Land of the Lost

Not sure what I'll do when my teenaged boys grow up and become human again...I guess I'll have to find some other stimulating material for my Blog posts. ;-) Though my children have stimulated this posting, it is really a much more pervasive problem - everyone seems affected by a sense of groping through life. We are so overwhelmed by the amount of noise and information that we run blindly from one "to-do" to another. There appears to be no ability to plan or to foresee a future - just running from one distraction to another. We see this in politics, in the news cycle, in the lack of knowledge of many of history and its implications, it permeates all aspects of our lives. There's an adage that states "if you don't stand for something you'll fall for anything!" We seem to be in that untethered state - not knowing who or what to believe or to cling to. We've lost our hold on both our personal and communal narratives and without them we have no sense of direction. We have also reached an almost historic low in the number of persons attending faith communities - thus we've lost a spiritual narrative and tether as well. Last night began the liturgical season of Lent - out of a congregation of 1400, about 80 persons came to the service. Granted, it was at 7 pm on a weeknight in the greater Washington, D.C., area and traffic can be a nightmare, but that's a really low percentage. My doctrine in Christian and we have a number of persons who openly profess that they don't believe in sin and the resurrection. Hmmm, kind of key components to following the theology!! It seems to me that we are living in the land of the lost primarily because we've forgotten about our role in community. Everything nowadays is "the world according to me" - this goes for church as well. We hear over and over again statements like, "Don't hand me that liturgical mumbo jumbo, I don't believe in miracles (or grace, or forgiveness, or...). Just get me in and out in an hour so that I can get on with my day." It could be that we're in an Old Testament time and that we're supposed to wander for 40 years in the desert. Unfortunately, we don't have a Moses (apparently) to interceed on our behalf with G-d. Thus, we're just wandering around looking for some GPS heading that will get us going in the right direction (whichever way that is). This week, think about whether you've lost your way. The season of Lent is 40 days of journey that offer the opportunity to reconnect with G-d. There are many ways to do this. The quickest might be to walk into a faith community this weekend and ask G-d to help you find your way. Peace for the journey, Dan