The Best Part is the Messy Part!

A Reflection on Connection and Ritual in Worship

Recently, after several attempts to merge two fairly busy calendars, I sat down in my office with a “relative newcomer” to Christ Episcopal Church—someone who has worshiped with us faithfully for about a year, but with whom it took a long time to connect.  As we talked, I asked a simple question: What is it that you’ve found you love about Christ Church?

They paused for a moment, clearly thinking carefully, and then said, “Well, I love that the rituals of the liturgy connect me to God… and that no one gets too much into my business here.”

I laughed—out loud.  But if I’m honest, internally I wanted to scream.

Not because the answer was insincere.  Not because it was wrong.  But because it revealed something that gives me pause: I think we may sometimes give people the impression—however unintentionally—that this is what church is for.  That the point of Christianity, the point of worship, the point of gathering on Sundays and feast days, is the rituals themselves.  That if the liturgy is beautiful and no one asks too much of you, then you’ve somehow arrived… This parishioner and I went on to have a beautiful and powerful conversation, some of which I have summarized in what follows:

The truth is this: the rituals are not the destination.  They are the vehicle.

Trust me when I say this—I love rituals.  I love liturgy.  I love sacrament.  I love beautiful, holy worship.  I have given my life to it as an ordained minister of word and sacrament—a priest.  And yet, after thirteen years of ordained ministry and thirty-three of my thirty-seven years spent in and around churches of many traditions, I have learned something the hard way: rituals alone will not hold you when life fractures.  They will not sustain you when grief enters uninvited, when relationships unravel, when identity shifts, or when certainty dissolves.

The rituals are only as powerful as the relationships they foster.  They matter because—and only because—they connect us to a living, breathing relationship with God and with one another.

Put theologically a different way, the miracle of Christianity—the scandal of the Gospel—is not actually that Jesus is God.  The scandal is that God chose to become Jesus.  That the Creator and sustainer of the universe—omnipresent, omnipotent, sovereign—wanted to be in relationship with us.  So much so that God took on human flesh to come among us: to teach, to instruct, to heal, to suffer, and to offer God’s very self for the life of the world.

From the very beginning, the desire of God has been connection. Communion. Right relationship.  With Godself, and just as importantly, with one another.  The Hebrew Scriptures reveal it clearly: God made a companion for Adam in the Garden—Eve.  God made covenants with Noah and Abraham.  God liberated the Israelites from bondage and slavery and provided Mana for them to eat in the wilderness.  God called prophets to reveal God’s desire for relationship again and again.

The New Testament is clear about God desire for connection too: God come to his people in the form of Jesus, and in his adult ministry he eats, touches, and converses with ordinary people doing ordinary human tasks. God teaches the way of righteousness not with decrees and rules, but with stories of human interaction—parables. God heals the inform and possessed. He reveals himself to his followers after the resurrection and restores Peter who had betrayed him before he ascends to heaven. God sends the Holy Spirit as living interceding presence among us to this day.

Which is why coming to church simply to “do the rituals”—to receive the bread and the wine, to pray familiar prayers, to be anointed with holy oil, and then to leave untouched by the vulnerability of relationship—is to sell yourself short of what life with God can be.  It is not that these practices are unimportant.  It is that they are incomplete when they remain insulated from the messy, complicated, entangled reality of human life.

What This Looks Like in Real Life

Let me make this less theological and more concrete.

Just this past Sunday, in two separate conversations, I heard stories that stopped me in my tracks.  In both cases, parishioners told me how this community, and the people within it, had made life-changing differences in their lives.

The first was from a widow who lives alone.  She recently underwent life-altering and debilitating surgery.  She told me plainly that she never could have made it—never could have received the care she needed, never could have healed as well as she has—without her church friends.  These were the people who drove her to and from appointments and surgery, who brought meals, who helped her navigate her home as she recovered, who showed up day after day.  She also named something just as important: she had to risk vulnerability.  She had to allow herself to be seen served.  And because she did, she is now experiencing real, tangible, even miraculous healing.

I found myself wondering—what if she had come to the Eucharist all these years and never learned anyone’s name?  What if she had never risked being known? Would she be receiving this kind of care, connection, and healing now?  I think not.

The second story came from someone in the midst of enormous transition: a new “empty-nester”, navigating a marriage that has been less than fulfilling, whose children—now young adults—are off at college and beginning their own lives.  Her identity as a mother has shifted, not by choice, but by time.  At a crisis point, she picked up the phone and called a fellow parishioner—someone she had sat near in the pew for years but never truly known—and said simply, “Would you come over and have lunch with me?”

What followed surprised her.  This woman—whose name and face she knew but whose story she did not—shared her own journey: raising children, an unexpected divorce when her last child left for college, and the slow, painful work of rebuilding a life with new purpose and meaning.  And this parishioner stopped me to say how much it mattered to her to realize that someone who sang the same hymns, prayed the same prayers, and received the same sacrament at the same altar had been exactly where she now stood.  In that moment, she said, the burden lifted.  She was no longer alone.

This is what connection looks like. This is the Gospel practiced.

The Church, then, exists as the place where we practice connection—awkwardly, imperfectly, and often clumsily.  It is where we take risks, disappoint one another, learn again, and return for more grace than we had before.

A Pastoral Word

I also want to say this clearly: I know this is hard.

Not all of us share the same comfort level with vulnerability or self-expression.  Some of us carry real wounds.  Trust has been violated.  Privacy has been exploited.  Stories have been misused.  For some, distance has been a necessary form of survival.  I see that.  I honor that.

And yet, I assure you—as your priest and your pastor—that the risk is worth it.

Christ Episcopal Church is intentionally building, week by week, a community where we are invited to be our whole selves—honestly and fully—and where those selves are celebrated.  We do not tolerate abuse or cruelty.  We do not reward meanness or power plays.  We hold fast to the belief that wisdom does not flow from the top down, but rises from beneath—from your stories, your testimony, your healing, your lived encounters with God.

Those are what sustain us.  Those are what carry us forward.

The rituals matter deeply.  They are the scaffolding. But the beauty—the life, the grace, the transformation—is revealed in what God is building among us.

And that building only happens when we dare to connect.

Pax et Bonum!

Fr. Ben +