When George Carey was the Archbishop of Canterbury, he told about the time when he was serving a local church.  A university professor and his wife asked Carey about enrolling their children in Sunday school and attending worship.  Knowing that the couple was agnostics and not members of the church, Carey asked them why they wanted to expose their children to a religion they had rejected.  After complaining about the lack of standards in modern society and the need for moral values, the couple said, “We want our children to grow up in a big ‘story’, a story that will give them security and meaning and hope.  We don’t want diminished children.”

The Archbishop said that it was his belief that modern people are not “totally devoid” of interest in God.  It was his observation that the “behavior of the many thousands who visit cathedrals and churches all over the world as tourists show that many of them have a residual faith that is stirred by the ‘signals of transcendence’ which they find in such places.”

Residual faith?  Signals of transcendence?  What is the meaning of these terms?  Residual faith is the residue or remnants of a faith once held by a person but no longer.  Faith has not totally disappeared, but so little of it is left that one would not be thought of as a person of faith.  Occasionally, however, something happens that stirs that residual faith, causing a person to wonder if there might be something to this faith business after all.  Whatever that “something” is that thaws a frozen faith, we call it “signals of transcendence.”  It is a hint that there is another Reality beyond the material realties of daily life.

Something happens.  It may be, as the Archbishop said, that you are a tourist in one of the grand cathedrals of Europe, and the magnitude and beauty of the cathedral evoke a question:  What moved people to build such a thing?  Is the cathedral a monument to the human ego, or a signal of transcendence, a hint of God?

Something happens.  It may be a crisis in one’s life.  You have a heart attack, and find yourself in an ICU bed hooked up to all kinds of machines; and you wonder if you have reached the end of your rope.  But you have time to think, and you think about things that you didn’t give much thought to before, like what have I been doing with my life all these years?  You think about death and wonder if there really is anything beyond death.  You may even think about church and why you quit going; and the honest truth is, you don’t know why you quit going, your life just got so busy with other things that God and church became afterthoughts; or like Scarlett O’Hara said, “I’ll think about that tomorrow.”  And while lying in that ICU bed, you realize that tomorrow has come.  Indeed, tomorrow has come, and it has come with a great question mark, like a word from on high, a “signal of transcendence.”

So, whether we are people of great faith or of residual faith, things happen to us.  And the things that happen to us often stir up the great human questions of life:  Who am I?  What is the purpose of my life?  Where am I going?  And over the long centuries of history, a certain group of people have found their answers in the Mystery named God, and in following the One in whom and through whom we have seen the nature of the

Mystery.  These people formed a community and called it Church – the place that practices a faith that keeps your life from falling apart.

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