I Didn't Make It To Church This Morning
Let us draw near to God with a sincere heart and with the full assurance that faith brings, having our hearts sprinkled to cleanse us from a guilty conscience. - Hebrews 10:22
Today we’re having an extended reading about finding sacredness outside of Sunday worship - and in it as well. This is longer than usual, but it seemed helpful to do some deeper thinking around the guilt that so many of us associate with following Christ in a Christian community. So take it at your leisure and see where you meet Jesus in it.
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“I didn’t make it to church this morning.”
This was something I have said quite a bit—and not just in college, when every Saturday night I was up too late for no good reason (though once in a while for a relatively good reason). I said it the most after we had children and moved to Bloomington. Regularly. Habitually. Each Sunday, I would wake up with so very many good intentions. The night before, as I drifted off to sleep, plans for the morning would have flitted through my mind: wake up before anyone else gets up, to squeeze in a shower and smell nice; make sure the babies eat breakfast and take a nap before church; clean the kitchen and start lunch.
I know, I know, the road to hell. . . . Anyway, I excelled at dreaming up plans like this for the babies. It turns out that that road is really soft and quiet, actually, and it beckons to me in the form of a couch and the warm sun streaming in from the window next to it. The babies went down for their nap. And so did I.
I was overcome with guilt. As a disciple of Jesus, then a pastor, and now a mother, responsible for the soul care of these babies, how could I miss church? (I know, I’m being overly dramatic.)
I struggled, and still do sometimes—with so many others, not only parents, but people in many walks and seasons of life—with how and what it means to be a part of church, the body of Christ, the beloved community, in loving relationship with God and others. For some, the struggle with church was not a choice, and I recognize the ways that many are shut out for reasons around their gender and sexuality. I’ve felt that same rejection, too.
For me, however, the struggle was not only about conforming in a certain way to fit in on Sunday mornings but also about what it means to walk the walk and talk the talk in all aspects of life. I’ve tended to think that my connection to God needed to be enacted in a certain way, like a checklist: church, Bible studies, choir practice, Sunday school, quiet times. But then I read a blog post from Penny Carothers that challenged this sense of obligation and offered the possibility of “the sanctification of the ordinary”:
[Medievalist scholar Elizabeth Dreyer’s idea that parenting is fertile ground for spirituality] has got me thinking: what if there really is a different way? What if God intended the hug of a child to mirror the numinous moment others achieve through meditation? What if attending to the needs and the play of children—really attending, not reading the news on my phone or folding laundry while I listen with half an ear—was a window into the spiritual? What if all I really needed to do was simply be present? After all, God calls himself a lover and a parent, and perhaps there is something to learn in embracing my life rather than trying to escape it so I can have real communion with God.
This changed my life. It’s still a little shocking to me, even today, that perhaps the most spiritual, even worshipful thing I can do is embrace my life as a mother. And I don’t mean a platonically ideal mother, but a snot-wiping, baby-chasing, diaper-bag-toting mother, embracing the ordinary and everyday as a sacred act. Because our faith and identity aren’t cultivated only by formal Bible studies, centering prayer, or the lectio divina (a traditional Benedictine way to read, pray, and meditate on Scripture slowly and intentionally), though these are good and wonderful. Rather, sometimes it’s the simple “help!” and “thank you” that build any relationship, whether with God or with children or spouse. It’s that simple.
All this meant that I didn’t feel pressure to drag the twins and myself to church if it just didn’t work out, and it would be all right. Lightning would not strike us from above. So most Sundays, we’d stay home, in our pajamas, and I tried to put on some classical music for a little bit. The babies and I listened to their Pap’s sermons from previous Sundays on my iPhone. We banged rattles and cars. I sang “Spirit of the Living God” to them. We got out all the kitchen paraphernalia. I threw them up in the air a few times, just to hear them squeal and laugh. I played some hymns on the piano. We had crackers and juice, and then we ate lunch.
It felt good, but in the end, it wasn’t church—not exactly. Though I felt moved and loved in the moment, and there was something inexpressibly spiritual happening those mornings, I was missing something. There simply is no substitute for gathering with the communion of saints each week, even if it doesn’t look like traditional church or the church of my childhood. In fact, many Christian communities do life together in unconventional ways. For example, there are the intentional Catholic Worker groups, where families buy a cluster of homes and truly share life together with weekly meals, meetings, and extending hospitality to the neighborhood, especially those in need. Some churches meet in coffee houses, movie theaters, community gardens, and bars. Some take a complete Sabbath at least one Sunday a month and worship on Saturdays, or they meet during the week or once a month, or online, or in video chats. All these out-of-the-box expressions of church demonstrate both that the core of church is ekklesia being constantly called out, and that we also need to be called in, called to community, to be among our people regularly.
People do church today in ways that are less and less distinct from “secular” culture—that is, the rest of society, the stuff of the ordinary, everyday, mundane, regular spaces, actions, and gestures that fill our lives. The challenge is to carve out numerous spaces that allow for all these expressions of church—whether it’s Sunday mornings at home with a podcast and piano, Thursday-night potlucks and a hymn sing, or sharing in the Eucharist at a dinner church service on a Sunday evening with a group of rowdy college students.
While it’s hard for me not to think of church as only what happens on Sundays, specifically worship, I wonder if we’ve closeted the potential for living out that belovedness God intended not only for the body of Christ but for the whole human community at large. By lifting up the importance and necessity of church, we’ve constrained and forgotten how we are called to live in our neighborhoods day in and day out, in relationship with all the categories of people in our lives—acquaintances, strangers, colleagues, peers, and friends.
A queer spirituality dissolves those boundaries, and queering church means throwing open those doors and breaking down those walls, especially when it comes to participating in community life—the way we gather together, the way we worship, the spaces we find ourselves in. Queering church means queering our faith lives, too, and those boundaries and legalistic expectations to check off the religious to-do list. Queerness opens us to a more thoughtful and meaningful perspective, a willingness to see the possibility in what is different: all the different seasons and struggles, abilities, multiplicities, and convictions of each individual. There isn’t one way to show up. And when we do show up, we don’t have to be functioning at the same level or pitch. There’s room for everyone’s needs. There’s room for everyone’s gifts. There’s room for everyone’s spiritual practices. There’s room for everyone’s visions. There’s room for everyone’s doubt. There’s room for everyone’s complexities. There’s room for everyone.
- Mihee Kim-Kort, Outside the Lines: How Embracing Queerness Will Transform Your Faith