The end of all my exploring

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

I have been thinking a lot about where I am and how I got here: Being a Christian, being an Anglican, again, after having been a Christian Druid, a Druid, a Pagan Druid, a Tibetan Buddhist, a Buddhist Druid… and so on round back to Anglican. I could just feel like I’ve been going around in circles, but it helps me to think of my progress as a spiral, or a dance, or a labyrinth; it may not be progress in the sense of onward and upward motion forever and ever, but it is a pattern, and maybe even a pleasing and/or meaningful pattern.

What helps the most, though, is to think in terms of doing rather than being. An Episcopalian is what I am; all through the past ten years of exploring, my name has been on the rolls of the parish where my husband is the organist, where his parents have been members for decades. But what am I doing? Well, since around Christmas, what I have done is say the Daily Office. I have done this before, as a teenager, in my twenties, in my thirties; I come back to it when I’m at loose ends, just as I come back to writing in a notebook, keeping a journal. (Which, come to think of it, I also started to do as a teenager.)

I’ve come to think that the Daily Office is just What I Do; in Buddhist (and in some cases Pagan) terms, it is My Practice. I read Scripture; I say Psalms; I recite prayers. It is a training in Scripture, in the ground level of Christian tradition; it is a training in how to pray; it is devotion, offering, the necessity of petition for human needs, the duty of praise to the Divine Source. And I just do it. Sometimes I read it silently; I prefer to say it aloud; sometimes I even chant it.

The idea of a Practice, of religion as something To Do rather than simply a label for what one is, or a set of beliefs, a list of propositions that to be affirmed, is very strong in Buddhist traditions and in Neopagan ones. Being a (Druid, Hellenic Reconstructionist, member of the Troth, whatever) means primarily doing certain things, at certain times, in certain ways, usually with a group of people. It is less important that everyone has the same opinions or theories about the gods, for example, than that everyone shows up to ritual with an appropriate offering for the deity to be honored, and speaks respectfully to the deity if given the opportunity.

For a lot of American Protestants, this would be a very strange idea. Religion is about belief, and belief means assent to a description of the universe, which may or may not be called a creed. People seem able to conceive of themselves as quite acceptable Christians without going to church, taking communion, or following the teachings of Jesus–because they believe the right things.

But the idea of religion as right practice is not really foreign to an Anglican. The Anglican tradition, and later the Anglican Communion, crystallized around a book of prayers, a book of practice, rather than around a description of beliefs. Lutheran tradition, for example, produced a number of confessions, whereas Anglican traditions did not. The Thirty-Nine Articles have never had the mojo of an official confession or catechism (although Article Twenty-Six has often been a great comfort to me in my affliction).

Anglicans like to quote a saying from the early Church: Lex orandi, lex credendi. The rule of prayer is the rule of belief. What we pray, what we affirm in our liturgy, is what we believe. What I believe as a Christian is what I pray: The Psalms, the Apostles’ Creed, the prayers of the Office and the Eucharist. Liturgy in the church is older than the creeds, older even than the canon of Scripture; the Church is older than the Bible, that is, the Christian community is older than the list of texts that it defined as authoritative.

I am not at all certain that I believe what I say in the Apostles’ Creed, if by “believe” I mean “assent to it as a definitive map of reality”. I say it because it links me with the Church, because it reaffirms my baptism and confirmation. I am even less certain that I believe what I sing in the Nicene Creed, which is full of Greek philosophical jargon that ceased to be widely understood over 1000 years ago; it is less important that I assent to it than that I sing on pitch and at a brisk tempo.

What I do believe, and by “believe” I mean trust in and rely on, is that God is present; God is listening; Jesus is a revelation of God; the Gospels have something important to tell me; and the Anglican tradition is a source of wisdom and peace for me, because it is a tradition of music, poetry, and story.