Thursday, January 25, 2007

Is heaven a siesta? No, it's a coffee chat



"If Heaven were a siesta, religion might be conceived of as a reverie. If the future life were to be mainly spent in a Temple, the present life might be mainly spent in Church."





The photo is not a church. It's a coffee shop in San Juan Capistrano. The quote is from Henry Drummond, known mainly for his exposition of First Corinthians 13. His little book The Greatest Thing in the World has sold over 12 million copies in English alone. But he wrote another work I keep going back to. It's called The City without a Church, and is based on St. John's vision of new Jerusalem found in Revelation 21. "No temple therein." Drummond's take is that we live our religion not within the walls of a church, but in the nitty-gritty center of things, where citizens get together and connect. We live our religion by our service to one another. You can read the whole thing by clicking here.



Jonathan Voltze is the editor/publisher of The Capistrano Dispatch an independent local paper published every other week in English and every other week in Spanish. He instituted Friday morning "coffee chats" at an independent coffee house (hard to find in a town of 35,000 which has FOUR Starbucks in a half mile square). Dependable independence, I guess. It was good to be back with the "regulars," even if they were talking about the same old stuff. They were talking, and that counts for a lot these days.

Seems I spent most of last week talking or listening in meetings of all sorts:
The Guayabitos Homeowners Association
The coffee chat at Metro Java
The Christian Science Society in San Juan Capistrano
The Capistrano Valley Community Foundation

So I'm staying connected -- have even learned to do hyperlinks. Did you notice? Now it's market day in La Penita, and I'm up for some serious shopping. That is what I call heaven!

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