Ties that Bind (Trinitarian March 2015)

Fr. Tony’s Letter to the Trinitarians

March 2015

Ties that Bind

In the Disney version of Pinnochio, the puppet who wants to become a live boy is led to a mysterious place called Pleasure Island.  In this scary amusement park, all rules are off.   Pinnochio is ready; he has already sung his ode to no restraints:

“I've got no strings
To hold me down
To make me fret, or make me frown
I had strings
But now I'm free
There are no strings on me

…I've got no strings
So I have fun
I'm not tied up to anyone
They've got strings
But you can see
There are no strings on me.”

In Pleasure Island, Pinnochio discovers the unpleasant truth:  a life without restraints, without personal obligations and ties that bind, is a life that robs us of our humanity.   It is a place where boys are turned into sad and crazed donkeys.  

Here in the great unchurched Pacific Northwest, we often hear the phrases “I am spiritual but not religious,”  “I believe in God, but not organized religion,” and “I love Christ but not the Christian religion.”   The sentiment is understandable.  Churches and the institutions of religion, with their rules, methods of exclusion, and guilt-inducing narrative loops, are often the instruments of oppression and dehumanization.  As Marcus Borg often said, “When someone tells me they don’t believe in God, I ask them to tell me about the God they don’t believe in, and find that I don’t believe in that God either.”  Well, when people say they don’t want Church, or religion, and they say what it is they don’t like, I find myself nodding in agreement. 

But the word religion shouldn't be rejected out of hand.  The Latin re-ligio means that which binds us firmly.  And the idea in Latin is not about bondage in the oppressive sense of slavery or some kind of sexual kink. It is about the gentle ties that bind us to each other, our community, neighbors, those who have gone before, our families, and to all those around us.   Granted, it is about the obligations these ties impose.  But it is also about the meaning and sense they bestow to life, and how this makes us more human. 

Diana Butler Bass, who will lecture here in Ashland this month and is the focus of our Lenten reading program, describes what she sees as a “Great Awakening” going on in world faith traditions, a shift of orientations and ways of putting things together.  When she talks about “Christianity after Religion,” she is describing a Christianity after the old extrincisist way of putting Christianity together, the institution-, authority-, and dogma- focused Christianity of our youths.  She is not describing a Christianity shorn of all ties that bind, or Christians with “no strings to tie them down.”  In fact, Butler Bass stresses the new ways of Christian believing, belonging, and behaving that are coming to life in this awakening: they are marked by personal conviction, relationship within community, and spiritual practices.   I think she is talking about “Christianity after bad religion,” not the end of Christian faith itself at all. 

Grace and Peace,  Fr. Tony+