"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.

A Journey

Have you ever noticed that folks in the bible are thirsty all the time? Or so it would seem as big things are always happening at the well. Jacob met Rachel by a well and Jesus spoke to the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well.

The simplest explanation for all this is hanging out at the watering hole is that these people lived in the desert; where else would you find them? I traveled to the Holy Land last winter and witnessed the desperate scarcity of water. When Isaiah called the land around Jerusalem the wilderness, he wasn’t kidding. It is wild. And unforgiving.

But there is more to this well image, I think. God wants to remind us of our deep need for him. As unrelenting as thirst in the desert. Unquenchable except by God alone. Have you felt this? I felt it all my life; which is a hard thing for a kid growing up in a family that is not “churchified.”

I remember my mom making several attempts to get my five siblings and me to Sunday school and my dad to church. She met with resistance of biblical proportions from all parties involved. She never tried again. Church became taboo. Something that people with a lot on their consciences did. Or people who didn’t believe in Science, which, in our house, ruled.

Somehow I’d gotten an old but beautifully illustrated children’s book of bible stories. I hid at night beneath the covers to read it. I got as far as Cain and Abel and decided this was no book for a little girl to read by herself in the dark.

As a young teenager I babysat for a Lutheran minister down the street. The family kept a framed copy of The Lord’s Prayer on an end table in their living room. I decided to memorize the whole prayer, one stanza a week. I was thirsty.

I went to church with a friend once when I was in high school. I sat in the pew by myself as everyone took communion because I hadn’t been baptized.

One Christmas Eve my younger brother and I decided we wanted to go to a midnight service. By this time I was old enough to drive. I had never spent Christmas Day or Christmas Eve in a church. Imagine the thirst.

My brother and I didn’t know where to go. We only knew we wanted an old church with candlelight and a big choir and traditional hymns so we headed downtown. We slid inside a beautiful limestone church with stained glass windows just as the service was beginning. It was everything I’d imagined. The closing hymn, was Silent Night and everything really did seem calm and bright there in the candlelight as the hour approached midnight on my first Christmas Eve in a place of worship.

Years, as they say, passed. You can mask thirst but you don’t really quench it. It would be years before I thought about church again.
My husband and I went looking for a church after our daughter was born. We wanted a church in the city. We found a beautiful, welcoming one; limestone with stained glass windows. It was only when the choir and the congregation began singing Silent Night together as our first Christmas Eve service there came to a close that I realize I’d found my way back home.

I was baptized at the same time as my daughter.

A few years back I spoke to a man of deep faith. He told me he’d just met a man who had a tattoo of Jesus on his arm with the words: Isaiah 53 written beneath. I woke up in the middle of the night wondering what Isaiah 53 said and couldn’t fall back to sleep.
I went to the bookshelf, took out a bible and opened it. I looked down, prepared to start turning the pages and noticed it had fallen open to Isaiah 53. The next morning I asked my kids what they thought about this. My son’s answer: “I think God wants you to read Isaiah 53.”

I’d write it here for you now, but I thought it would be more fun for you to look it up yourself. Hint: it’s one important prophesy.

I remember this happened sometime in the fall.

At our church third graders get their first bibles on Mother’s Day. It’s very emotional. The Cherub Choir sings. They look like little angels. My son was a third grader this particular year. He got up in front of the whole church...can’t you just picture him in his little tie... and proudly got his bible. On the way home he said, “Mom, guess what verse I’m going to read out of my new bible first?” “The Christmas story from Luke?” I guessed. “No,” he said, “Isaiah 53.”

You know what they say we don’t find God; God finds us. And knows when we are desperately thirsty.

How did God find you? Do you have a faith story you want to share?