did not go to church, and I only attended church sporadically, with family and friends, up until I thought I had found Jesus when I turned 38 years old and started to attend church regularly.
But that was before I knew I was made in the image of God, whose divine spark, wasn’t something I needed to obtain from special “holy” men at a Pentecostal tent revival. The divine spark is something we are all born with, we just need to have the “scales” peeled away from our blind eyes, and the circulation that has been choked out by the wilderness weeds of life’s difficulties restored so that we can begin to see God’s image within the other human beings living in our world.
When I was younger, I watched other people who went to church, and it looked like they had their good lives all put together, so I figured a churchy life was the ticket to whatever looked like normalcy in the television family. I most likely got those ideas because I was often left unsupervised to watch reruns of perfect, old, 1950’s television shows that often came with a good morality message.