I found this yesterday, it’s so interesting:
I don’t really have time to go listen to the whole podcast, and I bet I can imagine what it is like, so I contented myself with wandering around this person’s TikTok. Whoever this Malaurie person is, she has lots of posts, like this:
I don’t know about you, but I find this just about heartbreaking. How ironic to walk through a church, of all places, seeking out some sort of feeling of “energy,” and miss all the–well, the Person the building is about and for. And I suppose there was no one there, in the building, to whom she might have turned to request information. Or perhaps there was someone there–a priest or something–but she didn’t think to ask.
I’ve already mentioned it many times to just about everyone I know, but I was so astonished to be in church, two weeks ago, in the back, following along the Divine Liturgy, as one does, and turn my head to observe two youngish, teenage boys peering through the brightly lit doorway. It was a gorgeous autumn sunny day last Sunday (and this one). The boys didn’t know what was going on, and so they asked each other, their faces blank, “What’s going on?” But then one had a flash of recognition–“It’s a funeral,” he said. Relieved at finding some reason for there being a room full of a lot of people all singing together, facing all one direction, they nodded knowingly and turned away, back to their regular lives.
I was so surprised I didn’t get my act together to go after them, but they were on bikes anyway, and would not have really wanted to be chased down by a middle aged Church Lady in uncomfortable shoes, staggering after them to offer an explanation.
Our church is not old and no one would come to look at it for history, or beauty. The only reason to go in are for the actual worship services we hold. Not just funerals, in fact, but also the regular Sunday ones, and then weddings, as well, and sometimes a choral evening prayer, or, I dunno–there are a lot of reasons to stop everything and gather to listen to the Word of God and then to walk slowly forward to have pressed the Body and Blood of that same Lord pressed into the palm. It isn’t about “energy” or spirituality or getting in touch with dead relatives. It is a life ordered around the Person everyone does need, though. It means stopping and trying to understand. It means not accepting anything that Glennon Doyle “figured out” on her own.
So anyway, how soon shall Christians missionally pivot to deal with the new, vast, compelling spirituality of a post-Christian, post-secular culture? Or is it still too soon to ask that?
