Homo Narrans: How Our Penchant for Stories Fills all Theological Gaps

       Instead of spending a great deal of time and energy learning the stories that were handed down to us, these days people are more likely to make up their own stories. In fact, whether or not they receive stories from others, we all love to make up stories, and live by them. Some of these stories are believable, some are not, and some might even be (more or less) true to fact.

       For example, years ago I wrote a note to myself about something I saw walking home from work. My route took me past a small cemetery on Kalamazoo Ave., in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Very near the sidewalk, almost begging to be noticed, were three simple stones. The epitaphs read “Francis B. Whitney, 1886-1960;” “Nora Whitney, 1891-1928;” and finally, “Baby Whitney, 1917.”

       A bright spray of flowers planted at the head of Baby Whitney’s stone caught my eye. I’m not much of a gardener, so I can’t tell you what kind of flowers they were. It did occur to me, though, that it was too early in the spring for flowers to bloom. Looking closer, I realized that they were made of silk. They were white, blue, and shades between. They contrasted sharply against the brown grass.

       As I walked home, I wondered about those flowers. Baby Whitney had died eighty years earlier. Her parents (I’ve always thought of her as a girl—not sure why) were also both long dead. Who remembered her so tenaciously, so long after her death, and after such a short life? So my mind went to work. Could it be that a brother or sister, maybe an only sibling, left the flowers? Perhaps this person had an unwitting hand in Baby Whitney’s death, and was atoning for that—a house fire where a slightly older sibling escaped but left the baby behind. Maybe this sibling still struggled with guilt. Maybe this sibling had been returning here, for years, to atone. Perhaps this sibling’s whole life had been shaped by a nagging sense that he or she couldn’t ever do enough to get things right. Survivor’s guilt can be traumatic. It can weigh heavy. “That must be it!” I thought.

       And then it occurred to me to wonder why I would make up stories about a little girl dead eighty years.

         The answer, of course, is that making up stories is what humans do. In my last column, I suggested this penchant for making up personal stories might be one reason that so many people don’t bother with learning much about what their churches teach, the narratives they officially emphasize, or the confessions they make.

       We’d rather make up and live in our own stories. Watch children at play. They are usually acting out stories, often stopping to step out of character just long enough to clarify the plot lines. “This stick is a bazooka, okay?” or “Jenny, hide from the alien behind that tree. Let’s pretend that’s where the our elf-base is.”

       Stories are the woof and warp of our every waking moment. By some measures we have as many as two thousand daydreams a day. Many are story snippets. We write and read novels and poems, watch TV (and vicariously live the lives of their stars) and play MMORPG games like World of Warcraft. We set up our Google newsfeed to get only the stories we want—never mind what is really important in the world.

       We sit down for supper with our family, after a long day at work, to tell each other stories about our day, always making sure to elicit sympathy and understanding by how we tell them. So, sometimes even unawares, we embellish, we portray ourselves in a slightly different and usually better light than the people who actually witnessed the event might remember. We cast others in roles, including the role of antagonist.

       Some studies even suggest that some kinds of depression may be linked to the inability to gently reshape our worlds in this way. This depression is caused by being too honest with ourselves about our stories, an inability to see ourselves as the sort of heroes we’d like to be around the supper table. The truth hurts. We need creative, truth-stretching stories to get by.

       In his book The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human, Jonathan Gottschall discusses at some length all the reasons that social scientists, communication gurus, and even biologists have come up with to explain our penchant for stories. One recurring theme is that stories—from nightmares to child’s play to the novels we read—are all a way for us to rehearse and prepare for real life. Gottschall argues that the bottom line, though, is that we make up stories because our minds are allergic to uncertainty, randomness, and lack of meaning. We are always looking for the pattern that makes sense of things. “If the storytelling mind cannot find meaningful patterns in the world, it will try to impose them. In short, the storytelling mind is a factory that churns out true stories when it can, but will manufacture lies when it can’t” (Kindle Location 1246). His book is replete with examples. CNN's coverage of the disappearance of Air Malaysia's Flight 370 is a recent case in point. Judging, I guess, that any story was better than the regular news, CNN provided round the clock coverage of one theory after another, often spending inordinate amounts of time ruminating on wild conspiracy theories. It was a too good dozen or so stories to pass up.

