Why I Keep Going to Church

Going to church on Sunday is extremely inconvenient. 

When you and your spouse are working parents, those 48 weekend hours (assuming my husband isn’t working for over-time) are precious.

Between Friday night and Sunday night we try to balance:

        quality time with our two children,

        household chores like vacuuming and cleaning the bathroom,

        errands like picking up prescriptions and buying birthday presents,

        activities like play-dates and sports, and

        when we can squeeze it in, either some “alone time” for each one of us to decompress (e.g. a football game on tv for my husband, a yoga class for me) or

        a date night to remember we are more than just “mom” and “dad.”

As you can imagine, come Sunday night, everything has not been done.  How could it?  But “getting it all done” is personally not my objective.

It used to be, when my perfectionism was still steering the ship.  Now though, balance is my main objective.

Balance requires a constant series of prioritizing and re-prioritizing what tasks and activities will win my love and attention, and what will be moved to the back burner for another time.  For me, this includes going to church.

It’s hard to not think of the decision-point when I decide “yea” or “nay” on a particular weekend task or activity as through a competitive lens of winners and losers, but sometimes it feels that way.

Yet despite this feeling, I add yet another activity to my weekends once or twice a month, and that is church. 

Why do you do this you ask?

Well, it is certainly not obligation.  My faith and theology do not dictate a when and where for me to sustain a relationship with god.

No, I go for the 2 H’s: Hope and Humility.

The first “H” is Hope. This is probably the more obvious one. 

At times, I can despair about the horrific atrocities that go on every day, every minute, in our world.  Genocide. Childhood trafficking. Families without food to eat. People with AIDS having no medicine.  Girls having no access to school or education. African American teenagers being shot in the street. Destruction of Rain Forests for the purposes of cheap hamburgers. Dare I go on...Yes, I can slip down this rabbit hold.

And I know I’m not alone in this.  I think some people who choose to avoid news and world events, and thereby can appear ignorant at times to the very real problems that plague our society, are often folks who can slip into despair too.  But, because they don’t know how not to despair, they just stick their ostrich heads in the sand and say “I hear nothing. I see nothing.”

For me though, a way to not despair, or counter-act it anyway, is to go to church.

I receive an enormous booster shot of hope each time I walk in to the sanctuary of my church and I begin to recite in unison with the fellowship of other Unitarian Universalists, these words:

          Love is the spirit of this church

          and service is its law.

          This is our great covenant:

          to dwell together in peace,

          to seek the truth in love,

          and to help one another.

There is something very tangible, and maybe even primitive, about sitting with my body next to someone else’s bodywhile joining my voice with their voice, and proclaiming a wish for love, service and peace.

It’s not that I don’t generate feelings of hope from other avenues as well.  

Yesterday for example I re-watched the 5 minute YouTube Video by Brother David Steindl-Rast called “A Good Day” posted on his website www.gratefulness.org.  As during past viewings, I was easily moved by the message that I receive of hope.

And yet the virtual is not quite the same as sitting in church.  The visual flat screen of my computer with its audio narrative, is just not a substitute for the flesh and blood of real human contact- and that is a good thing.

Because when we sing ourselves into meditation and prayer with a song called“Spirit of Life” whose lyrics are the following:

          Spirit of Life of Truth of Power.

          We bring ourselves as gifts to thee.

          Oh bind our hearts this sacred hour.

          In faith and hope and charity.,

I feel not only a sense of hope, but also a sense of communion and unity. When I feel these three sentiments together, I get this unique, un-replicable experience that feels like the alchemy that is inter-connectedness. 

For me, this experience peaks at the end of the church service when we say our unison Benediction. This past week, I recited it directly to my 6 year-old son who sat beside me:

          Go out in to the world in peace.

          Hold on to what is good.

          Return to no person, evil for evil.

          Strengthen the faint-hearted.

          Support the weak.

          Help the suffering.

          Honor all beings.

Saying these words together with a group of dozens of other people gives me so much hope for humanity.  It’s like a big vaccination shot for all of the troubles and traumas I have viewed or witnessed over the course of the last week or month that can at times leave me down-trodden or melancholic about the darker side of humanity.

But each time I come back and sit down in that uncomfortable wooden pew, I look around at the men, women and children around me, and I am reminded that there are people out there who share the same longing I do for a more loving, fair and compassionate society.

The other “H” is for Humility.

Perhaps this is the less obvious reason that someone might have for attending church, but it is an important one for me. 

Interestingly this one does not require a lot of words to talk about it because it has to do with all that I don’t know- and that is a lot.

Growing up the word “humility” had a very shameful connotation to it.  But that is not how I see it now. Humility is permission and validation to be the limited human creature that I am, and this can be a useful reminder in the spiritual journey.

When most of your spiritual and religious life is primarily self-directed and done as a solitary practice, as mine is, I think it can be easy to forget about the fact that what we know and understand is about the equivalent of a single grain of sand on a 5-mile long sandy beach.

But this level of ignorance that we all share is not a flaw, it is part of our humanity.  Therefore, it is understandable that in a spiritual journey that is being steered predominantly, at least in the manifest realm, by me, it is going to be filled with blind spots that unintentionally shape my reality.

The danger of this however, comes in to play when we forget about our own ignorance.

What I’ve found though, is if I go to church, I not only open myself up to the possibility of noticing another grain of sand other than my own, but I am also reminded of the panoramic view of the beach itself. 

Hope and Humility- that is why I keep going to church.  How about you?