apatheistic

Saint Conrad of Constance and his legendary spider. I have never learned what the dice have to do with him (if anything), and every time I drag Daniel to church he obsesses over the fact that they are not a matching set.

The churchy circuits here are abuzz about the new book Wenn nichts fehlt, wo Gott fehlt ("when nothing is missing where God is missing") in which theology professor Jan Loffeld examines demographic trends and comes to the shocking conclusion that the general [German? European?] public these days is increasingly neither pro- nor anti-religion, but apathetic towards the whole subject. Shocking! challenging! revelatory! etc. Czech theologian Tomáš Halík, whose opinions I very much respect, pulled this quote to summarize the book's message:

Without a doubt, Christianity has a future, but probably a much different one than we are capable of imagining and planning for today.

I feel a like it's a measure of how far off track most churchy discussions are that this statement would be shocking, challenging, or revelatory. The idea that Christianity, or the Catholic Church, is now or has ever been some sort of eternal unchanging entity is relatively absurd. Do we not worship a god of death and resurrection? But in Europe, church and culture were inextricably intertwined for so long that it is still unthinkable to some that one could continue to exist without the other. And in the U.S. I think that uncompromising views are in some ways even easier to sustain because society is so much more fluid: anyone who doesn't agree with us can just head down the street to a community where they feel more comfortable.

The book came up on Saturday at a training day at St. Konrad (my new-ish church) for readers, Eucharistic ministers, and members of the "construction site group" that plans lay-led services once a month. It was led by a liturgy professor and her sidekick Ph.D. student and it was largely quite engaging and informative. We learned, for example, what to do when a communion wafer drops to the floor and you think that's gross and don't want to eat it, Body of Christ or not. Answer: put it on the corporal, the square cloth on the altar, and the sacristan will dispose of it in a worthy fashion later. Somewhat surprisingly, no one pointed out that presiding over the distribution of Holy Communion at St. Konrad is a stained glass window depicting the saintly bishop himself with the spider he according to legend swallowed whole because it was in the chalice with the Blood of Christ and sometimes you gotta take one for the team. (In case you're concerned for the spider, no worries! Later it crawled back out of St. Conrad's mouth intact! Ick.) 

But by the time we got to the part of the day dedicated to liturgical innovation (necessary, per the liturgy professor, because people are increasingly apathetic about church), I have to admit I had limited energy left for listening to the Ph.D. student's bright ideas about how to creatively use liturgical space. Not because his ideas were bad, but because I think the thing our planning group is lacking isn't ideas; it's relationship. He kept talking about "the congregation" as if it were a group of people different from the one in the room, but I think we need to face facts: the Venn diagram of people who volunteer at church and people who attend services is pretty much two overlapping circles. What's stopping us from changing the conversation from "what should we do for them?" to "what we do we want for ourselves?" What would it be like if we all felt some ownership of the monthly services we are nominally collectively responsible for, rather than simply taking turns playing the parts of (active) celebrant(s) and (passive) congregation? What if we put some time and attention into making things better for those who are showing up rather than speculating about those who aren't? Even if our goal is to grow our ranks: you know what's really attractive? Loving community. 

The liturgy professor made a point of saying that people in the U.S. look to church for social life more often than the Swiss, so maybe I'm just being too American here...though she also said that another reason we needed liturgical innovation was because people were bored at church and just sat through the service to get to the coffee hour afterwards, so I'm not super convinced that that particular cultural difference is so much wider than coffee-and-donuts vs. Kaffee-und-Gipfeli. (A Gipfeli is a Swiss croissant, which is a *totally different thing* than a French croissant, although to the untrained eye they may be visually indistinguishable. We can get really into the weeds with "differences" here.)

And who knows what the future will bring? The best contribution to the apathy-to-church discussion I've encountered so far was this article by a Catholic priest in France who reports the unexpected and spontaneous appearance of hoards of young people at church services on (drum roll please....) Ash Wednesdays. For reasons maybe related to...Catholic Instagram influencers?

Why are they there? I don't know either. Maybe because [surveys show] they are more unhappy than the generations before them. Maybe because they are in the first generation in France that grew up completely without God or any religious education. And maybe because something really is missing when God is missing.

Maybe? I hope that a less catchy but more accurate title for Loffeld's book would be "when nothing is missing when church is missing" or maybe "when nothing is missing when religious education is missing"? Because surely any serious theology can't have such a limited conception of God that God could just up and go missing? But also, I'm fully sympathetic to the survey respondents who say they don't care whether God exists or not. It's not a question I'd want to venture an answer to a stranger about, and I am relatively into this stuff. I also have no doubt that people can lead meaningful, fulfilling lives in which theology and church play no part. Quite frankly I wish sometimes that I could.