members

This past Sunday Daniel and I became members of our church. We've been part of the community there for almost five years now, and participate in every other way. Why has it taken us so long? Maybe it's because neither of us grew up with a big emphasis on membership in our nondenominational churches. Or maybe it's because we've continually felt "on hold" in our life here in Denver. Or maybe it's because we've needed a hiatus from church and commitment, and the freedom to come and go as we please.

Whatever the reasons, in the end it felt special to become members. It's made me think again about community, and hearth gatherings, and my longing for authentic connection. 

It's also got me pondering why we go to church in the first place. Often, when I walk in there, I immediately want to turn around and walk back out. I was raised with enough evangelical iconoclasm, enough devotional and intellectual rigor, and later with enough rebellious Eastern University emphasis on social justice rather than pietism, to feel turned off by the denominational ties, the way some of the people talk about church like it's some kind of club. At some level, I don't get it. 

For all the church I've experienced--the good, the bad, and the ugly--I still feel like a Romantic poet inside. I have felt closest to God not in church, but in nature, in reading, and in connection with others. I thrill when poor John Keats whispers, "Truth is beauty, beauty truth." I sit under a velvet Utah sky so thick with stars you think it's snowing. My eardrums are buffeted by silence. Awe creeps in, and with it fear and trembling. I look into my husband's eyes, his body and mind part of me now after all these years. My child slips his doughy hand into mine, trusting me, loving me, no matter how I fail him. And in those moments, I feel God. Like Wordsworth, "I have learned

To look on nature, not as in the hour

Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes

The still sad music of humanity,

Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power

To chasten and subdue.—And I have felt

A presence that disturbs me with the joy

Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime

Of something far more deeply interfused,

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,

And the round ocean and the living air,

And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:

A motion and a spirit, that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought,

And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still

A lover of the meadows and the woods

And mountains; and of all that we behold

From this green earth; of all the mighty world

Of eye, and ear,—both what they half create,

And what perceive; well pleased to recognise

In nature and the language of the sense

The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,

The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul

Of all my moral being.

But still we go to church. We hide from the sun and wind under a man-made sky. We wiggle on wooden pews, never quite comfortable. Why? There are so many things I value and love about our church. Pastor Dick's sermons, which are always gentle yet piercing, profound and life-giving. Pastor Char's faithful work with the children, the way she cradles silence during the prayers of the people, holding space for our grief and our joy. The classical guitar solos that make my toes tingle. The choir singing "deep peace of the running wave to you." The way our kids run to children's church. The community of believers, random as they are.

But there's a weirdness in it.

Maybe it's the guy in the choir who always sings a half-note off-key. Or the kids picking their noses while Pastor Char gives the Children's Lesson. The 70s-style hymn renditions that make me think I should be wearing bell bottoms. Or perhaps worse, the tired choruses that for me, pastor's daughter and former worship leader, were brand-spanking new circa 1985. (If I never hear "Kumbaya" again, I'd die happy. Could we just sing the classics? A little "Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing" or some Bach, done right? Or some of the more modern choruses?) Or perhaps it's me, judgmental me, looking at the people in their dress-up clothes and thinking, "Who are these people? What do I even have in common with these rich people, these dirty people, these weirdos?" The smell of burnt coffee, too much perfume, and old lady. This motley gathering of people all huddling around the common fire of a faith that we don't even understand most of the time.

I feel like Annie Dillard, in her strange and wonderful essay, "An Expedition to the Pole," when she asks, "Why do we people in churches seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute?" Dillard goes on to say:

On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies' straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.

The bumbling circus of it all. The bumbling circus inside of me. And then, in the midst of the panhandling, a bright flash of gold. The sermon that touches "the mind in the heart," leaving nothing out. The chain of hands to shoulders as we gather in for a baptism affirmation. The clamor of voices that, even slightly off-key, lifts my soul to praise. The Lord's Prayer, which never gets old. And in the midst of the weirdness, God touches us. He meets us. He is with us. Emmanuel.