Religion, Relationships, and Relativity

Sunday, April 18, 2010

Our fourth grader, AJ, bounced out of worship last weekend with this proclamation,
“Did you know Christianity is not a religion? It is a relationship.” These very words came up again in a conversation with good friends over sushi last night. I guess this is why many times I feel it is personally more engaging to identify myself as a Christ-follower than with any specific faith. Words so box us in… Don’t they?

These conversations reminded me of a courageous book written by a dear friend and past colleague, Chuck Meyer. Chuck was a member of the Episcopal clergy, a gifted lecturer, author of several books, and served as both Chief Operations Officer and head of the Ethics Committee at St. David’s Medical Center during the same years David and I were practicing there. Chuck, slender and quick, could be seen darting from building to building only to immediately slow down to a speed appropriate to lovingly counsel a patient or family through the impending transition we call death. He was also responsible for changing the verbiage we use at the end of one’s life from DNR (Do Not Resuscitate) to AND (Allow Natural Death). Chuck Meyer was brilliant.

9781896836393
During a drive home from Houston on November 13, 2000, Chuck Meyer met his own transition from this earth in a fatal car accident which ended his life and gave him back to his Creator. But before this tragic day, Chuck wrote one final book. He states in his forward it was a book he hesitated to write but that needed to be written. It is a personal and raw account of years of intense life experiences and what came to be Chuck’s final thoughts on the church. In his book, “Dying Church Living God,” we are called to begin again. Here is a taste.

“Rather than being reformed the Dying Church must be allowed to die in order to see what resurrected form will emerge. Like a bug on a windshield, after 2000 years, the Church just went splat against the onrushing movement of the Spirit. And thank God.”

Wow. This was a thought provoking read.

Further along in the book Chuck writes of Jesus not coming to earth to start a religion but to form a way to a relationship. But what is in a word but the meaning? What about the word “religion?” Religion is from the Latin “re ligio” which interestingly means “to bind again.” Well, maybe he did come to start a re-ligio. Unfortunately the true meaning of words become tainted and skewed under the failings of human history. Another word that tends to have an unwarranted negative visceral response is the word “repent.” This word, also from Latin roots, “re pense” simply means to rethink. This is never a bad idea.

All relationships require that two things be relative to one another. What is a relationship but the experience of relativity? And what is experience but the movement of oneself in relationship to other things? God’s two great spiritual laws of love outline these relationships so clearly. We have the first and most important based on the relationship between ourselves and our Creator, and the second, which is like it, between ourselves and one another.

Religion, relationships, and relativity… What is in a word but the meaning?
Thank you Chuck for your legacy of exponential potential and for never boxing God in.

Always love to hear your thoughts. Have a wonderful week. Michele
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