With regards to hair coverings, I believe that people need rituals. It isn't so much what we do as the way that it orders and puts our emotions or beliefs and superstitions into a manageable place. God made us like that. Just as He says commands the ancient Israelites to rituals of Law, behaviour, cleanliness and sacrifice, but then goes on to completely contradict Himself in Micah, for just one example, when, via the prophet, He says in (NRSV) Chapter 6, v6-8:
With what shall I come before the Lord, and bow myself before God on high? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, with tens of thousands of rivers of oil? Shall I give my firstborn for a transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness and to walk humbly with your God?
If you feel that head covering does something for you on a spiritual level, that is okay. But it is not, as I know you know, the covered head that makes you more or less holy before the Lord. Sometimes humans need symbols, something concrete and visible to have faith in, or to follow. I haven't done this for quite a while now, but a few years ago when I was going through some painful personal experiences, although it is no part of a traditional Mennonite worship service, when I felt painfully in need to have some ritual, some visible manifestation of my reaching out for God, I would burn incense while I prayed, mimicking what we are told in Revelations 8, about incense containing the prayers of the saints.
Another angel with a golden censor came and stood at the altar; he was given a great quantity of incense to offer with the prayers of all the saints on the golden altar that is before the throne. And the smoke of the incense, with the prayers of the saints, rose before God from the hand of the angel.
I do not believe that God would not have heard my prayer without incense. I don't believe that God needs any form of worship at all - neither church nor temple, nor the bowing of one's head or one's knees. Can a temple or a church contain all that is God, the way a fenced pasture contains sheep? Of course not. When the thief who died on the cross said, Jesus, remember me, when You come into Your kingdom, he had no official form of worship or sanction by any earthly religious authority.
But humans are built to look for and understand patterns. If none is given to us, we invent our own. In order to prevent spiritual damage to ourselves, I believe that God gave us a blueprint or a pattern to follow in terms of worship via the Bible.
As far as your quest for a personal relationship with God, I think that the journey is the relationship. Like children, we come to God at first with a certain understanding of His nature and what we are supposed to do that is passed on by our parents. We haven't thought it through by ourselves or developed any critical facilities to the point where we believe some of the things we are told, and see other things that our parents told us as perhaps unimportant to our personal understanding of God.
Most people never step outside of that comfort zone of belief or at least the appearance of belief in what their parents told them. For each of us, how we were raised is the mainstream Christian position - all others are a bit off the mark, in our unspoken opinions, even if we don't go as far as to consign all those who don't believe exactly as we do to Hell in a hand basket.
It was your remark in your post about how you take a more mainstream position than I do that made me think of this. Your background is evangelical Baptist, with the theology (feel free to correct anything I may have misunderstood) of A,B,C - to accept Christ as your personal Saviour; to believe that He died for your sins; to confess this belief to other people. To most Christians in the world, this evangelical formula is not a mainstream belief.
I believe that Christ is the promised Saviour and that He died and rose again and will come again, and that I will know, as I am known. I believe this unequivocally and with my whole heart. But I will never use the words born-again to describe my relationship with the Eternal. Not because I do not believe, not because I do not know that Jesus said you must be born again, but because of the connotation and the set of other beliefs are assumed by now to go along with those words. What I would mean by born-again is not what any born-again Christian would understand me to mean and for me to say that would be misleading that person into thinking I share in his or her belief - which is that everyone who isn't born again is headed straight for Hell.
And quite unfairly perhaps, as I have my own prejudices, when someone tells me they are are born-again Christians, I am completely turned off. I associate those words with cheap grace, and the same sort of curious anticipation of a crowd who goes to see bull-riding at a rodeo, of the possibility of someone getting hurt. There is this notion many born-again Christians have, that everyone who hasn't said those A, B, and Cs exactly - is not a real Christian and is wrong and is headed for Hell.
I do not believe in any ritualized prayer such as many evangelicals talk about as the Sinner's Prayer - capital letters. As though it is a formula and once you have said that formula, you may in fact do as you please - you have a Get-Out-of-Hell Free card.
I am not saying that you or that even most of those who believe in the A,B,C thing immediately go, "Great, wow. I'm saved. Where's the nearest bar now that I have the freedom to sin." I am speaking in general terms about perceptions and faith and how often what people think is faith is custom or cultural.
But this is the perception many people have of American Christianity, and it is not without validity. It is as though Christianity is a form, not a belief that requires a certain standard of conduct. As though a professing Christian can do anything at all as long as he as "accepted Christ as his personal Saviour" and then is entitled to sit in judgment of Christians of other denominations, with a different understanding, and if their (the born-again Christian's) behaviour, is called into question, responds pithily with, "Christians aren't perfect - just forgiven."
Well, duh.
There are Christians who believe that to follow Christ, means to be born again, each day, without ever once saying words to that effect. Who make that commitment, each day, to do as Christ did, to love one's neighbours, to turn the other cheek, to love those who despitefully use you - not to sue them in a court of law, not to impose their faith on others in the form of public monuments or prayer in secular schools, but to live it - to live in such a way as Christ would have lived, a light that cannot be hidden.
Christ compels no man to come to Him against his will. And yet many evangelicals in the US would do just that - impose the tenets of their beliefs and faith on unbelievers in public areas like schools. I don't see this as much different from the way the Catholic church behaved through much of its early history, in terms of forcibly 'converting' whole populations, and which is something that the underpinnings of Protestant faith is completely against, emphasizing, as they do, the whole notion of the personal relationship with Jesus Christ.
Far too often Christian discipline and discipleship is not taught along with those A,B, Cs. Far too many born-again Christians profess a theology that is completely irresponsible and absolutely fails people who are genuine in their faith and want to grow in their faith, but have issues in their lives, like drugs or alcohol. I can't now quite remember all the things that being born-again is instantly supposed to cure, but essentially, far too many born-again preachers preach that the minute you are saved, you are delivered from your craving for alcohol and beating your wife and all is supposed to be wonderful.
That is not true. God is not a star to be wished on, or a Santa Claus to send a wish list to, that we are, by virtue of belief in Jesus as the Christ, delivered from human temptations or from the need to develop self control and wisdom. For those who have some sort of terrible issue they are trying to overcome, it is the equivalent of giving him or her a Bible verse when he or she needs bread.
I would highly recommend that you read Dietrich Bonhoeffer's book, The Cost of Discipleship. I honestly think you would really get something out of it, since you are a fan of C.S. Lewis. The book addresses many of the questions you are asking yourself these days, including what it means to love Christ for Himself, alone.
Bonhoeffer was a true martyr for Christ, who opposed Hitler, and even returned to Germany after having escaped it.
Quoting briefly from his famous writing on Billige Gnade, or cheap grace, he wrote in part, ....That is what we mean by cheap grace, the grace which amounts to the justification of sin without the justification of the repentant sinner who departs from sin and from whom sins departs. Cheap grace is not the kind of forgiveness of sin which frees us from the toils of sin. Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves. Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession, absolution without personal confession.
If I may put it so bluntly, this to my mind, is the pervading sin of the evangelical churches in North America today.
Just as God charges that the his ancient Israelites allowed the form of worship, the rituals of animal sacrifice and cleanliness to become the mark of the "good" Jew, forgetting that the whole sum of the Law was to love the Lord thy God and thy neighbour as thyself, so in that way, too many evangelicals have their own version of cleaning the outside of the cup (Matthew 23, KJV) "but within they are full of extortion and excess."
Layla