          The truth of a story isn't nearly as important as whether or not its a good story. In fact, polls show that a many as 36% of Americans still believe that America was, somehow, complicit in the 9/11 attacks. Gottschall also notes that a recent Harris poll showed that 24% of Republicans think President Obama might be the antichrist. And in 2010 one third of Republicans believed that Obama was a stealth Muslim himself, while 45% believed he was not born in the United States. And so it goes with the Kennedy assassination, the UN-One-World-Government plot, and various wild theories about how a secret council of Jews is running the world, and the divine plot to wipe out the earth’s population with a flood. We make up such stories, says Gottschall, because “they provide nothing less than a solution to the problem of evil.”

    

       Humans may need stories to make sense of their lives and the world, but they can only rarely, and then with great effort, get their stories straight. And this must have a huge impact on how we interact with the church, with its teachings, and whether we much care if the beliefs and teachings agree with our sense of how things really are.

       So not only do people read less today (my last column) and read less deeply with less understanding, they also make up great stories to fill in what’s missing. The church may teach salvation by grace, but people think, “I’ve been a pretty good person. I’ll get into heaven when I die.” They are especially prone to thinking so when they’ve spent their whole lives embellishing the truth about themselves and not realizing it! The church may teach that sex is primarily for having babies, but people make up stories for themselves about how they could never live that way and get ahead. The church may teach that Old Testament characters all contributed something to God’s great plan of redeeming the world through Jesus, but Sunday School teachers still teach, “Dare to be a Daniel.” The church may teach that we need to pick up crosses and follow Jesus, but when we strike it rich we tell each other that it just goes to show that God helps those who help themselves.

       These examples just scratch the surface. Karma, reincarnation, channeling, dream catchers, the right to “life, liberty and happiness” or the Bill of Rights, and on and on—people incorporate these syncretistic elements into their personal faiths all the time. They are (to adapt Peter Berger’s famous phrase) always socially reconstructing the faith of their fathers (and mothers) to suit themselves. And they don’t really care what Barth or Berkhouwer or Bavink might say because they’ve stopped reading that stuff anyway—as have most of their pastors. What is more, you add this penchant for personal story telling to the individualism of today, the mistrust of institutions and priests, along with the difficulty most people have with really studying such matters—and we don’t even know the story the hymn writer thought we’d tell in glory.

       In sum, we don’t know much about the religious traditions we’re a part of, and many of us don’t stop to reflect on that, or much care. We know how to make it up as we go, after all.

Who Knows (Anything)?

           A few weeks ago a young woman approached me about teaching a Bible class for young professionals like her. She said that nothing much was available in the churches, or it was all at the wrong time, or it was too narrowly focused on truth as that particular church saw it, and none of her friends particularly wanted to go to a church anyway. But still, she had friends and colleagues who would love to get together to study what the Bible says. They were just curious. Would I be interested in sitting down sometime, with her, to discuss the possibilities?

            I was. I put a note in my agenda to set the meeting up as soon as I return from my study leave.

            I have to say that the request stunned me. I can’t remember the last time someone approached me about learning more about the Bible. In fact, if I’m honest, one of the things that has changed most in the thirty or so years that I’ve become a pastor is both how much people know about Christianity in general, and how willing they are to invest in that knowledge.

            When I started as a pastor, teaching kept me busy. I had two weekly catechism classes filled with teenagers. Those same teenagers also went to church once, or even twice, a week. I did a Wednesday evening adult Bible study that was well attended—sometimes as many as fifteen or twenty people crowding into my living room. Well-attended lay-Bible studies met in the church, some as women’s groups, and others following popular interdenominational curriculums. 

