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Desiring Church Instead of God or Having a Divine Crush
(It’s two sides of the same coin.)

Essay on Lent and the Discipline of Prayer
March 14, 2006

It’s Lent and that ought to be a time of increased prayer. At St. Thomas church it’s certainly a time of increased worship services. There are services on both Wednesday and Friday nights throughout the season. Because I’m on the road all week I am unable to attend the special services during the week. To add insult to injury, my trucking schedule has been such that I missed the two Sundays leading up to Lent (Feb. 26 and Mar. 5). This was more than a bit frustrating for me, since the Lenten services were so significant to me last year.

But here’s the odd part. While I want to go to church more, I want to pray less. My spiritual fervor has really dropped off in the last few weeks. This is, needless to say, prolematic. Fellowship with God is not the same thing as attending church. Jesus made this very clear in his conversation with the Samaritan woman at the well. The burning religious question among the Samaritans concerned the proper place of worship. They argued the temple should be in Samaria—a place with strong historic credentials—while the Jews maintained the temple was right where it should be, in Jerusalem. The woman perceived Jesus to be a prophet and therefore asked him this most central question (in the Samaritan mind) of proper relationship to God: Where should we worship? Jesus’ answer was that the heart of divine relationship had less to do with place and everything to do with the fulfillment of the Old Testament promises through Jesus’ own life, death, and resurrection. He summed up the difference in attitude with the well known aphorism, that God is spirit and they that worship God must worship him in spirit and truth.

What Jesus says to me, through the woman at the well, is that my priorities are askew. It is not normal for me to want to go to church and not to pray. Church is nothing, after all, if it isn’t prayer. If I don’t want to pray, then I’m wanting to go to church for all the wrong reasons. Church is not merely an aesthetic experience, a relaxing experience, an opportunity to chat with friends. It is the gathered Body of Christ at prayer.

But I suspect there’s a very logical reason why I have this upside down view of things this Lent. Relationship with God is an art because, in its most direct form, it is very unnatural, humanly speaking. Relationship is not just mind connecting with mind. Humans, after all, are not pure mind. We are both body and soul, physical and mental. While we may be able to conceptually separate the material and non-material, they are, in fact, a seamless whole. Relationship, therefore, requires both a material and non-material component. Since God is spirit the most direct relationship with him is a non-material relationship—something not natural to humans, and therefore, something that must be learned precisely because it is unnatural. Footnote

This is where corporate worship and the liturgy enters into the picture. The “bells and smells,” the music, icons, incense, words, and actions provide the physical context which makes the prayer experience complete for we humans who are inherently physical. We can’t embrace the Heavenly Father like we embrace our spouse because the Heavenly Father doesn’t have a body like our spouse. We therefore are given the liturgy and our fellow worshiping Christians to embrace as a proxy for the true divine presence which is indeed there.

It is possible that I have only fallen in love with the “bells and smells” and not with God himself, and no doubt some in the non-liturgical tradition would claim that. But I understand the situation differently. Having experienced the sublime character of the Lenten liturgical cycle, I find prayer, in and of itself, apart from the liturgy, to be as satisfying as a telephone call when only the embrace of a loved one will do.

Evangelicalism has a closely related phenomenon that manifests itself from the opposite end of the spectrum. My niece once identified it, with wicked accuracy, as “Jesus is my boyfriend” music. Love, cut off from a satisfactory physical relationship, often degenerates into infatuation, or what we might call a “crush.” Such infatuation reduces the afflicted person to the level of silliness. Much Gospel music (from the time of the Middle Ages—its not a new phenomenon with the Jesus Movement) reflects this same sort of vacuous lack of specific content and fatuous repetition of inane sentimentality.

Just as I have tended to abandon true or pure prayer as a result of being separated from the liturgy, so the evangelical gospel music writer, growing out of a tradition that tends to reject the physical aspects of worship that embody the human-divine relation, falls prey to becoming infatuated with God. They reduce prayer to a divine crush, or as my niece so pointedly described it, write “Jesus is my boyfriend” music.

It’s easy to rail against both Christian contemporary music and dead liturgy. It’s much more instructive to recognize the underlying causes. We humans are inherently physical beings. Recognizing that we ought to incorporate the physical liturgy into our relationship with God while at the same time entering into the disciplines to transcend mere physicality within our physical limitations. At it’s heart, this is the challenge of Lent.