Easter Is Calling Me Back to the Church

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/25/opinion/easter-church-faith.html

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NASHVILLE — I went to church on Easter Sunday last year, and never went back. It wasn’t a boycott, exactly. It was an inability, week after week, to face the other believers. Still, I’d fully intended to go to Mass on Christmas Eve, but at the very last minute a crisis erupted in my extended family — an all-hands-on-deck kind of crisis — so I changed into my jeans and hung my poinsettia-red blouse back in the closet.

In this house, we have never been Christmas-and-Easter-only Christians. My husband and I grew up in the church and raised our children there. Even during the hardest years, when mobilizing three young sons and various configurations of elderly parents felt like running the Iditarod every Sunday morning — even then, we didn’t miss Mass.

But the 2016 presidential election changed all that for me. I just couldn’t forgive my fellow Christians for electing a man who exploited his employees, boasted about his sexual assaults, encouraged violence against citizens who disagreed with him, mocked the disabled and welcomed the support of virulent white supremacists. This is what Jesus meant when he told his followers to love one another?

At church, all I could think about were the millions of people likely to lose their health insurance thanks to Catholic bishops who opposed the birth control mandate in the Affordable Care Act. I was supposed to be thinking about the infinite love of a merciful God, but all I could hear were thousands of Christians shouting, “Build that wall!” By the time Easter had come and gone, I was gone too.

In some ways, there was nothing surprising about this breach. I love my parish, but I have always had a vexed relationship with the church. Long before 2016, the fault line was there, rumbling with every papal pronouncement affirming the male-only priesthood or claiming to speak with moral authority on issues of human sexuality. What kind of faith community denies a sacrament to parishioners who don’t happen to have been born heterosexual?

During college and graduate school, I tried to talk myself out of believing in God. The reasons not to believe were multifarious and convincing. The reasons to believe came down to only one: I couldn’t not believe. I seem to have been born with a constant ache for the sacred, a deep-rooted need to offer thanks, to ask for help, to sing out in fathomless praise to something. In time I found my way back to God, the most familiar and fundamental something I knew, even if by then my conception of the divine had enlarged beyond any church’s ability to define or contain it.

A church isn’t a necessary thing to a believer for whom the whole world is holy. But when our first baby was on the way, my husband and I signed on. We could have chosen another branch of Christianity, one whose secular framework more closely matched our own understanding of a church’s role in the world. But to a soul imprinted from birth on Roman Catholicism’s stained glass and incense and 2,000 years of art and music, all the other churches just seemed a little slight somehow. Not quite finished.

And if all human institutions are by definition imperfect, why not throw in your lot with the one that made you, the one where everyone you love belongs? The worldly church is always a work in progress, and there is still hope for its redemption. “Anyway,” my husband said, “if a priest doesn’t baptize this baby, you know my mother will just take him into the bathroom and baptize him herself.”

In the past year, while my husband and his father were at church on Sunday mornings, I was in the woods, where God has always seemed more palpably present to me anyway. (And not just to me: “Some keep the Sabbath going to Church,” Emily Dickinson wrote back in the 19th century. “I keep it, staying at Home.”) For me, a church can’t summon half the awe and gratitude inspired by a full-throated forest in all its indifferent splendor.

The year away from church hasn’t made me miss the place itself. I don’t miss the stained glass. I don’t miss the gleaming chalice or the glowing candles or the sweeping vestments. But I do miss being part of a congregation. I miss standing side by side with other people, our eyes gazing in the same direction, our voices murmuring the same prayers in a fallen world. I miss the wiggling babies grinning at me over their parents’ shoulders. I miss reaching for a stranger to offer the handshake of peace. I miss the singing.

So I will be at Mass again on Easter morning, as I have been on almost every Easter morning of my life. I will wear white and remember the ones I loved who sat beside me in the pew and whose participation in the eternal has found another form, whatever it turns out to be. I will lift my voice in song and give thanks for my life. I will pray for my church and my country, especially the people my church and my country are failing. And then I will walk into the world and do my best to practice resurrection.