            I also preached twice a week—to dwindling audiences, I’ll admit. Still, the second service often had at least half the people in it that the morning service did. We usually covered the catechism. And whatever you may think about whether or not the catechism was “right,” at the very least going through the catechism introduced people to the basic framework of Christian theology. We’d cover the doctrine of God, sin and atonement, the Apostle’s creed, and last things, for example. The youth group meeting would also include some Bible study, and many adults belonged to small groups that focused on the Bible with the help of all sorts of denominationally approved study-booklets.

            These days—and for quite some time, actually—in churches both conservative and liberal, people don’t study nearly so much. Catechism classes have pretty much disappeared unless it is time to do confirmation. Youth groups meet during the Sunday service, so while they do spend a few minutes studying, they miss out on sermons. Adults may belong to small Bible study groups, though it is more likely (barely) that they belong to a book club. Sermons are preached only once a week.

            The nature of study, when it does happen, has changed, too. Where once study groups would read and discuss prepared materials, these days they tend to sit around a circle and offer opinions about what they “feel,” about some passage or issue or doctrine. The sense that two thousand years of reflection on almost every theological issue imaginable has already occurred is absent. People invent insight on the spot, if insight is what it can be called.

            This turn away from an established tradition of theological knowledge—or, if you please—reflection about faith and life, isn’t restricted to people in the pews. One of the more interesting changes that has taken place over the past thirty years is that pastors themselves seem to know less. This is a harder thing for me to get my head around. I’ve taught at the college and seminary level, and had occasion to sit in many classes as a guest over the past few years. I’ve met many recent grads at pastor gatherings. And the bottom line, to me, seems to be that pastors just don’t study the same things, in as great depth, as they used to. Few study Greek or Hebrew. Books that pragmatically lay out how to grow your church or transform your ministry or give purpose and direction to your life abound—not that there is much evidence now of growth or purposefulness than there used to be. I’m not hearing young pastors talk about the big theologians anymore—no Karl Barth, no John Caputo, no Richard Kearney, no Nick Wolterstorff, no Charles Taylor. Maybe I’m just an old fuddy-duddy, stuck in my dusty tomes.

            I understand that I’m generalizing. But I do believe this is a pattern, even if some pastors are still avidly reading and studying the classic stuff.

            Now, in all fairness, it is probably important to note that for most of its history, most Christians and many of their priests were very ignorant. For the first fifteen hundred years of the church’s history, most people couldn’t read, for starters. Being Christian was just what people were by culture and habit. They knew the Apostle’s Creed (maybe), the ten commandments, the Lord’s Prayer, and some of the Bible’s highlights. They knew how they were supposed to behave. The education of most priests was a shadow of what seminary education came to be after the invention of the printing press (and a whole long train of other factors). Historically, there is a way for Christians to participate in their faith in a lively and personally meaningful way in spite of not knowing much about it.

            The other side of this reality, however, is that where Christians in earlier centuries had little opportunity to learn more about their faith, even if they had wanted to, Christians today are voluntarily turning away from knowing more about their faith in droves, even though they have the option of learning more than ever.

            What has happened? Many things, on many different levels, I think. Let me make a starting list of the usual suspects:

1.     People simply don’t read as much or with as much understanding and depth as they used to. There is extensive scholarly consensus here that I’ve gone into in other posts, and my book, Not Sure. The bottom line is that if you don’t pick up books you won’t be able to figure out or recall even basic theology. If Christianity is a religion of the word, and people are not interested in reading words, you can be sure that Christianity is going to be in trouble.

2.     People are too busy to read, or to gather to study or learn. In a way, this partly has to do with priorities, of course. But not entirely. If you live in a big city like New York or Toronto, it takes a very high level of commitment to fight the traffic and get over to church or someone’s home to study. The traffic is stalled, the kids need rides to hockey and basketball, both parents are working, more people have complicated patchworks of part-time jobs with odd schedules, and those who are on the big career track are facing huge demands at work.

3.     People are too distracted to make study a priority. Let me count the ways. Television, internet, gaming, cottages, kid’s sports and activities (again), juggling two careers (again). We work on backhands and putting, abs and pecs rather than reading. And then there is shopping at the mall, and movies, and a critical lack of babysitting.

