A few of the reasons why a professor and poet keeps going to church.
In the late 1970s, a few of the hippie “Jesus Freaks” who had morphed into the California Vineyard movement took Interstate 10 east to the Arizona desert and set up some home groups. There, they encountered my mother, 15 years old and newly delivered of a son, me. I spent my early months in that movement of prayer circles, food donations, and murmured concern for the teenager whose father had recently died and whose husband had trouble obeying the law or coming home.
That church might as well have been my family, providing for us between my mother’s fast-food paychecks and babysitting between her shifts. We were counter-cultural, a message seared into my memory—in fact, the earliest one I can conjure is of being wrapped up one night and trundled off to a parking lot punctuated with oil drums out of which flames spewed like huge liturgical candles. The people I sang with on Sundays had come to burn their collections of secular music: into the fire Styx’ Masterpiece Theater; the turtles on the cover of the Grateful Dead’s Terrapin Station melting before my awestruck face. I was small, but I can still see the sense of release with which they performed this strange ritual. They were letting go of the former markers of their sense of self. Those barefoot brothers and sisters were starting fresh, defying the culture’s norms and its entertainments, were sealing a covenant to a new way of living with a burnt offering. I saw how dedicated they were to each other, to the gathering, to the Lord. I suppose I’ve always wanted to be that way too. So I went to church.
And all these years later, I keep going to church, for all the usual reasons: to meet other believers, to learn, to worship, to grow more deeply into the image of God I was created to bear. But I also go for some less usual motives, ones that I am, in what follows, trying to think through.
I can say with gladness and with the Psalmist that I rejoice in the Lord’s statutes.
I Go to Church to Sing Hymns
There’s a hymn that we sing in our church whose final verses send me sobbing. “Come ye Souls by Sin Afflicted” by Joseph Swain was published first in 1781, but its sentiments are the sort any Christian would take comfort in at any time in the church’s history. We’ve just sung,
Blessed are the eyes that see him,
blest the ears that hear his voice,
and then we get to the line that goes, “His commandments / Then become their happy choice.” I don’t know why it affects me so much, apart from that I find it profoundly true. While there was a time in my faith journey during which I would have balked at this or that bit of ethics or orthodoxy, and while I, as ever, have a long way to go toward holiness, I am currently at a place in life where I can say with gladness and with the Psalmist that I rejoice in the Lord’s statutes. These are not some burden I am content to bear as a corollary to the benefits of salvation, but a joy, a gift, my happy choice.
Read the full essay at Fare Forward →
Originally published in Fare Forward, 2023-08-19.
Image: Stephanie LeBlanc / Unsplash (as used by Fare Forward)
