21st Century i.e. the here and now, in this time and this place. Pretty simple. Good.
Episcopal Context - the tradition within I find myself and to which I have a certain devotion. A relatively clear distinction historically at least. Check.
Personal Piety - I actually spent the most time working on this one. My primary concern was distinguish my area of interest from any corporate worship experiences. But I didn't want to use worship because I felt that restricted the possible playing field. Devotions would work but didn't quite feel right. Prayer just felt like part of the overall category. So I reached into my vocabulary and grabbed an older word that felt like it was more encompassing.
I was rather surprised to discover that that word, piety, would be the one that caused the most trouble among the folks who responded to my request for input at the beginning of the process. Several of them mentioned negative connotations to the word. Where pious begins to border on self righteous and self satisfied. So I went and looked it up:
Piety - a reverence to God or devout fulfillment of religious obligation, religious devotion usually indicating humility, a conventional belief or standard.
Oh dear. That's not really what I had in mind at all. Well the reverence to God and humility parts aren't bad but not what I had in mind. The problem is that I can't come up with anything that works any better for me. Personal Faith Practice is probably much closer to the mark while being longer and no clearer. Personal Devotions. Still can't get comfy with Devotions. Smacks too much of pre-packaged portions of prayer. I guess I must confess to the same kind of negative connotative meaning to the D word that the others were having to the P word.
So perhaps I'm best served by unpacking it a bit more.
Personal - again as compared to corporate or common worship. What do you do AWAY from your church or prayer group or bible study group or small group or whatever. You. Yourself. One on one with the Make of All Things (or however you envision the Divine)
Faith Practice -(I guess this is the current front runner for the moment. Feel free to chime in with other thoughts) The stuff you do. Sing or be silent, read the Bible or contemplate the work of God in a flower or a bird's song. Contemplative or Discursive? (See what happens when you start reading theology books? Do you sit quietly or do get involved in direct conversation?) Involving which senses and in what form? I continue to want this to be as wide open as is permitted by the other two clauses of the overall statement.
Now a learned friend of mine asked the more fundamental question of for whom do we perform this actions? Is there an audience? If so whom? Does God require us to make certain magic gestures as we utter the holy words? Or do we do it simply for ourselves, to make us feel good?
After a bit of thought I think I reject the fundamental assumption here. That it is a performance. The history of the church universal certainly shows that it can and does become more about the "performance" over and over again. But I think that's the perversion of what we're supposed to be doing. Given my understanding of the interaction between God and Human as relationship then it is through those actions that the relationship is expressed. I express my relationship with the humans around me by the way that I act, speak, the rituals that I fulfill or decide not to fulfill. I am not "performing" for them or for myself. Lacking direct telepathic communication we must find physical and verbal ways of developing a relationship. (This is one of the great challenges of relationships formed "virtually". A great many of our routines of relationship are not available to us. Hence the much more stylized norms of the internet communication style. The simplest example being the emoticon.) Relationships are almost never perfectly balanced among humans and inevitably must be out of balance when we reach toward the Divine. For us the great gift is that the Divine keeps the door open to our stumbling and inconsistent attempts.
In fact one of my correspondents said it so beautifully. Erika wrote to me from the Isle of Man (how cool is that?) and said:
...people like me just stumble along trying to draw deeper into God but as often as not making a real hash of it, forgetting to pray or not bothering and then being surprised and delighted when he finds us again saying “I missed you, shall we walk together for a bit?”
Yes, yes, and YES! So I'm interested in the ways we all have stumbled along and on which paths and byways we have most often bumped into God again.
More thoughts on this subject to come.
Peace
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