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A Sense of the Sacred

Today, according to the Anglican Church Calendar, which we use, is the 22nd Sunday after Trinity.  But for most people it’s Halloween, the eve of All Hallows, or of All Saints.  These two celebrations, the night when the spirits roam abroad (ghosts, goblins, and vampires), and one of the principal feasts of the church year made me think of the problem of spirituality and religion. 

Many people today say they are spiritual but not religious.  Some use this just as an excuse to explain why they don’t go to church, but there are some deeply spiritual people who don’t find what they are looking for in the church. 

I think the church bears some responsibility for this.  We have unconsciously assimilated ourselves to the secular culture of the west, which has lost a sense of the sacred.  I have two examples of this loss of a sense of the sacred in the church: the modern liturgy and the approach to the Bible. 

A voice from the pew recently observed, “The old Mass was more like prayer.  Now I find myself looking at my watch.  The Mass doesn’t seem so holy anymore.”  A former advisor to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Terry Waite, who was a captive of Islamic Jihad for 1,763 days, got so fed up with attempts to modernize Anglican worship that he started attending Quaker services. 

On September 16 the TVO broadcast “The Agenda with Steve Paikin” was about scripture: the Bible and the Qur'an.  The discussion concentrated on ways scripture is used to promote violence against the unbeliever or the oppression of women.  Although the participants included an imam and a United Church minister, nothing was said about how scripture conveys a sense of the sacred, and the broadcast concluded with the citation of a Toronto journalist: “The interpretation of scripture should be left to the theologian.” 

How different from Cranmer’s  belief that the Bible, as the living word of God, comes with greatest power when unaccompanied by any human gloss, comment, or exposition!  It was this belief which inspired the English people’s love affair with the Bible, which brought forth our church in the sixteenth century. 

Scripture becomes sacred when it affects the reader, and worship becomes sacred when it affects the worshipper.  Divine grace works through scripture and liturgy in the illumination and transformation of the individual.  It is not knowledge about scripture or liturgy that is sacred but the interior understanding and savoring that scripture and liturgy have the power to bring about in the worshipper. 

When spiritual people come to our church, let us help them to grow in the spirit, so that the separation of spirituality and religion may become a thing of the past. 

October 31, 2010

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