Dogs and Dogma

Why every boy should have a dog. To learn that it’s okay to go around in circles before you sleep. And it’s okay to sleep more than once a day. Especially on weekends.

Sunday afternoon.

I’ve preached and prayed and sung. I’ve led a congregational meeting—the usual five minutes’ worth, in this case to bring one of our less important congregational practices into conformity with our denominational Book of Order.

I’ve eaten lunch—the usual wait at The Depot; the food is okay, better than okay, but the service is the slowest in Staunton if not the entire Shenandoah Valley. But The Depot is where we go, this group I eat with one or two Sundays a month.

I’ve come back to my office to write, but I’m readier to take a nap.

I like naps, but I don’t have a lot of confidence in them. The chances you’ll wake up from one feeling better instead of worse are, in my experience, fifty-fifty. Or, the chances I will wake up feeling better, or worse, are fifty-fifty. It’s a matter of temperament, I’m told. Some temperaments thrive on naps; some don’t. And some, it must be, are in between.

So much, it seems, is a matter of temperament. Even, some say, religion. It’s in our genes that we are religious, or, at least disposed toward religion, whatever that means. I’ll have to lean back in my chair to think about that one.

And I wake up feeling no better but no worse. This, given my natural pessimism, is a good result, because if it was fifty-fifty, chances are I was going to wake up feeling worse.

What does it mean, though, to have a disposition toward religion? Does it mean a (natural) interest in mystery or in metaphysics—which may have room for mystery or may not? Does it suggest an openness to the future or a dependence on the past? Is the religious temperament prophetic or priestly?

I have no idea. I do know that one trouble with a nap—even if I wake up without a hangover—is that I can wake up with a different matter on my mind than the matter I decided to sleep on.

This morning, after I’d climbed out of bed, put on my Sunday clothes, and walked down to the church, after I’d rewritten my sermon, and gone into the sanctuary to preach it through (and listen to it in that great, empty hall), and rewritten it again, after I’d gotten the prayers ready and the hand-out for the congregational meeting, as I was between buildings—in the alleyway between the Frazer Building (1920) and the sanctuary (1872)—on my way to pray with the choir, it hits me: “Is church just anachronistic?”

I say that’s a different matter, because it doesn’t to me, at first blush, have to do with religion, which I’m deciding this Sunday afternoon does have to do with both mystery and metaphysics . . . and openness, though it also has to do with singing—and I’m on my way to the choir—and praying—I’m on my way there to pray; so maybe the question is a religious question, after all.

Except: it’s also an institutional question. Here’s the derivation: the verb, institute, comes from the Latin institutus, the past participle of instituere “to set up,” which in turn is made up of in- “in” + statuere “to establish,” or, more literally, “to cause to stand.” And statuere is clearly related to statute, which has to do with law: getting into conformity with the Book of Order, closing loopholes.

Law, and not religion, because they're completely different “beasts.” Or is it a question: Law and not religion? Because they're two heads of the same beast. And, thank God, it’s time for another nap.

Rick