old enough, you will recall what people used to wear on commercial airliners; recall how we all used to dress up before going out on a date; and even think back to how everyone looked in church. Compare that with today.
The subject of proper church attire came up in class the other day. I’d been lamenting the dubious presence of flip-flops and shorts at my favorite morning mass and I was getting pretty annoyed. A student piped up and said, “I really don’t think God cares what we wear to church.” A few students nodded their heads in agreement. Of course, I had to ask how he was so certain of this; it sounded like he had some pretty important inside information. “God should just be glad we’re in church,” the boy added. I simply stared at him. “So,” I said, “God should just be thrilled with getting anybody in church these days. Am I hearing this right?” The boy nodded. I added, “He’s lucky to have us. So why would he care what we put on our feet?”
That’s right.
I chuckled and then started to ramble.
Attention All People of Planet Earth: There is now a clearance sale on seats in any and all churches and synagogues everywhere. Come as you are. Come and go as you please. The Almighty is so desperate for attention and devotion, He’ll take anyone. Come nude if you like. Inquire within.
My class sat there and looked at me like I had three heads.
Of course, I always tell them that if we can dress up for job interviews, court appearances and work we can certainly do the same when entering God’s house. To give The Almighty less consideration would make little sense. Our default setting should always be set to reverence and respect where questions concerning God and religion are concerned. Now, I’m not saying that this is specifically God’s thinking on the matter of church dress, I’m just saying that dressing up a little is the least we can do to show Him a little reverence.
I’m still not sure they got it, but I kept going.
I told them how I was once dragged along to a wedding (I’m not at all fond of them, to be honest) and suffered through the ceremony, knowing full-well that divorce for the bride and groom loomed just beyond the wedding cake. As it turned out, I wasn’t too far off. The happy couple split after a few months of enchanted bliss. At any rate, a few minutes after the ceremony, I slipped out the back while my wife was still socializing with some old friends. Somehow I ended up by the south door where I ran into, of all people, the groom. He was sucking down Marlboros as fast as he could while the bridal party posed for pictures back inside. “I’m not much on this church stuff,” he grunted, grinding the butt of his cigarette into the sidewalk. “I don’t know why we need to do this when we could have just gone to the beach or something.” I nodded and reminded him that his bride wanted the church wedding. So, too, did the new in-laws. I told him he’d made it through the whole thing like a real trooper. “Yeah, I guess.” He lit another cigarette and stared off beyond the church parking lot. He rambled on about not caring much for religion. Of course, he hadn’t been brought up in any particular faith. Somehow I wasn’t surprised. “I like the mountains,” he said. “I like to think that I can just climb a mountain and be in church. Why the hell do I need to be in some building?” I asked him if he’d ever gone up into the mountains to be with God. An odd question to be asking an edgy, chain-smoking, irreligious Marlboro man on his wedding day but I asked it nonetheless. Shoot, I had nothing else to do at that moment, and my wife was still hobnobbing somewhere back near the baptismal font. “Nah. I’m just saying that I could if I wanted to.” He flicked his latest butt into a row of junipers. Two flower beds over, a statue of St. Francis gazed out at us. “I definitely think there’s a God, but I don’t think he needs me inside some building. He knows me. He knows I’m a good person.”
He also knows you’ll be filing for divorce before the top layer of that cake freezes over.
I call this Assuming Divine Permission, but I also have another term for it: Religious Free Agency. Taking religious license is a very common occurrence these days. It’s easy to do and relatively pain-free. There are no religious regulatory agencies that are going to give us a hard time about how we deal with The Divine. Religious free agents organize their own teams. They draft their own players, sign their own free agent contracts and then set their own rules. All the while they assume that what they’re doing and saying is perfectly okay with God: “God doesn’t care what we wear to church”, “I don’t have to go to mass in some building— I can go anywhere and be in church,” “God agrees with what I’m doing” and “He knows I’m a good person”. And for the Catholics out there… “God doesn’t need to see me in a confessional to say I’m sorry; I can confess my sins just as well in the privacy of my bedroom.” “Why would God care whether or not I seek an annulment for my failed marriage?” And take a look at these fundamentalist doozies: “God sees sex as a dirty act, which should only be used for procreation,” “All homosexuals are going to hell,” “God smiles when we bomb abortion clinics” and “God wants us to kill the infidels.”
Religious free agents spin off into their own private orbits, something seen more and more these days as church attendance hovers at around 40%, and they assume what they believe will always garner God’s friendly approval. This attitude demonstrates classic individualism. It’s incredibly self-centered, audacious and naïve—just the opposite of what God has shown us through divine revelation: to be God-centered, humble and informed. A gentle reminder of where we all came from is sorely needed. Not a shift to radical fundamentalism, but rather a soft whisper in the direction of the major faiths and their basic tenets.
You see, it is we who need to seek out the will of God. We can’t say this is what I think and then demand that The Lord make His adjustments to us. That would be completely backwards. Still, people do that all the time, don’t they? Check out the December 20, 2005 ABC News Poll entitled, Elbow Room No Problem in Heaven.1 There’s no surprise that the vast majority of those polled believe in a heaven. Overall, 85% of the respondents said they expect to go there. Now, here’s where it gets interesting. Of those that described themselves as not religious, a whopping 77% still believed they would be going to heaven one day. Is this not a classic case of minimal effort expecting maximum results? Sounds a bit like a guy putting $35.99 into a money market account, fully expecting the interest earned to make him a multi-millionaire in twenty or thirty years.
In her 1993 paper, Self-enhancement and Superiority Biases in Social Comparison2, Vera Hoorens points out the following: “An impressive number of self-related biases in social comparison and social cognition have been identified during the last decades. To give an example, most people relatively overestimate the proportion of others sharing their opinions…”
If people make this error with others, don’t you think they make it with God? It’s nice to have opinions, but regarding something as important as faith it is probably best to have informed positions. Educated positions. So, outside of our personal opinions, to where and to whom should we turn for these types of answers?
First of all, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to invite a little humility into our lives. Humility will tell us that, often times, we do not possess the answers. Humility will let us know that we have to seek out the Divine Will from sources greater and wiser than our own minds. Unfortunately, that’s not going to come about by visiting the nearest mountaintop. Nature’s majesty can be edifying, true, but we’re not going to discern The Almighty’s will simply by staring at Mt. Everest, an ocean or a flowery meadow. The divine truth isn’t, very often, going to come about by dredging up and recycling our personal opinions and hang-ups, or by listening to the incessant pontifications of Phil the barber. That’s what the individualists and relativists do.
We must return to the centers of religious knowledge and wisdom: the major churches. Consider why these churches are the biggest. Consider why the masses have made
