CCBlogs thinking critically, living faithfully

Martha Hoverson's blog

We met in a coffee shop on a rainy Saturday morning, the wind blowing the bare trees across the way. They wanted to get married, but although both grew up Catholic, they had decided against being married by a priest. I asked why, then, they were talking to a pastor? Why not simply ask a Justice of the Peace, or find a notary to do the paperwork? And they answered with the statement we hear so often these days, “We’re spiritual, but not religious.” They believe in God, and they want their ceremony to reflect that belief, but they don’t want it to come with the trappings and strictures of the church that nurtured them.

“We’re spiritual, but not religious.” It’s not only young people who say this to us, and when those of us who are religious hear it, we almost invariably react a little defensively. What’s wrong with being religious?... READ MORE.

Martha Hoverson's blog

We met standing in line for something at the beginning of seminary, our last names different by only one letter. I had a different last name then, a different husband, only two children. They were a married couple, both leaving another profession to pursue a calling to ministry. They had two very little girls, an infant and a preschooler; I had two boys, 8 and not quite 4.

We had classes together our first semester. We were all in our mid-thirties, and that made us fairly young students. S told me she'd been diagnosed with cancer, breast cancer, and from there the details are faint in my memory. Did she delay treatment to have the baby, or am I remembering a story from my girlhood, superimposing one young mother's death over another young mother's illness?

My third child arrived shortly after the end of our first year, and our paths did not cross during the second when I attended only very part-time. You will laugh to think that I did not have an email address or the Internet at home in 1995-96. I typed my Field Ed sermons in the church office. Once I was off-campus, I was out of the world of seminary.

So the next part of the story is misty to me. All I can tell you is that she died.... READ MORE.

Martha Hoverson's blog

My first task at my new job, before I could even reach the office on the first day, was to visit a woman in the hospital, a woman who was dying. I sat with her family, the people who loved her, and I felt, as I always do, what a privilege it is to be with people at such moments. We talked about the future and how, very soon, this woman, this mother, this wife would be in God's embrace. It sounded personal, because an embrace, by its very nature, is intimate. Children spoke of the people gone on before, now awaiting Mother's arrival. And the room filled with love.

God's love can be present in many ways. Our lack of love won't keep God away, but our love can serve as a conduit for God's, making that feeling of warmth and comfort palpable to those who need it most. And that can be any one of us, at crucial moments in our lives: a birth, a death, a disappointment or an ending.

This Sunday will be Mother's Day, a holiday invented for a political purpose but hijacked by florists and greeting card companies. Whether or not it should matter to us, Mother's Day can make us feel euphoric or lonely, delighted or disappointed. Perhaps we had a difficult relationship with our mother, or we wanted to have children and couldn't, or our relationship with the children we did have is strained; there are many reasons to feel left out on Mother's Day. .... READ MORE.

(Sixth Sunday after Pentecost June 29, 2008 Genesis 22:1-14; Matthew 10:40-42)

This past week the comedian George Carlin died, and for several days, cable news played and re-played clips of two of his best-known routines: “The Seven Words You Can’t Say on Television” and “Religion is”—well, that one goes on to use a word I cannot say in church! The first posed a question about community standards and whether we really have or should have any at all as a public culture. He provoked a conversation about whether certain words "really mattered, at a time when every other word out of other comedians’ mouths did NOT begin with F.

Is it his fault my kids have grown up in a world where those words do? Or were we headed that way so clearly that he was simply naming the truth?

I think it’s probably more likely the latter. His social commentary pointed out a gap between generations that has become more profound in some ways. Younger people, and I include my own age-group and younger, tend to use more casual language, more often and in more situations. The old rules about what you can say where no longer seem to apply.

Except, perhaps in church.

But more importantly, in his later routine about religion, George Carlin raised questions that many other people share, probably most of them not sitting in churches this morning, and because they are not here to talk with us, it feels all the more important to give some thought to what they are thinking.