I am, of necessity, coming to a dualistic understanding of church and religion. Dualism is distinguished by there being two serviceable explanations for things; there must be no overlap between the descriptions, since they explain things based on completely different understandings of experience, and each must purport to offer a complete explanation.
Considering religion, we first have that objective, perhaps anthropological, phenomenon of the sacred element in any culture -- the medicine man, Gibbon's barefoot friars of Jupiter, etc. Any great city, from Egypt to North Dakota, has its priests and its rites. And one beginning of sufficient humility is recognizing that this explanation can be used to describe the Mass of the Latin church in the West. When you travel in contested lands, you can see that these rituals, familiar to the native as anodyne weekly rituals from childhood, are specific to a certain world-political force, and operate to strengthen that force. Note, though, that this is not a materialist or exclusively political reading -- only a dogmatic thinker would refuse to concede some spiritual power to the shaman and the Egyptian priest. Every place has its eidelon and holy rites, and the people in each place are able to think transcendentally about life and their own experience in the context of these rites, even if the rites are merely expressive in nature.
Looking at the Masses in areas thought to be most attuned to the culture, it is possible to see them in this manner, as the holy rites proper to the place, and which it is good and fitting to do, and they fulfill the righteousness of the time.
But this definition does not exhaust the event. The righteousness of the time is fulfilled not by setting out to fulfill the righteousness of the time, to do holy rites, but by entering into a certain event in a first-person understanding. Which is to say, those who go to Mass to participate in the sacred rites of a certain place are fulfilling their obligation,but some aspect of the experience is veiled to them precisely because they rely upon this line of thought as a sufficient explanation of their actions.
A religious event also has its first-person characterization, in that the people are not merely dutifully fulfilling the city's rituals, but doing things that are meaningful to them because the actions of the ritual have something more than expressive meaning to them. A Christian who recalls Christ thinks of someone who actually existed. One who meditates on Isis and Osiris mediates on s sequence of events that is meaningful in itself. In other words, in these rituals, we are doing certain things in the world, and encountering certain things in the world, just as we might do so outside of the context of the ritual.
So if the prevailing explanation of the event comes from the first understanding, the dutiful observance of the holy rites proper to the place, there is a possible remonstration from someone who, ontrastingly, has an understanding of the event based on the first-person experience of meaningful, rather than expressive, actions in the world. The thinker of the second way might say, "But what about Christ" or "But what about Osiris?" This thinker understands that what he is doing in the ritual was instituted within history at a certain discrete time in reaction to certain specific events, and that the ends of the ritual are a closer communion with these truths that have to do with independently meaningful things in the world -- things in the world that have a historical or cultural reality outside the context of the ritual, so their invocation within the ritual is not simply expressive speech. The ritual refers. This view exists alongside the way of thinking based on the present importance of of the act, despite the fact that the understanding which sees the ritual as the rites proper to the place purports to offer a complete explanation without entering into the first-person nature of the experience. (And the first-person explanation also makes a claim to completeness, even though it would miss much of the the event going on around itself in the present moment if it were to rely entirely on the actions of the event. At a certain point, we should realize that we are not merely meditating on the actual reality of Christ, but that we are standing in an immense cathedral; the latter is clearly a meaningful aspect of the event.
So, as I attend the Masses in the capital of the world, this is why I am pining a bit for the ikonostases of the Balkans. These rituals are proper to the place, and they make the culture strong. But the rituals refer to things actually in the world, and so we need to turn our minds to the first-person meanings of the event. Turning my mind to the reality of, for example, a Serbian ikonstasis isn't a fleeing from my own culture, or in the manner of Heidegger on Holderlin, an outward journey to the distant place to unearth the truths of the homeland. I turn my mind to the distant event because I am surrounded by the piety of expressive speech, though I know that this speech refers to actual entities. His blood dripped onto the same earth on which I stand. And the distant spirituality that is calling me through the doors of memory serves to ground me in the event apart from the present culture -- which is not a fleeing from the ritual, but in fact the central truth of my first-person experience of it.