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 scripts
for behavior when the people gather. It provides resources like books and music
that enrich the experience. It uses life events like marriage and death as
hooks on the lattice to catch passersby. It creates a lattice of time (celebrating
the story of Jesus in the liturgical year) that keeps reminding people of where
their lives can go.
Within the lattice, all kinds of different experiences occur.
Some people experience God through mysticism, some through acts of service to
others, some through a disciplined routine of prayer with others. Many withdraw
from the lattice but continue to find God through memories of their experiences
in the lattice.
People who have never had contact with the lattice never
benefit from what the lattice can provide. They are like athletes who grow up
without coaching, and whose abilities may not ever fully develop, or like
musicians who have not had people around them to nurture their musical gifts.
Some people will overcome such disabilities and develop a relationship with God
in their own way. Many 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 wonders of musical performance.
That 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 miss the point. We who manage the lattice 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 mushrooms and 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 let us gain power over other people. We get
into fights with other religious people. This is especially true when we merge
our lattices with political structures. Church and state merge, and smother
life instead of nurturing 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
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 pretty
have
to look close
churches are sidewalks
weeds
are life
