Spiritual, but not religious: A random reflection on John Prine, Candy Land, the Incarnation.

I have sometimes joked that I am religious, but not spiritual. The joke is not original with me. I am sure that I overheard it from one of the theological rockstars in my broader Facebook social circle.

I really love church and church has always loved me back (for a more poetic rendering of this basic point read this sermon draft).

I also wrote awhile back that I feel like I am at some sort of crossroads.. I will just say that one small comfort is that I don’t feel my faith in Jesus wavering one bit. I do wonder if I might have found myself falling rather headlong into a spiritual, but not religious stage. If it wasn’t for this quarantine, I think I might be finally enjoying Sunday Morning brunch and novel reading. Unfortunately, this quarantine means that even that small rebellion isn’t possible. I confess that I haven’t attended a single Zoom church meeting (so there….I guess). 

Of course, I know that this isn’t sufficient for the long haul. If anything this time of Quarantine is reminding everyone of the importance of the embodied parts of our faith: the feel of others' songs reverberating in our ears, the smooth feeling of the pews, the din that arises when the service is over, the taste of bad church coffee, the touch of paper thin hands of the old and the sticky hands of kids. We need all that. We need all that especially because of who we believe Jesus is and how he did his work and lived his life: water for washing, wine and donkeys, the spray of the sea, rolling seeds between his fingers, scratching his toes. 

This embodied life isn’t all beauty. There was also the kiss on the cheek for Jesus and all the pain that unravelled his physical life. 

Yet, Jesus, claimed embodied life again, taking time after he rose from the dead to cook fish for his friends on a beach.

I think I have set up a false equivalence here, though. I have equated “the physical” with the religious and the religious with what happens in church. 

I have been really deep diving into the music of John Prine the last week. I really like it. Bob Dylan was said to call his songs Midwest, Proustian, mindtrips. I don’t know-- I have just been struck with his decency, hidden, sometimes in the bawdiness. The embrace of the materials of our lives and their surprising goodness.  The way that we can make things a little less impossible for each other if notice each other.  His songs remind me of my favorite passage in American literature. 

Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flophouses. Its inhabitant are, as the man once said, “whores, pimps, gambler and sons of bitches,” by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, “Saints and angels and martyrs and holymen” and he would have meant the same thing.

For the time being, I can’t live out my faith in church or at some Cannery Row (although I can send Doug there). I need to iron it out with the strange materials of computer screens and dried beans and endless games of Candy Land.  I need to figure this out in the midst of dog vomit and never ending piles of dishes. I need to try and figure out how to hold on to Jesus and equanimity and love in the midst of cabin fever and the slow drip of an absolutely soul-crushing bureacratic process.

And what can I do? Cook breakfast, embrace the material world around and trust that Jesus is here too. 

(No fish for breakfast, though)