Excitement

There’s a lot of talk among certain of the faithful of the Church of England about getting people “excited about God.” I think I know what they mean, although the choice of word is misleading. What they seek is to foster a personal connection between God and the people. They want there to be a genuine relationship instead of people just coming to church because it’s expected, and going through the forms by rote, with nothing deeper than that happening. To correct this, they change the forms instead of trying to recover their content. They may not know what that content is supposed to be, and/or perhaps may not realize that changing the forms does inescapably alter the content as well. That’s okay with me, as I think both do need changing; I just don’t know if it’s really okay with them. The tired old forms don’t have to be empty or tired or tiresome, provided they have the right content.

These folks try to attract people to God by re-orienting what is supposed to be the worship of God toward serving the people, uplifting them, consoling them, entertaining them, and trying to prevent church from seeming weird, outdated, formidable, intimidating. (There’s obviously nothing wrong with serving the people! It’s a way of serving God, after all. It's just a question of where, when, and how to do it.) I can remember when I, too, was trying hard to demonstrate to the world (and perhaps to myself) that we Christians were hip, up-to-date, with the times, appreciative of and receptive to all the modern trends. Christians are cool!

You have to sympathize with these efforts, I think. We must not imagine these people as enemies of God bent on destroying the faith. I can testify that they are quite the opposite. They are trying hard, by whatever means they can find, to rescue their faith, to rehabilitate it before it disappears altogether, which in England really does appears to be more than a remote possibility. That’s what they mean when they say they want to get people “excited about God”.

They mean connected with God. They want people to love God. Excitement, of course, is nothing but sensory stimulation, a hyped-up, outward thing, bodily and emotional. And transient – as I suspect they know, actually. And you need more and more of it to achieve the same effect, and in the end, it wears off no matter how you try to recapture it, and then you are left bored and disappointed and dissatisfied. The whole process usually (in my limited observation) seems to take about 10 to 15 years. Then you begin looking for something deeper, something that more truly meets you at the level inside you where your spirit dwells. Deep calls unto deep.

We don’t really do excitement in the Orthodox Church, do we? Because we are taught to be ever mindful of our sins. Not that we are not deeply conscious of being forgiven, but we are equally conscious of that from which we have been forgiven. We are, in the words of an old Protestant hymn, “sinners whose love can ne’er forget the wormwood and the gall.” Or as Christ said, “Whoever has been forgiven much loves much.”

Yet it isn’t mostly the remembrance of past shame and disgrace; it's mostly the current and anticipated future missing of the mark that keeps us sober. For as the only true joy in life is communion with God in Christ, so the only true sorrow is the degree to which that communion, because of our weakness, is still so imperfect, so immature, so pathetic.

When the sinful woman knew her sins to be forgiven, she came and wept at Jesus’ feet and gave Him her best gifts, the precious ointment (bought with the proceeds of prostitution!) together with her heart and her tears, tears of repentance and thanks and joy, tears of love. And He accepted from her this true worship.