131. Why we need “organized religion”
131. WHY WE NEED “ORGANIZED RELIGION”
I can pray to God, love God, and love my neighbor anywhere. Why can’t I just go into the woods or the desert or the beach to pray? Why should I go to church? I don’t get as much out of it as I do out of the world. Church isn’t working for me.
The chief purpose of the whole external worship is that man may give (internal) worship to God. Now man’s tendency is to reverence less those things which are common and indistinct from other things, whereas he admires and reveres those things which are distinct from others in some point of excellence. Hence too it is customary among men for kings and princes, who ought to be revered, to be clothed in more precious garments and to possess vaster and more beautiful abodes. And for this reason it behooved special times, a special abode, special vessels, and special ministers to be appointed for the divine worship, so that thereby the soul of man might be brought to greater reverence for God. . . .
The divine worship regards two things, namely God, Who is worshipped, and men, who worship Him. Now God, Who is worshipped, is confined to no bodily place, wherefore there was no need on His part for a tabernacle or temple to be set up. But men who worship Him are corporeal beings, and for their sake there was need for a special tabernacle or temple to be set up for the worship of God (I-II,102,4).
If you “don’t get anything out of church”, you don’t understand the reason for going to church in the first place. We go to church to worship. Worship is not like entertainment: worship is not getting something but giving something. You don’t go to church as you go to watch a football game; you go to church as you go to play a football game, to do something. And that something is worship. It’s a form of love: a giving. We give God our worship, i.e., our hearts, our promises, our aspirations, our hope, our fidelity. So the reason you’re not “getting” anything out of church is that you’re not giving anything. That’s what you’re supposed to get out of church: the opportunity to give yourself to God.
It’s like sex that way: selfish sex is not maximally ecstatic, only unselfish sex is. You get something ecstatic out of sex only when you give your whole self away, only when you forget yourself entirely. It’s life’s deepest secret: only when you lose yourself can you find it.
Not that church is like sex in that it’s supposed to convulse your body, or your emotions. But it is supposed to convulse your will. “Here I am. Take me. Do with me as You will.” That’s “spiritual sex”.
We don’t go to church to get away from the world. We go to church to understand the world. We have holy times and places to remind us of the holiness of all times and places. We have the supernaturally extraordinary to remind us of the supernatural value of the ordinary. We leave the world and enter a church not because the world is worth so little but because it is worth so much. It’s the church that saves the world. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son” (Jn 3:16). We love the world because God does.
St. Thomas’ point in his first sentence is that God made us material as well as spiritual. It insults God to ignore the material in us (the body) or outside us (e.g., the walls of a church).
St. Thomas’ point in his second sentence is that we appreciate things best by contrast: life by death, pleasure by pain, the supernatural by the natural, the spiritual by the material—and vice versa. The highest things have to be rare for us to appreciate them. That’s why Sunday is just one day out of seven.
It’s not materialism to dress priests, judges, and kings in beautiful, expensive robes and to house them in beautiful, expensive places (palaces, courts, churches). We express our spiritual loves and loyalties materially, there is no other way. That’s what God made matter for: to reveal and express spirit.
We go to church not because God is enclosed in matter but because we are.