Tom Harpur Toronto Star Nov. 22/98

We all have a tendency to keep on setting the same traps for ourselves. Instead of learning from mistakes, we often re-create the same mix of problems and stresses.

For example, I know that selling a house, buying another and then moving is a major task, especially when you include some distance and a totally different environment. But this fall, we did all of that. We moved from Lake Wilcox north of Toronto to the countryside around Meaford, near Georgian Bay. It was something we'd always wanted to do. We love this gorgeous region.

What was typical of your truly, however, was to try simultaneously to cope with the promotion of a new book and the trauma of extensive renovations on our future home. After the book tour, we lived out of motels for weeks.

Life by itself can throw a multi-layered set of stresses at you any time. But to go out and deliberately construct your own crises is a form of compulsive folly. The hardest part of all was - and is - the renovation. Drywall dust, fresh paint, torn up plumbing and wiring, boxes draped in plastic sheets, endless questions and consultations with workers of all trades.

We've learned a lot though: how to nurture an air-tight stove; how to live with a well, a pressure pump and a septic system; when the deer hunt is over here and it's safe to go outside and walk upright again; when and where the salmon and trout are running; whom to call when our lane fills with snow.

Reflecting on the hardships of the past two or three months has reminded me that all change is difficult. Renovation, which means to make new again, involves changes and so is always a costly process in every sense. Our error was in underestimating this.

In that light, I'm aware that my columns of late on the urgent necessity of the renewal of the churches' message and modus operandi haven't described the "cost" involved. What kind of cost?

There's an intellectual cost at stake. The communication gap between religious institutions (run by the old) and the younger yet spiritually hungry generation (mostly outside the fold) demands not just a change of terminology but of the basic concepts behind all else.

Some tough, serious thought is required. There is no quick fix. You can't look to others, columnist of whomever, to do this for you, whether you're a bishop, priest, rabbi or lay person. This will be a painful, rigorous experience.

There will be emotional costs. Religion runs as much or more on deep-seated feelings about and attachments to the past than on the light of reason. Once, as visiting preacher in a a rural church, I found myself facing nothing but hardwood for the first five rows. Rather than try to project myself across this, I asked those at the rear to come and sit at the front during the first hymn. Six verse and nobody moved. So, I left the chancel and went down to join them.

I never forget those rigid, angry faces and their refusal to budge. You'd have thought I had asked parishioners to strip and parade in the aisles. Their parents had sat in the back pews. They were sitting them. They were their pews.

The point is that when you have that kind of emotional charge involved in something so simple, imagine the shock of being asked to reconsider the present wording of the creeds or the formulation of what it means to be "saved."

If the biggest and most influential faiths are truly open to what "the signs of the times" and the Spirit are saying, there will be many other costs as well. Obviously, the days are long gone when Rome could make rules to govern what goes on in the privacy of the home, particularly the bedroom. Or tell scientist what to believe and teach. So, too, are those when the Anglican bishop of Toronto helped to run the province of Ontario. But, sadly, the cost of true humility in the modern world has yet to be faced squarely by mainstream Christianity.

When it has been faced, there will more openness, less triumphalism, less arrogance. If real renewal come, the question institutional religion will be urgently asking the world is not, "When are you going to join us?"

It will be, "Where do you hurt most and how can we serve you?"
 

(I use this copyrighted article to give you
insight into the mind and theological thinking
of Tom Harpur. I urge you to latch onto a few of
his books and find good spinup on modern
critical theology. - QBaal

By the way, there's a FRAM factory in this city.
And, thinking of the title of the 'bove article, I heartily approved of Fram's philosophy "Pay a little now, or pay a lot later!"  This applies to cars, marriage,......and religion.