Evolving

IN CHURCH YESTERDAY there were ten people, including the substitute minister and the organist, who also plays the piano, which he alternates beautifully before, during, and after the worship service. I have been attending this church for several months now, I like it, and intend to continue. What concerns me, however, is the question of how long the church will continue to exist. Interestingly, its a nearly two hundred year old church, a beautiful nineteenth century brick and wood building, with a nice stained glass window and a church bell on top, which I have been permitted the honor of ringing each Sunday morning, just before nine thirty, when the service begins. If you pull the rope hard, with strength, the bell rings loudly, singing our across the tiny town in the Ozarks. I ring it five times, and I always initiate at least one ring which is insufficiently loud, on account of my lack of effort. Its embarassing, but correctible, and I know how to correct it. During the service I sit each Sunday in the same place, about half way back on the left side, near an elderly couple who are friends of mine. At least the lady is. The gentleman,a conservative, is not especially happy with my expressed opinion of evangelical Christians who support Trump, and thus treats me rather coldy, but, so be it. My opinion adheres. I'm not the youngest congregant, but close to it, and that also alarms me. How long will this ancient church last? I am told that one hundred years ago teh weekly congregation was somewhere around one hundred, and that thirty or forty years ago there were still thirty or forty attendees, normally. This somehow seems indicative to me of the generalvdecline in membership of the Christian religion throughout Europe and North America, ongoing. I am sixty nine years old, and I vaguely suspect that I will outlive this litle church in the woods. If it can survive four more years, until the year twenty twenty eight, it wll be able to celebrate its two hundreth birthday. This would be an amazing accomplishment, and I think there is a good chance of it happening, and of my participating in it. Beyond that, who knows? What I like about the Christian religion is the loving, kind, compassionate side of Jesus. What I disike is the theological dogma. Like a good songwriter once wrote in a song lyric, "You an keep the cross, just give us Jesus". Its worth bering in mind that one can be a buddhist, and also be a believer in any other religion on the planet, all four thousand two hundred of them, or however many there are. Buddhism and Christianity go beautifully together, arguably. Perhaps the best idea for the expansive, intellectually and spiritually ambitious person is to embrace every religion on Earth, to embrace their fundamental beauty, widsom, and truth, while strictly adhering to and limiting one's self to none of them. Arguably, all religions are human made,all are partly true, none of them are entirely or exclusively true, from any particulare viewpoint. If you put all our human religions together into one, big Earthly religion, it might, in total, represent no more than one trillionth of the religious wisdom in the universe, scattered among all the various intelligent, religious species of beings which must surely be out there, worshipping, praying, advancing beyond religion, as we here on Earth appear to be on the verge of being ready to do. As Goethe said: "Behold the phenomena, for they are the doctrine."