I was in love with God, in love with Jesus, in love with church. With a church—but I thought the life I’d found there was everywhere. Love one church, love them all, that was what I told myself.
I was a stay-at-home Mom. To earn some money I toiled over self-help manuscripts with a red pencil while the kids were in school. I was lonely in every part of my messed-up life except church, and so I spent every moment I could there. I was temperamental: impulsive, sad, passionate, insensitive. I knew I probably wasn’t pastor material. But I was in love with church.
I took it slow in seminary, a couple of courses at a time. I loved my studies. I was immersed, voracious. It took me 7 years to get all the way through. But finally, on the first Sunday of Advent 2005, I stood before my very own congregation—a church of about 25 souls, mostly elderly, in a run-down neighborhood in an isolated little town.
I looked out into their eyes, took a deep breath, and began telling them everything I thought I knew about the love of God.
I had no clue about the good people I was there to serve. I had never lived in that kind of a town. But I knew why I was there. I was there to love those 25 people and to help breathe new life into their church, so that 25 would grow to 40, and 40 to a hundred, and…!
And I did love them dearly. But there was no saving our little church. We were too small, too tired, too frail, and too lacking in imagination about how to engage the world. Neither did the town (mostly Catholic) take any interest in us. After 5 years, we held a meeting and decided it was time to close. There was no one to take over from the elders, no one to take on the work.
Some of our members had been attending that church their whole lives. They had been married there, had walked their own kids down the aisle there, had said goodbye to people they loved from those same pews. For them, Union Congregational Church was synonymous with God—so synonymous that a few weeks ago when I spoke about God to my ailing mother-in-law, formerly my parishioner, without thinking she blurted out: “I miss God.”
That’s what she said. “I miss God.”
When I think of the Saturdays I spent wrestling over my sermons…
The day I mailed the last of our church dissolution paperwork to the Attorney General’s office was the day the wilderness finally closed around me. I had stepped into it when I left my old home church in Cambridge. I’d fended it off as best I could, but now it claimed me. What in God’s name did we think we were doing? What was church for? Who the hell cared what we did inside our buildings besides us? What was the point of any of it?
We were all so busy being church, and all around us was a world that couldn’t care less.
It was strange, but I felt more a part of that world than the other.
That was 3 years ago. A lot has happened since. I’m back at the church I started in. But I’m one foot in and one foot out; one foot in church, one in the world. I’m not sure where I belong any more. It’s like when you grow up someplace and then you move away for a while, and for the rest of your life you never feel quite at home in either place. When I’m in church, I’m thinking about the world and its problems. And when I’m in the world, I feel like a little dislocated piece of church. Harvard Square isn’t exactly a haven for my kind of spirituality. Even the people who panhandle there prefer that you not bring up Jesus.
Either way, I miss God.