waterfall.

mary beth wrote me this today, and i have to post it here because it does what i have been trying to do for months. it beautifully sums up my frustration and disillusionment with churches:

"I think sometimes we take things that are of God and dumb them down so that we can put them in a neat, little package that will make sense to our finite minds because we maybe find security in that. But while we do that, we suck the life out of it and mold it into something that we can manage. It's like if I went to one of the most beautiful waterfalls in the world and experienced the water coming down on me, the beauty of it, the deafening sound of it, then got out a container, put some of the water from the waterfall in it, brought it back to you and said, "look, in this container is one of the most amazing things you will ever experience!" I think that is partially what the church (the institution) has done. We have taken the beautiful, untamed things of God, put them in a container and massed produced it, and said, "look, this is God....A -B-C." No wonder so many are unimpressed, unaffected - we have given them a container of liquid when they really just needed to go spend time in the waterfall. I don't know....just some things I've been thinking about...."