Quo — et Quare — Vadis?

A race to irrelevance

Intriguing, isn’t it, the seminar topics that can jump into dinnertable conversations: Cousin Dorothy’s impending divorce, the season’s threatened potato crop, Uncle Harry’s rise to eminence as an Elk, the alleged irregularities in household chore distribution, the Cocker Spaniel’s imminent vasectomy, an adolescent’s classroom imperfections, Aunt Gussie’s approaching mid-summer wedding, the flourishing warts on an incumbent government, the anxiety connected to a teenager’s nocturnal activity that’s sidestepped instructions that he be home by eleven.

There’s one of those festive boards around which there’s sporadic observations of the religious proclivities of the neighbour kid — the kid now in his late 50s — who, in recent years, has fallen from any sort of formal ecclesiastical grace, belying his once-perfect Sunday School attendance, his gold stars for scripture recitations, his youthful leadership at bible camps.

He used to be such an exemplar fellow.

Church doors he now rarely darkens, save for the occasional wedding or funeral. (Actually, he did show up not long ago with a devout sister who’d encouraged his companionship and had threatened to withhold his dinner if he didn’t join her.) Nevertheless, sanctuary pews are nowadays quite safe from his wear and tear.

The irony of it all is what sometimes intrudes on meal-time conversation when puzzled notes are taken of the boy’s gentle grace; his essential honesty, his oft-tested compassion, his generosity, all beyond easy measure. Without pretension, he quietly stands as one whose spirit mourns all human conditions that seek to savage souls and bodies. You’ll not catch him wearing any of his virtues on his sleeve; whatever influences his action is rarely discussed even as it drives his concern for the impoverished, the broken, the exploited of his own foreign lands. A lot of his time and treasure remains intently for the good, and for a better deal for all who surround him.

Mind you, there’s no impending sainthood for this guy. His sins, like those of most mortals, are the usuals of the flesh: he entertains good cigars; he knows a fine martini when it’s shaken, not stirred; he’s not averse to raunchy movies; he’s tried, typically without success, to limit his contributions to the land’s revenue agencies. He’ll have you believe he’s nothing special. If you were to pass him on the street you’d take him for a normal, conventionally handsome, middle-aged professional man, which is what he is.

And a generation or three ago he’d have been the elder, the acolyte, the chair of the presbytery’s finance committee.

So what happened? What was it that fritzed our neighbour’s churchiness, fostered his diminishing appetite for sanctity, prompted his dismissal of the institution’s historic responsibility, respectability and relevance, charted his pursuit of community propriety, his sense of obligation? What’s turned our buddy away from the altar of society’s principled leadership of a civilized world?

Turns out it was Jesus! Our boy is, after all, a Jesus fan! Jesus is why and how he honours peacefulness, compassion, humility, mercy, forgiveness and, oh yes, guts. Our man will argue that his alienation from sabbatical conventions comes, in fact, from Jesus metaphorically having taken him by the scruff of the neck, marching him out of the institutional church and suggesting he not go back.

And, he says, he’s not likely to. After all, he can go to his lodge meeting and get his fill of beansupper camaraderie; he can go to his office and be pounded to pursue revenue increases and to worry about personnel salaries; he can go to the neighbourhood museum and ogle holy haberdashery and stained-glass; he can go to his gym for exercise; that he can go to a karaoke bar if he wants to sing; he can go to the Legion if he craves bingo.

As well, if he wants to help somebody out, there are agencies that’ll funnel his pittance to greater value than that of the pompous and circumstantial, the real-estate addiction, the corporate-image absorption of the industrialized temple.

Well, that’s our friend’s story, and he’s sticking to it.

Those around the gossipy table aren’t surprised by it; there’s a lot of it going around. Some say the church business needs a new plan.

Or maybe the old one.

Peter MacRae is a retired Anglican cleric and erstwhile journalist. He lives in New Glasgow.