4.     At the same time, people don’t feel the need to know. And perhaps this is the biggest change. There was a time in the history of the church when the three great estates each had their own area of expertise, which they were supposed to practice on behalf of everyone else. The nobility ruled. The peasants tilled the land. And the church saved everyone through prayer, ritual, study, and whatever it was that they did in the monasteries. In this system, people didn’t have to know and were not encouraged to know—some one else did it, for them. But, in a round about way, we’ve returned to that sense that whatever is in those theology books is great for theologians—but I don’t need it. I am particularly struck by the suspicion people have for learning, a sort of crawling anti-intellectualism that shouts “if it isn’t useful, if it isn’t going to advance my career, it isn’t worth it.”

5.     The culture in general has made church, and what used to be its demands for study and attendance, passé. This is mostly through a widespread—and well-founded—suspicion of institutions and the power they wield. When any institution tells you what to do these days—people bristle. Trust is low. The church—its philandering priests, its residential schools, its insistence (in some quarters) on what is perceived as outmoded rules, just doesn’t seem to merit much interest or study or attendance where you might learn.

6.     And finally, our individualistic culture has put a lot more trust in the spiritual narratives we spin on our own. More on the why and how of this in the next column.

            What do we do about all this? Can churches somehow plow against this cultural tsunami? I hope so. I think a lot about it, and experiment. In the meantime, However, I am taking up that young professional on her offer to help me establish a Bible study for her and her peers—probably in a pub. I’m looking forward to it.

How It's All Different Now: Couples, Weddings, and Counselling.

            Weddings have changed a lot over the past thirty years. Sometimes they disappear altogether. So what is a pastor to do?

            I love weddings as much as the next person, but especially when the people getting married are close friends, their children, or relatives. On the other hand, I can’t say that weddings are the favourite part of my work as a pastor.

            When I began in the ministry, most of the difficulties were practical. They took a lot of time and money, two things that always seemed in short supply. The toughest issue was time. A wedding meant offering three or four premarital counselling sessions, another to discuss the wedding liturgy, then a rehearsal (usually on Friday nights), followed by a rehearsal dinner. Then there was the wedding itself, usually on Saturday afternoon, followed by a reception, usually in the evening, effectively eating up the whole day. My wife and I would have to sort out how much babysitter we could afford, how many invites to rehearsal dinners or receptions we could turn down, and then decide how much we could afford on wedding gifts. Preparing wedding sermons took a lot of time too. I tried to make every wedding sermon very personal and unique, so that the audience would know I was speaking to this couple in particular. As a young pastor, I sometimes had to do this five or six times during the summer. It was a big, sometimes costly load. The fifty or seventy-five dollars honorarium barely covered costs.

            Eventually, Irene and I figured most of this out. We decided that as a matter of course we would turn down rehearsal dinners. We decided that we couldn’t afford the purchase of wedding gifts—and I would explain this to the couple well before hand. If the couple were participating members of the church, Irene tried to attend the reception with me. Sometimes I would decline the invitation to the reception if it came during a busy stretch of the year. We bathed all of these guidelines in lots of communication with the couple getting married. We never had any problems—at least that I heard of.

            Over time, however, I became more and more frustrated by the expectation that I should provide premarital counselling. At first, naively, I thought, “no problem.” I treated it as a class on marriage in the Bible and agape as the Christian approach to love. We studied the formulary and its claims. I explained over and over again how Paul’s demand that women submit to husbands meant that they should love their husbands as their husbands loved them. And so on.

            Over time, however, as my wife trained to be a therapist, and then specialized in couple’s counselling, I began to realize that all I had for my couples were platitudes. My wife had real training—years of it. She had many annual seminars, and regular professional supervision as well. My two seminary classes in pastoral theology couldn’t hold a candle to any of that.

            Sure, there were a bunch of marriage training courses out there that included mail in tests that would tell me a bit about the couple. But the couple could take such tests on their own, if they wanted. And, in any case, counselling--that I'm not qualified to do--only begins once you have a (hit and miss) profile of the couple. Mail in tests are no substitute for a real therapist.

