Of Churches and Mystery

There is a memory from my childhood that reappears every so often: I am seven or eight years old, sitting between my parents on the pew that may as well have our names on it, the pew on which we sit every Sunday morning.  Without fail.  We are those people, those “every time the church doors open” people. 

The choir, unrobed and untrained, is singing “When The Roll Is Called Upon Yonder” and I am gazing at the beam of spring light that lasers through the long window just off my father’s shoulder.  There are a million tiny dust motes floating in the light, hovering like fairies.

This was the moment, I am quite sure, that I fell in love with churches.  All of them. The square white wooden chapel on a dirt road keeping watch over worn gravestones. The cathedral nestled among skyscrapers, its stone walls thick enough to keep out the noise of millions of lives. The arenas, surrounded by acres and acres of asphalt, that used to be shopping malls.  

I love being surrounded by the echoes of oft-repeated words.  I love the soft rustle of pages – Bibles and hymnals and bulletins – being turned.  I love the consistent, if uniquely expressed, symbolism and ritual, the invitation to participate, and the feeling that descends on me every time I walk in, the sensation that can only be described as sacred.

Today, though, it is different. On this particular Friday in April, drenched in springtime sunlight, I am not immediately engulfed in the reverence I have come to expect when entering a church.  Today, as I take a seat in the balcony and look down at a full sanctuary, the long cylinders hanging against the chancel wall – the metal tubes through which the organist will send blasts of air to produce majestic music that is both doleful and triumphant – make me think of the raucous belching of a gutted muffler. Today, as I look around at the congregation, so many of whom are  young adults, the white glass circle surrounding the face of Jesus in the stained glass window looks less like a halo and more like a veterinary cone, a tool of captivity and humiliation.

What is wrong with me? I wonder.  Where are the feelings of comfort and assurance that I expected, wanted, needed to envelope me as I stepped into this meager repository of what we know of God?  Why, on this day, can I not see the sacred?  My senses are skewed by anger and that anger has made me sarcastic.  It has also made me sad, so sad.

Ellie was 24 years old. Just a few days shy of 25. When cancer invaded her body and stole her future, she had not lived even a quarter of a century.  The words used to describe her – “a ray of sunshine,” “a shining light,” “a genuine joy” – are not the exaggerations of people struggling to assuage the grief of those who loved her best.  They are the God-honest truth, truth that makes all this even more painful.  And they make me sure that I will have absolutely nothing to say to her mother when given the opportunity to pull her wounded self into my arms for a brief moment.

I am stiff and straight-backed as the service begins, but somewhere between the first powerful notes of the organ swelling and spreading in an invisible wave to land on my shoulders and the tender prayer of the minister who baptized Ellie as an infant, I feel the anger, the sarcasm, even the sadness give way to something else, a revelation of sorts.

I realize, as the tears finally come, that it is not, of course, the churches and chapels and cathedrals themselves that create the sacred.  It is not the stained glass windows or the altars, the prayers or the hymns.  It is not even the scriptures or the sermons.  It is the desire of the human heart to recognize, to acknowledge, to know that what we experience of life is but a threshold, a doorway, a waiting room.  

And as the benediction rises and falls upon our grieving heads, I yield to the mystery, to the ineffable presence of all that is beyond understanding, to the unfathomable power of love. 

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