"Why I go to Church: A Story"

I think I've mentioned somewhere else in this blog that I did not grow up "churcified." Probably there are people in my family who wonder why I go to church now. There are lots of reasons. But I'm a story teller and sometimes it's easiest for me to explains things with a story. This is not an attempt to persuade or proselytize. It's just a story about one of the reasons I go to church.

Because grief doesn't take appointments.

Nor then, does our need for comfort. Which is why I simply wandered into church late one afternoon a couple of years ago. Without an appointment. It was the only place I could think to go, having just gotten a call from a friend who had just learned that all treatments had failed. The cancer had simply refused to go away. He would leave, we knew, a wife and small children.

I spent some time in the chapel. Alone. But needed more. I went upstairs to the ministers' offices. A minister, K., who was not expecting me, opened her office and then literally opened her arms and held me and said...and I'll never forget her words and how gently she said them..."Your heart is just breaking, isn't it?"

K. gave me a card to pass along to my friend's family. A passage written by a remarkable theologian named Dietrich Bonhoeffer. I did not know that afternoon that I would soon need to cling desperately to Bonhoeffer's words myself.

Here are those words:

"Nothing can make up for the absence of someone who we love...It is nonsense to say that God fills the gaps: God does not fill it, but on the contrary, God keeps it empty and so helps us to keep alive our former communion with each other, even at the cost of pain...The dearer and richer our memories, the more difficult the separation. But gratitude changes the pangs of memory into a tranquil joy. The beauties of the past are borne, not as a thorn in the flesh but as a precious gift in themselves."

Those words would become a gift to me because: Grief doesn't take appointments.

And the holidays are a terrible time to be grieving. But that's when I began to lose my mom a couple of years back. She suffered a brain aneurysm a few days before Christmas. I saw her at the hospital while she was still conscious. My last words to her before she went into surgery were, "I love you, Mom." She said, "I love you, too. All of you." She suffered a second and catastrophic aneurysm the next day and never fully regained consciousness.

But there were times over the next couple of months when she opened her eyes and seemed to respond. We think maybe she saw us and we were with her a lot. And if hse was able to see then she woudl have become pretty familiar with the kind face of Pastor B from my church. Because, God love him, Pastor B's care and compassion for my mom, who was not a member were, in the psalmists words, "steadfast and enduring." I will never forget his soft voice saying, "Shirley, Shirley, I'm here to pray with you today."

My family, "churchified" or not still says of this painful time: "What would we have done without B?"

It is astounding to me how the presence of Jesus is revealed in the way we comfort each other at church. I decided at the last minute to go to the Christmas Eve service that year. It was the first time I'd left the hospital for any length of time since my mom had had her aneurysm. But I needed to be at church. I was fine until I saw an dear family friend. I began telling him what had happened. I was crying so hard I could barely talk. His 10 year old daughter didn't say a word. But she didn't look uncomfortable. She just threw her arms around mean hugged me hard.

And I knew that Christ was at work there. And I knew her parents had taught her well. And I knew that it was no coincidence that she had grown up in that church. In this place where people comfort each other. Without appointment. Without condition.

Thanks be to God.