            So, as time passed, I became more and more convinced that my premarital counselling was little more than a charade. It was more for the benefit of parents who demanded free counselling for their kids than the young couple themselves. Eventually, I made a stand. I wouldn’t do it anymore. Instead, I insisted that all couples receive premarital counselling from a licensed therapist. I provided a list of names of Christian therapists if my couple insisted on it. But it was far more important to me that the couple find a great counsellor than a Christian one. "Great" and "Christian" are not synonymous. In fact, in a province like Ontario, just about anyone, trained or not, can put out a shingle (though this should change soon).

            The other big change, of course, is that now many couples choose to live together without being wed. This was already happening occasionally during my college days, among friends—even though the couple usually spread their cohabitation between two apartments to keep it quiet. But by the time I was in my last Christian Reformed congregation, it was pretty clear to me that many couples were (still often very surreptitiously, but not always) living together. I’ve written about this in another blog post. Check it out at: http://tinyurl.com/kon8dnt

            Does this mean there is nothing a pastor can and should do, anymore, before a couple marries—or even chooses to move in together—something that is quite common in my new church setting in the United Church? Not exactly.

            First, I still urge all couples who are committed to a long-term relationship to get some professional insight into their project. Lots of fine therapists offer couples counselling and/or couples retreats. My wife, Irene, has being doing retreats for years, usually sells them out, and gets consistently good reports on them, even years later. Check out her upcoming retreats at: http://tinyurl.com/lyfp536

            Two. Saying that I’m not a therapist doesn’t mean I’m ignorant about marriage. The Bible has things to say about committed love, and I preach that. More importantly, I have a great deal of lay fascination about couple relationships—in the same way I am fascinated by global warming, or end-times prophetic groups, or evolution. I know what models are most commonly used for marital therapy and who the key scholars are. This enriches my preaching and grounds my pleas that couples get pre-moving-in counselling in something other than ignorance.

            Third. I strongly encourage couples to educate themselves about couples relationships. In that respect, I cannot recommend highly enough Sue Johnson’s new Love Sense: The Revolutionary New Science of Romantic Relationships. The book is highly recommended by well-known scholars such as John Gottman and James Coan, as well as practitioners like my wife! Johnson’s approach, usually called Emotionally Focused Therapy, builds on the recognition that humans have a deep need for attachment. It is too complex an idea to explain in a few words—though I make a stab at it in the same post I mention two paragraphs above. One new feature of this book, compared to Johnson’s previous ones, is how it dips into neuroscience to help explain her approach. It makes frequent reference to clinical studies—a relatively new development in this field.

             Sue Johnson’s work is all the more appealing due to the breadth of her approach’s explanatory power. Thus Johnson’s book also offers great insight into contemporary issues like pornography, social media, and how to raise children.

            I wish that I had something like this thirty years ago! It would have given the lie to the reality that I was prepared to offer premarital counselling. And it would have been a great boost for the young lovers at whose weddings I officiated.

Olympic Spirituality

[This is a sermon about the relation of modern sports to spirituality, based on Ecclesiastes 9:7-12. It seemed fitting on the eve of the Olympics. What is more, the church I serve, Lawrence Park Community Church, just ran a four-week series on Sports and Spirituality in January. Our Sunday speakers included Paul Henderson, Maria Tourpakai (a Muslim squash player, TedXTeen speaker and Taliban opponent), Jerry Howarth (Voice of the Blue Jays), Kurt Harnett, Jason DeVos and others, mentioned here in this summary talk.]

            Thousands of years ago, in ancient Greece, where the Olympics were first played, the games were held in honour of the Greek god Zeus. Every champion was paraded to Zeus’s temple, where he—it was all “he’s” back then—he was given an olive crown like the one Zeus wore on his head. Greek art often pictures the goddess of victory, Nike—yes, that is where the sports company gets its name—putting the olive crown on the victors’ heads. Winning at the ancient Olympics meant joining the company of the Gods—in a way. Winners were carved in stone, and their images would be placed in the garden outside of Zeus’s temple, near Zeus’s image.

