Hello again
and (a belated) welcome to 2017. Hang in there, everybody.
I’ve missed
writing, and getting back to it I feel rusty – there are so many things I want to say but I can’t quite get any of them out. Of course, the solution to
this is to just keep writing and hope they’ll eventually see the light, so
thank you, dear readers, for indulging me during the boring bits.
Wednesday
night was the first session of the second trimester of our class. We have a
different instructor for these next 10 classes and this necessitated what ended
up being an enlightening round of introductions, in which we learned that one
student wants to bail out of our class because we aren’t learning enough about
the Bible, another was deeply disappointed to
learn during the last session that the Church doesn’t give definite answers to the big
questions of life, and the new instructor was apparently baffled as to why so
many of us were taking this class purely out of personal interest. It’s always
interesting to see how different teachers and teaching styles resonate with
different students. I suspect that I won’t be as comfortable this time. Or, let’s
say, it’s possible that to avoid the theme of these posts being, “ways in which
my theology class instructor pushed my buttons this week” I might have to go
off-roading a bit more. Which is not necessarily bad.
Our topic
this trimester is “church.” Whether this means “church” in the sense of the Catholic church, or the Christian church, or just church as a general
concept is not yet entirely clear, but it seems that it’s mostly going to mean “the
Roman Catholic Church in Switzerland.” Which is not something I have a huge
amount of experience with or cultural grounding in, so that should make things
interesting. [Style note: I’m going to try to be consistent about using
upper-case-Church to mean “the Roman Catholic Church of which I and this
theology class are a part” and lower-case-church to more generally mean “a
place Christians meet to worship” but also "the church I attend."]
We did an exercise in which the instructor put a Bible on floor and said
“Let’s say this Bible represents the Church. Now take a few moments to walk around,
then stand in a way that represents your relationship to the Church.”
We all ended up standing in an awkward circle at various distances from said
Bible, and when asked to explain their choices of position people mostly talked about
their experience of church as children and how they did or didn’t participate
today. Then he said “ok, now let’s say the Bible represents religion. Move so
that your position represents your relationship to religion.” And most people took a step closer. He
said that this was reflective of a general trend in society, that religiosity is
in fact increasing even as mainstream church attendance is dropping
precipitously. Then he said that felt his job this trimester was to give us
information that would “make us feel better about the Church.” Hmm…
This is
maybe a good place to talk about a big cultural difference between Switzerland
(or…one can never generalize about Switzerland, but at least Zurich) and the
U.S.: here churches have markedly more resources, and markedly fewer attendees.
In the U.S., churches are funded largely by passing the collection plate, so
there’s a strong relationship between church attendance and the health of church
facilities and programs. Here, not so much. Few families regularly attend
church. And the bulk of church attendees are elderly and quite literally dying
off. On a typical Sunday service at my
church, a good 75% of attendees are over the age of 70. Maybe I’m
exaggerating. But definitely over 60. Church, in the not-too-distant past, was a place everyone in the neighborhood
went every Sunday to participate in a common religion and a common culture. And
as dour and frankly unfriendly as these people look, all bundled up (here’s
another cultural difference: no one takes their coats off at church here…I don’t
know why…to save on heating?), I know that they are good people who contribute,
in lots of ways, to their community. But the fact is, this group isn’t going to
be around in 20 or 30 years.
But despite
this: churches here have beautiful facilities and ample funding for staff. This
apparent gap exists because of the
historical connection between church and state: mainstream church denominations
are funded through the tax system. If you are a Catholic living in Zurich, for
example, 11% of the taxes you pay to the Canton of Zurich (so I think around 4%
of the income taxes you pay overall?) are given to the Church. The same thing goes
for the Protestant church (of which there is one state-sponsored variety, not so
much the rainbow of Episcopalians and Lutherans and Presbyterians and so on that
exists in the U.S.). I get the feeling that a lot of people still identify as
Catholic or Protestant, but feel like they’ve done their duty towards the church
by simply existing as economically-productive beings. The church is there when
they need it (for baptisms, funerals, maybe introducing the kids to religion), but
they are comfortable enough in their circle of friends and family that they don’t
need it as a source of community. And when they need to commune with a higher
power, there’s hiking, or yoga class, or other things that are not as...boring or challenging
or awkward or inconveniently timed or whatever.
Of course, as people have less and less to do with the church, they are more and more likely to opt out of paying the "church tax" - so there's still a crisis looming. And thinking about the future I hear “how do we get people to come to Mass?” or “how do we get them to take their faith more seriously?” or “how do we tell them
the Good News?” but I don’t think any of these are quite the right question. Things
clicked for me when I was watching a video on The Work Of The People (I adore
this site; it's more than worth the subscription fee imho), in which someone defined church as “a community of practice for
love.” Perfect! A community of practice is people with a common goal who come together to support each other. But the focus isn't inwards - how do we get more people to join our community? - but rather outwards - how do we find strength together to do the thing Jesus told us to do - LOVE - ever more and better? If our orientation is outwards we can stop worrying about threats to our existence because it doesn’t matter if
there are 100 people at Mass, or 10; whether we have a beautiful building, or
not; whether the people we serve get their own spiritual energy from the Church, or
from a temple, or from the mountains. That's not our business, our business is to work together to figure out how to be there for each other, our families, our community, our world.
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