Let’s face it: these days, religion gets a bad rap. We hear of many who define themselves — with various levels of defiance — as “spiritual, but not religious!” What is implicitly or overtly clear is that the religion half of the comparison comes off worse, barely worthy of being taken seriously. Religion means rules, after all; religion means doctrine and dogma and smothering, life-suffocating expectations from people who are themselves afraid to live. Religion means, in the words of the Beatles’ song “Eleanor Rigby,” “wearing a face that she keeps in a jar by the door,” as she picks up the rice from somebody else’s wedding; religion, according to the same song, is “Father MacKenzie, writing the words of a sermon that no one will hear; no one comes near.”¹ Religion means blind adherence to centuries-old rituals and regulations, carried out day after day, with no thought for meaning or relevance. Religion is musty and dead; religion is blind belief, with the rigorous suppression of anything that might challenge that unthinking belief, anything that might challenge one to move out of day-to-day comfort zones and experience life at its most thrilling and raw and immediate.

            And so on.

            Much of this is true. Depending on where one comes out on things in these polarized and polarizing days, one might even be tempted at times to say all of this is true and just throw off church and join the ranks of these spiritual-not-religious folk. But if we truly take Jesus and his story seriously, that way just won’t fly.

Simeon and Anna

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