Why I Go to Church

Some people ask me why I go to church.  C’mon, Michael, they say, you’re an atheist.  You’ve never gone to church in your life; you don’t even believe in all that business.  And the truth is, they’re right–mostly.  I don’t believe in most of that business.  I wasn’t raised in a “church” family.  As a kid I think I went to church perhaps three or four times, and I had to be dragged kicking and screaming.  Sunday morning was usually the time that my father, a part-time carpenter and a full-time drunk, was sharpening his tools or working on another bender.  The only “Jesus” I heard on Sundays were those angry ones thrown like darts by my mother, and they certainly weren’t intended to evoke Christian love or forgiveness.

But I sensed, even then, that there was something missing from my life, a spiritual void at the center of me.  In college I tried to fill that void by becoming a faithful devotee of literature.  My spirit thrilled at the notion of Wallace Stevens’ valiant dismissal of organized religion by turning to the beauty of the natural world: “What is divinity if it can come/Only in silent shadows and in dreams?” I admired his idea that divinity must live within oneself.  Or in Yeats’ turning to the creative act to assuage our fear of being fastened to a dying animal.   Later, as a novelist myself, I wrote, in part, to help me understand the chaotic and unjust world I lived in, to fathom, as Kafka’s Joseph K, the mortality to which I was condemned.

Though literature has largely helped me to comprehend the complexity and to savor the beauty of this world, it still falls short.  I still exist in a world of where people suffer, where children die inexplicably, where injustice and poverty often rein, a world too often filled with ugliness and fear, where things are usually not made tidier or clearer or more just at the end, as in some novel.  In a world where I, too, am just as selfish and ignorant, prejudiced and thoughtless as any other person.  Going to church, I’ve found, grounds me, makes me feel that I am part of that world of suffering and injustice, and not just a disinterested spectator, some anonymous narrator writing about other people’s pain.   I especially feel this way when I am in the presence of a great sermon.  Like a profound poem, a thoughtful sermon awakens my spirit and mind and heart to the beauty and poetry in life, but equally to the suffering of others, and to my responsibility in the face of such suffering.

Today for instance, the minister at my church gave a sermon on “the other,” on immigrants past and present.  As he often does he began by citing an example from the Bible before using that as a springboard for something larger and closer to home, a theme that affects us in our daily lives.  In this case it was about Peter accepting others not like himself, about baptizing Cornelius, a Gentile.  The minister then went on to say that his own family, like most Americans, were at one time immigrants themselves, aliens who didn’t have formal papers and didn’t speak English.  As in a complex novel, his sermon didn’t make me feel comfortable or at ease.  As he and his co-paster often do, they challenge me to be better, not so blind or selfish or smug.  He made me question my own political and moral beliefs.  In today’s uncertain political and cultural climate, he forced us all to look inward—something we all must do in this time of deceptively simple choices.

I don’t believe in an afterlife.  I don’t believe that going to church or praying or even listening to a wonderful sermon is going to extend my life one day beyond the one I have. But, as with literature, it does help me look deeper into that one life, to examine it carefully and savor it more fully.  That’s why I go to church.  Plus the donuts and coffee afterwards are pretty good, too.