"The Tie That Binds....."

The world outside my window Saturday morning was another soggy grey drizzle, nothing of such concentration, seemingly, as to threaten those who live along the nearby creek, but one just never knows the volume of the downpour in the hillside subdivisions that surround us. About ten o’clock my daughter, with a better view of the situation, called to advise us of the waters having crossed the road and now inching toward her front door. Fortunately, however, as it has on other occasions, the pool ceased to rise some fifty feet or so from the cars parked in her driveway; and, with the sky actually clearing for a few hours, by three-thirty or so nothing remained other than a few large puddles captured here and there, that little Methodist church that sits up by the bridge, as far as I know, suffering the most damage. As Beth and I passed on our way to dinner, we saw a fire-engine and a couple other vehicles at that location, the flood, no doubt, having penetrated their lower level to some degree. Surely, though, this particular congregation has clean-up down to a science, such event nothing that hasn’t happened several times before in the past two or three decades. This is “home”, though, the families filling its pews generationally linked, committed to its survival. Service will be held today as usual. Christ will be in their midst... Some old, Tomas Halik quotes resurfaced in my reading this weekend, the Czechoslovakian Catholic priest having no problem in expressing his personal rejection of Pentecostal format. Referring to “tongues” as a “psychological regression into baby talk” and describing our worship as an environment which encourages us to “pray down, shout, weep, and clap (our)selves out of our anxieties” while being “cradled and caressed” by people of “like tendency and often with bigger problems”. Yet he also concludes that “The Church is a mystery for us, for we do not know its boundaries, just where it begins and ends, who belongs and who doesn’t, many thinking they are inside but are outside, and vice-versa.” How about his opinion that we all yet, in the Church, “still encounter attempts to understand God by hemming knowledge about Him into dogmatic definitions and binding our relationships with Him into a straitjacket of a legal system”? I loved it, then, when he confesses to a revelation of sorts last Easter, one wherein he was struck by the Gospel accounts of meeting with Christ after the resurrection, how His own followers failed to recognize Him through signs of His outer appearance. It took His “breaking of the bread”, His speaking their name, and finally the experience of their actually touching His wounds. Isn’t such point where we are all connected in Him? The rest is merely our identity, our individual perspective acquired along the way. This morning I sat in my own pew; but my spirit was with these just a short distance from my home whose faith, in spite of the storm, remains anchored in that One who indwells them…..