            During the ancient Olympic opening ceremonies, athletes and judges slaughtered a pig and sacrificed it on an altar of flame. Then they put their hands over the flames and promised Zeus to play fair. After the Olympics were over, winners ate at a banquet where hundreds of cows were sacrificed to Zeus and then eaten in his honor. Ultimately, the Christian and Roman Emperor Theodosius shut down the Olympic games just because they were full of these pagan religious practices.

            So do our modern Olympics still have a spiritual angle? Sure. The founder of the modern Olympic movement, Pierre de Coubertin, wrote in the nineteen-thirties that sports was "a religion with its church, dogmas, service . . . but above all a religious feeling." He called his new religion Olympism, and said that its goal was world peace. Ironically, De Coubertin wrote his stirring words about Olympism as a religion of peace just before the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, a propaganda show for Hitler’s racist and violent Nazi juggernaut just before it rolled over Europe. One hopes no similar comparisons will be made fifty years from now to the Olympics being held in Sochi, which is partly a propaganda show for Putin’s dictatorial, increasingly homophobic, nationalistic, and corrupt government.

            Of course at the Sochi Olympics there's no pig meat sacrifice, though the ancient Olympic flame and oath have been revived. And if anyone doubts that these things don’t feel religious to modern Canadians, I recall that when some spectators began roasting hotdogs on one of the smaller Olympic flames at the Nakiska ski site at the 1988 Olympics in Calgary, the newspapers reported that "The sacred Olympic flame is being desecrated by spectators." I’d call that a religious sentiment.

            But it isn’t just the Olympic sports that have a spiritual feel. Most professional sports do as well. A few months ago the Scottish tennis player Andy Murray won at Wimbledon, the first person from the United Kingdom to win at home in 77 years. Afterward, Simon Barnes wrote this in Britain’s paper of record, The Times. “Joy puts it too conservatively. This was beyond all earthly concepts of joy: this was, for a few moments of eternity, nothing less than bliss . . ."

           The modern world of sports has its departed saints who are forever revered—its Babe Ruths and Rocket Richards. It has its archangel coaches, people like Bo Schembechler and Scotty Bowman. Sports has its gods, the superstars before whom we kneel and swoon—the Wayne Gretzkys, Serena Williams, and maybe now our own Eugenie Bouchard. Sports has its rule-making synods, like the IOC and the NHLPA. Like ancient Judaism, it has scribes, too—that special class of priest who prints all the news that is fit to print about the saints. Sports has its temples, such as Yankee Stadium and Wimbledon’s Centre Courts. And of course, modern sports has its symbols of faith—Stanley cups, autographed baseballs and hockey sticks, maybe even signed by Nazim Kadri or Haley Wickenheiser.

           You see, we live in an experience economy. That is, today’s consumers—of anything, whether it be cars or religion, sports or vacations—today’s consumers (and I’m including myself) all want more than just a material product, we want an experience that moves us, that feels good. My all time favorite ad that gets at this is from BMW. The catch-line goes: "Engineering. Science. Technology. All worthless . . . unless they make you feel something." And what the whole sports economy is ultimately about, for competitors whether they win or lose, and especially for spectators—the sports economy is designed to make us feel something, deep inside, that we can share with others and that will glom us and our fandom and our adoration to the team. At its best it is an almost ecstatic, religious feeling, and at its worst, as when the Jays keep on losing, or our child comes in last at a school sports day, we feel something close to despair.

            But are religion and spirituality—I’ll use them synonymously for now—are religion and spirituality really just about feeling good? I have my doubts. I hope not.

           

            So, the most telling moment during the Sports and Spirituality series, for me, was when Paul Henderson spoke. He had not just one, but actually three great moments that still rank among the top-ten shining bright moments in world sports history. Henderson scored not just one, not just two, but the last three winning goals—three Joe Carter-like world series homeruns in a row—in the great Canada-USSR summit of 1972. All of Canada, gathered around TVs in school gyms and coffee-break rooms went crazy with joy when Henderson scored that last goal and won the series for us. The famous picture of Henderson celebrating that third goal show that he was feeling pretty good about it himself. It was a great experience. Very emotional. It felt spiritual. We worshipped Paul.

