c. 2003 Religion News Service

(Tom Ehrich is a writer and computer consultant, managing large-scale database implementations. An Episcopal priest, he lives in Durham, N.C.)

(UNDATED) My father calls my cell phone. I move to the front porch, where reception is better.

We chat for a while, exchanging daily news, almost as if we lived next door. But then our signal goes astray. I hear him asking where I am, but he cannot hear my response.

Should I hang up and call back? Or just wait for this sudden non-connection to reverse itself? I decide to wait, for even in an industry mature enough for mergers and bankruptcies, service remains uncertain. Sure enough, the signal returns, and we finish our chat.

It is strange to be talking companionably and then to have one disappear. It shouldn’t be strange, I suppose, because lost connections are a staple of human life. A marriage is strong one day, and then the tie gets frayed, as something _ crisis, self-doubt, change, illness _ sends one partner spinning beyond reach. Friendships suddenly collapse, or work relationships go sour, and suddenly we are sitting together but not connecting.

It might be a common occurrence, but it is still strange and saddening. Like the crowd coming to Jesus, eager for guidance but unable to ask anything deeper than an inane question _ “Rabbi, when did you come here?” _ we lose easygoing familiarity and find ourselves asking awkward questions that don’t address our real need but are the best we can do.

How many couples start arguing about money or children, when what they really want is to reconnect their lives? How many gangly adolescents turn to smoldering silence, when their hearts cry out for hugs and reassurance? How many work colleagues deal with stress by turning against each other, firing off angry e-mails, sacrificing friendship in order to regain lost equilibrium?

So common, so tragic. Here was a crowd looking for Jesus. Their needs were deep. But when they found him, the best they could manage was a question about his arrival time. Their real heart-quest remained unspoken: Why did you leave us? Who are you, that you could cross this sea without a boat? But they couldn’t ask deeply, so they asked shallowly.

The world tends to latch onto our shallowness. Politicians pursue votes by playing to our superficial fears and yearnings. Merchants sell product by tapping the shallow forms that our anxieties take, as if fear of aging meant wrinkle-removal, as if loneliness required even more television, as if self-loathing were a diet opportunity, as if serenity lay inside a bottle or identity inside an automobile.

Religion has built its franchise on shallow answers to deep questions, as if ceremony conquered angst, as if strategic Scripture citations explained creation’s ambiguity, as if law could restore lost love, as if a self-righteous argument about doctrine could undo the disconnect between humanity and God, or, as is happening this week in the Episcopal Church’s General Convention, as if several thousand conventioneers could spend millions of dollars to bicker about sex and thereby contribute one thing to salvation.

I doubt that we can rescue ourselves, no matter how many arguers stand before microphones to blister opponents with carefully harvested Scriptures. For the superficial seems safe, and raging about things that Jesus didn’t address, like sex, enables us to avoid what he did address, namely, wealth and self-sacrifice. Scapegoating the enemy feels better than examining oneself. Voicing right opinion feels better than listening to God. Better to drop a connection than to look behind one’s hubris and there to find one’s deeper yearnings.

What Jesus did was to cut through the inane. He ignored the crowd’s silly question, he looked past the shallow quest _ more bread, please _ and he pointed them to “signs,” to manifestations of his grace. This is what you must seek, he said, not the morning manna or ceremonial wafer, but “food that endures for eternal life.”

Faith invites God to lead us beyond our ceremonies, our legalism, our self-righteous bickering and our shallow prayers, to see our deepest hungers, and to redirect our yearnings toward food that will last. Otherwise, we will keep doing what we are doing: hiding from God, losing connection with each other, and taking the shallow as normal, as all there ever can be.

DEA END EHRICH