Ritual and Repetition

~ by Bowie Snodgras

A couple of weeks ago I was in Seattle for a conversation on what it means to be "Anglimergent."  Abbess Karen Ward of Church of the Apostles hosted a dozen of us to talk about the innovative "emerging" work that is happening around the country by people and communities with an Anglican bond or affection.  If you are interested in learning more about Anglimergence, check out anglimergent.ning.com. 

The night before our gathering began, I stayed at a friend's house and was reading an early-summer New Yorker magazine with a series of one-page reflections on "Faith and Doubt" when I came across one called "Counting Pages" by Allegra Goodman.  I have included the first and last paragraphs below... a beautiful reflection on being inside and just outside of religious structures.

As a young girl, I spent more time outside synagogues than in them.  Services were long, and I always found some excuse to get away.  I remember the Quonset hut where my family went to services when we first moved to Honolulu.  The building looked like a white cylinder half buried in the ground.  I remember borrowed space in a Unitarian church, an elegant old house with woven mats covering hardwood floors.  A weathered tree house sat in the branches of a large tree in the garden.  I'd leave my sandals on the grass and climb the ladder to read Wizard of Oz books.

. . . And yet, inexorably, some of my own religion rubbed off on me.  Might that be the way belief works for some people?  Not  a sudden epiphany but a long, slow accumulation of Sabbaths.  No road-to-Damascus conversion but a kind of coin rubbing, in which ritual and repetition begin to reveal the credo underneath.  As I grew older, I was drawn to poetry, and I began to study the haftarah - the weekly selection from the prophets.  As I grew busier, I began to appreciate the time away from the world.  Services became a refuge.  I did not need to rest when I was a child, because I did not work.  I did not want to come inside, because the outside world was still entirely beautiful to me.