Bigger than us

Bigger than us

 

“Bigger than us” I say.

As I reflect on the place religion might play in this messy world, where so many people do not seem to have any need to see and respond to God, I ask myself, what is the core of religious response?

My answer: a sense that there is something bigger than us.

Something, maybe someone, bigger than us. Not just bigger than me, bigger than all of us.

Who are us?

 Back in the ancient days of sociology, the 1950s, one of the more famous sociologists, Robert K. Merton, coined the term “reference group.” He suggested that we fashion in our minds a group of people with whom we identify. We may not belong to that group, and may have no physical connection with them, but they shape who we are.

One of my reference groups is the Roman Catholic church community. That community, in the very concrete form of St. James parish in Decatur, Illinois, saved my parents from the effects of what I believe were my two alcoholic grandfathers, one of whom committed suicide. My parents were lower class—neither went to high school. They were suddenly uprooted from their families in Springfield and sent to Decatur by the Bell Telephone Company. There the church community, and especially its leader, Fr. Francis Ostendorf, rescued them.

The Catholic community is world-wide. It inspired my brother to live for nine years as a missionary on the Brazilian Amazon, which led me to choose “Latin American social and economic development” as one of the two topics I studied intensively for my degree in sociology. My black seminary classmate, Fr. Bennet Spivey, who died two years after his ordination of Lou Gehrig’s disease, motivated me to identify with Black Catholics.

So for me, “us” is worldwide. And now that my church has expanded its sense of who can experience the voice of God, “us” for me is even wider than the Roman Catholic world.

So I say, when Jesus said “make disciples of all nations,” I say: the word “disciple” means “learner.” Jesus calls me to make learners of all nations, and then, maybe when some learners want to affiliate in a deeper way with my church, we can baptize them. Too often in history we baptized first and then made learners. Usually we never got around to the learning and let the baptism (or lack of it) become an excuse for exploitation. “If we baptize you, you can work for us without pay. If you refuse baptism, we kill you.”

 

The troubles of our time

Our greatest problem as we muddle our way through the environmental mess and the worldwide migrations our behavior is causing, is that too many of us are drifting in a world where there is nothing bigger than us. We are masters of our destiny, and our technology should be able to dig us out of whatever hole we dig ourselves into. Without anything bigger than us, self-interest tells us that restraints are not needed.

The regulators do not regulate because there is no sense that there is something bigger than themselves. Why be concerned about the feelings pf co-workers, or respectful of people who look different?

 

Love

My friends kid me about my fascination with definitions. But I insist that we need a working definition of love. Otherwise the word can mean anything, even murder. My working definition of love: respectful, vulnerable, faithful involvement of people with each other. (And, if you are a believer, with God).

Why should I respect, be vulnerable to, and be faithful to someone if there is nothing bigger than us?

But there is something bigger than us. That something, who I believe is a someone, is God.

I believe that we should be respectful, vulnerable, and faithful in our dealings with one another because that is how God is involved with us.

God loves, which is the message that Jesus took from his Jewish background, especially the psalms, and lived out himself.