            And yet, Paul Henderson told us that soon afterwards, that moment left him feeling empty, unfulfilled, and ultimately, unhappy. The ecstatic joy only lasted a short time. The greatest sporting achievement of any Canadian ever soon left the hero personally defeated and lost.

            And then, as he told us, he “found Christ,” and became an Evangelical Christian, and he’s been spiritually happy and fulfilled ever since.

            Now, I’m not interested, really, in the fact that he became an evangelical Christian, or that Maria Tourpakai is a Muslim woman. Henderson could have become a Zen Buddhist, for all I care. What I am really interested in is that after he scored those three goals, Henderson realized that even at its best, when he was feeling his best, and the whole nation was feeling his glory, Paul Henderson realized that these feelings were not enough to give his life meaning.

            Feeling great, being moved to jump out of our seats and cheer, participating in the wave—this is all wonderful, but even when it is bliss, it doesn’t add up to something to live for. Henderson, in the quiet after his triumph realized that his destiny, that the reason the universe exists and we play a part in it, the big questions we all face about divine love and world peace, and how to love our wife and be responsible citizens—Henderson realized that such questions would never be answered on the hockey rink or even in the din of a whole nation singing his praises. He realized that building his life on even a great fleeting feeling is like building your house on the sand—whether that feeling is occasioned by a BMW or a Leaf win or too much wine, it matters not. The minute the feeling passes, the minute the rains come and the floods rise. Henderson crumbled, and so he went in search of real spirituality.

   Now listen carefully. I’m not saying that search for great experiences and the positive feelings that follow are bad. Not at all. The writer of our text from Ecclesiastes encourages us, in fact, to have the sort of experiences that leave us feeling good. He—it was probably a he—says we ought to drink wine with a merry heart. We ought to wear white clothes—a great luxurious splurge in an era where there were no washing machines or dry cleaners but lots of dust. The writer of Ecclesiastes tells us that we ought to enjoy whatever it is our hands find to do and the wife—or husband, or partner, of our youth. He might as well have said we ought to have a blast watching our kids win blue ribbons in relay race. God has long approved of such worldly pleasures and success, says the author.

   Except that—and here the writer of Ecclesiastes, in a moment of great insight to the human condition, uses a sports analogy—except that even when we’re having fun, we need to remember that the race does not go to the swift, and the battle does not go to the strong, and meaning cannot be found in feeling good about fleeting pleasures. All of that stuff is ultimately vanity. There is too much tragedy and suffering, too much pain and hurt in the world to devote ourselves to games. It is all, as the Apostle Paul pretty much says, killing ourselves for an olive crown that will whither.

No, religion and spirituality have to be about more than winning a race. True religion and spirituality are not about fandom ecstasy, but they are about Paul Henderson devoting the rest of his life, and much of his resources, to Teen Ranch, helping disadvantaged kids get a leg up on life. True religion is Maria Tourpakai overcoming Taliban extremism for the sake of women and children who are being kept in the dark. True religion is Kurt Harnett raising a family, supporting a wife in her career, and using all his spare time to support Special Olympics. True religion is Jonathan Power  responding to a letter from a scared girl in Pakistan, and giving her a new lease on life—not to mention his volunteer work to use squash to help scores of children in the Jane-Finch corridor stay out of the clutches of gangs or worse. True religion is all about you and I leveraging our politics, our jobs, our social standing, our resources, wisdom, and hearts to create a little bit of heaven here and now.

And while this sort of true religion doesn’t always feel good, because it can be blood, sweat and tears; while this sort of religion isn’t always convenient, it is the divine path to true inner happiness, and maybe even world peace. The meaning of life is to love God and neighbor, says Jesus; what God loves is that we do justice and embrace kindness says the prophet; true religion to visit orphans and widows in their affliction says the Apostle. And sure there will be tears of joy and happy hugs and laughter and fun and fellowship on the way; but not always. We are talking, after all, about the main thing, what life is all about and not just how we feel about it. We are following Jesus.