Secular people, or at least mostly secular people, make funny assumptions about religion and religious people. Snowcrash, as I recall but cannot find with a cursory google search, takes turns making fun of Religious people for being stupid and presenting one of the most intelligence characters as religion for the irony of it.

My Aunt when told that I “was religious now,” offhandedly completed the thought: “but not really.” Protests against the unseriousness of it were greeted with a shrug and a change of subject in much the same way my unwillingness to vote for a warmongering psychopath or a pedophile rapist were.

Shrug, let’s talk about Roby.

This isn’t a critique exactly, it’s fine, I’m not offended. These past few months have been, if anything, a deepening of my contemplative life. I have approached the problems of philosophy and reality with a closer attention and criticality than ever before in my life. I suspect that the secular friends in my life would expect the opposite: that to join a church is to submit, to let go of any interest in Truth.

From this side of the narthex (another Snowcrash reference, a drug name taken from the west end of a cathedral where non-members are allowed, though that hasn’t been enforced in most places for centuries) it seems to me that it is the secular folk who have accepted the status quo, the materialist “obviousness” of it all.

I don’t know, not many things seem very obvious to me, and while I have no doubt that there are many Christians who love the sureness of their faith, I’ve met many of them, I and this congregation are not such people. It’s all about the mystery, the strangeness and depth of it all. It’s about approaching every situation and subject with an open-heartedness, with an unwillingness to accept the status quo, to go easy.

I feel pretty good about it so far.