Last night, as a good friend and I were walking to a fund raiser at the Boswell Gallery, he remarked on being a bit surprised when he read here about my attending church. As I’ve been wanting to write more about my steps down what I believe is the path I am meant to walk, that conversation presented a subject about which I do think I can expound (as I don’t think I’m ready to present any scriptural analysis, though someday soon I hope to). Writing about that subject would also, I realized, force me to solidify my reasoning. So why do I attend church?
At the root of the answer lie two flaws in my character: I’m lazy and easily distracted by the (secular) world. While I recognize that our present society considers neither to be a “deadly sin” (or even just a run of the mill “sin”), I do consider both to be elements of my personality which I need to purge. A lazy and easily distracted person attempting to eliminate such traits from himself though is a bit like putting the fox in charge of the hen house to stop him from eating chickens. It may work, but it’s going to cost you a few chickens in the interim.
Going to church forces me, for the hour I am there, to focus exclusively on the religious. I can’t decide, “I’ll just take a quick peek at my email” or “I’ll take a short nap and read this passage after”. For that time, the circumference of the world shrinks down to encompass nothing but those pews and those people. By being so enclosed, I am then free to explore the larger world of my faith. (To some of you, I’d imagine, this description sounds very much like all that you see wrong with organized religion, very structured and limiting. However, just as great beauty can burst out from the very strict rules of a sonnet, so too does the strict adherence to weekly worship allow my belief to bloom into something grander than the structure from which it grows.) Ideally, I wouldn’t need to go to church to focus my thoughts on the spiritual (and in fact it’s not that this one hour each week is the only time when I concern myself with that aspect of the world, but it’s the only guaranteed time). For the present, however, I do it out of necessity. In the future, I expect it to shift more into the realm of desire and that an hour (or more) each day, not just each week, will be given over to spiritual concerns.
Sitting in church today, I realized that not only is it a time when I can take the time to plumb the depths of my faith, but also a time when I am open to any guidance from God. Which brings to the fore an aspect of my faith about which I have been tight lipped, that while each choice I make in my life is made freely, God’s will is the primary criteria by which I judge and evaluate my choices. How do I know God’s will? I don’t. I infer it from the world around me. I have long believed (as some of you know) that there is meaning in everything, that nothing happens by accident or coincidence. Once I placed myself in the hand of God, to crib a phrase from Dave Sim, all the meaning which I had thought was there, but which seemed so elusive, was suddenly laid bare. Extracting that meaning from the world around us does require one to first sit back and listen, to take it in, (before then applying thought to reason it out). Before, during, and after the service I do just that, I open myself to whatever He chooses to communicate to me.
Additionally, for that brief time each week, I am surrounded only by people who share, at least in part, my beliefs. While I’ve got no problem being friends or spending time around you whose beliefs (if you have any) are either ambivalent towards or directly opposed to my own (my faith is strong enough that it is neither threatened nor weakened by such oppositions), it is comforting to spend time in an environment where I am welcomed in toto. An acquaintance of mine recently wrote about the differing atmospheres at two parties he attended in the same night. While I do not posses his eloquence, his description of the dichotomy applies here as well. As it was a private and personal entry (and therefore not one to which I can direct you), I’ll just present here my own poor paraphrasing. The atmosphere of one party felt stiff, interactions occurring very much at a superficial level, while a certain intimacy and openness permeated the second party. That difference is much of what I have come to feel going between the world at large and my time each week in that small little building. (Yes, I do feel that closeness with some of you regardless of our divergent spiritual paths, but you are the exceptions.)
Of course the most important reason is that I look damn fine all dressed up.