Blue Star Memorial Highway

It struck me somewhere between Ellsworth and Bar Harbor, Maine that I was never going to find a better church than this one. What other church had such imposing walls, such a high ceiling, this kind of lighting, such grand music and preaching? And the variety in its many locations—I could feel at home in this church on Mount Desert Island, along the Columbia River gorge or a deserted stretch of highway in eastern Washington, in the flatlands of Texas, a tallgrass prairie in Kansas, or on the dark edge of Eminence, Missouri at dusk.

On this weekend trip, I could almost have marked our passing from one state to another by the type of churches crowding the highways—nearly all Catholic churches from suburban Boston to the northern Massachusetts border, a mix of Catholic and Protestant, including a variety of evangelical churches, in New Hampshire, and Baptist churches in increasing numbers as we drove further along coastal Maine. This kind of territorial demarcation based on Christian denomination is not by itself unusual—“The South” is delineated by Southern Baptist churches practically as much as it is by state borders, and Methodist churches in North Carolina are nearly as plentiful as mile markers. This was striking only in the sense that I was not looking for such a contrast; rather it found me.

Places of worship define, limit, and divide/set against/polarize—you choose the verb—human beings. In some ways they also define and limit God, or YHWH, or Allah, or the particular deity being worshipped within their walls. Inside a place of worship, God is made to fit into a certain definition based on the belief structure of those present within that place. Outside that place, God is not, as the cliche goes, in a box.

The struggle to come to grips with this idea is titanic for those who truly seek to know God—or at least to know as much of God as we are given to know in this life. We are challenged in scripture not to forsake the meeting together of us who seek and worship, yet we know that God is so great, so immense, so beyond our comprehension that God cannot be contained by the walls of our minds any more than by the walls of buildings. The nature of God—even trying to talk about it makes clear that the weighty idea cannot be grasped in full.

Over and over scripture makes clear that God is greater than our cognitive abilities, even while speaking of God’s wings, eyes, arms, breath. Read Job, or Psalms, for examples. We are finite and cannot fully conceive of God. It is an act of mercy that those who wrote down their thoughts and conceptions of God used points of reference to which we can relate, for the most part.