Lattices
A lattice is a structure around which climbing plants can
grow. The image suggests an inanimate thing, the lattice, providing a means for
a living thing, a plant, to flourish.
Churches are lattices.
A church provides a structure within which people can
experience God. The life is in the people and their experience, not in the
structure.
Take the Catholic Church. It provides places where people can
gather, and gathering is essential for experiencing God. It provides a script
for behavior when the people gather (liturgy). It provides resources that can
enrich the experience (Scripture and theology). It structures experience around
life events: baptism, Eucharist, burial.
Within the structure, all kinds of different experiences
occur. Some people experience God through mysticism, some through concrete acts
of service to others, some through a regular routine of prayer. Many withdraw
from the lattice but continue to find God through faint memories of the stories
of God.
People who have never had the experience of the structure
never benefit from what the structure can provide. They are like athletes who
grow up without coaching, and whose abilities may or may not ever fully
develop, or like musicians who have not had people around them who will nurture
their musical abilities. Some such people will overcome their disabilities and
develop a relationship with God in their own way. Many, perhaps most, will not.
That is the cause for regret on the part of us religious
people. We are like people who love music and regret that some people never get
to experience the goodness of musical experience.
The regret is the motive for what we call evangelization. We
do not evangelize for the sake of numbers—statistics about church membership
and ritual attendance are misleading. We who manage the structures are managing
wood and nails, not living things. God is moving in our structures, we hope,
and sharing abundant life. Our role is to let plants grow.
We of the structure are human beings, which means that we are
sinful. We develop pathologies of structuring. We fall in love with controlling
other people, or with pride in creating beautiful buildings and objects. We
love creating rules, because rules are one way for us to gain power over other
people. Rule breakers get ruled out of conversations. We get into fights with
other religious people, sometimes even to the point of using violence. This is
especially true when we merge our lattices with political lattices, whose
function is to keep us at peace with one another. Church and state merge, and
the structures smother life instead of promoting it.
For some reason we church people got the idea that we have to
control the world in order for people to come to God. No. We just have to
provide the lattice and get out of the way.
A poem
Weeds
have sympathy for weeds
flowers
out of place
true, not so pretty
don’t
look like flowers
have
to look close
but persistent
even
in sidewalks
God works that way
life
out of place
often not so pretty
have
to look close
we church people are sidewalks
weeds
are life
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