never satisfied

In the busyness of everyday I find myself composing mental blog notes that never progress to keyboard or screen. So why is my mind so blank as sit in front of the computer this cool winter evening? Seeking to develop reflective practitioners, I need to exercise those capacities within myself. So of what am I thinking?

One recurrent thought echoes Mick Jagger: I can't get no satisfaction.

It troubles me that I feel so negative attending worship week after week. There seems no depth in the music. The theology is often appalling (to me). Or lacking. In an unguarded moment I once said to the President of our denomination that a thing I find difficult is so often having to switch my brain off as I walk through the doors of the church building. Which was unfair. But heartfelt. There seems an unholy intimacy in the "Jesus and me/ I am a friend of God/ Happy Clappy" atmosphere that distresses me, but that others find life-enhancing.

Yet at the funeral last week, which was an excellent acknowledgment of a life lived well, I did note the absence of any prayers directed to God and the palpable sense of carefully keeping everything rational. "She lives on in our memory of her" is totally true, and yet I yearned to hear the word 'resurrection'. There was an arm-length-ness about the conduct of worship that also did not satisfy.

One of our children said to me the other day "You really miss Cafe@Church don't you Mum?" This was a monthly event in a past hometown which did seem to find a third way that was neither self-consciously 'liberal' nor 'sentimentally evangelical'. This memory is partly why I was so energised by Sally's no hymns plan for this past Sunday. I do miss the creativity that was somehow more readily nurtured in a tiny island country than in a vast island continent.

Jane reflected a few days ago on interesting challenges facing the newly formed World Communion of Reformed Churches which "will have to work hard to try to hold together confessional and faith concerns with the deep desire for social justice. Many of the churches in the Global South do this naturally - it's part of being a Christian, as is praying and bearing witness. Somehow in parts of Global North some churches seem to have decided to say that they are either liberal or traditional and assume that those on the other side either don't pray or read the Bible or don't serve the world or speak out prophetically on social issues. Perhaps one day we will understand that the body of Christ is bigger, more diverse, more open and more challenging than any of us have dared to believe. A place of security from which we can find the courage to overcome the temptations of safety."

A couple of weeks ago we ran a session on leadership for first year students. In which we acknowledged leaders as people who ask "What can I do to change things" rather than whinging about what they do not like. At the recent Queensland Synod meeting the President's second Bible Study focused on Jesus' sayings that we often call the beatitudes (and demonstrated that careful theological scholarship is alive and well in our denomination). I was especially struck by his interpretation of 'meekness' which was, from memory, about not needing to puff oneself up but instead to have the internal strength to do what is right regardless of the reaction of others. Way back (I just discovered it was in March! I have thought about it and talked about it a lot since) Jane posted about the French translation of 'blessed' which is en marche with "the meaning of get up, get going, let's go. If someone is "en marche" they would be setting out on a path, walking ... if something is en marche, it is switched on, working, going." For this whinger then there is a challenge: demonstrate the blessedness of internal integrity. And change that theme song:

How can we get satisfaction?