What is Church?

But though I liked clergymen as I liked bears, I had as little wish to be in the Church as in the zoo. ~ C.S. Lewis

Most of us probably remember the foundational lessons from our childhood. Phrases like, “children are meant to be seen and not heard, speak when you’re spoken to, and respect your elders.” One of the lessons I was taught early on was, “don’t talk about politics, abortion, or religion.” If you’ve read any of my other papers, you probably realized that some of that foundation has been lost on me as an adult. I talk about politics entirely too much.

My parents divorced when I was very young. My mother wasn’t a religious woman, and we didn’t attend church on a regular basis, although we were Baptized as infants. My father was raised in a church-based family and whenever we spent time at our grandmother’s house, it was expected that we would attend church. For someone who didn’t attend regularly, this was a very uncomfortable experience. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe in God or that I didn’t want to learn, it was that I felt so out of place. Watching my cousins easily navigate through verses in the Bible or quickly find the correct page in the hymnal as I stumbled through them made me feel inadequate.

My husband was raised in the Catholic church and attended Catholic school until high school. He was an altar boy with positive memories of his time in the church, along with some amusing memories of the nuns at his school. While we were dating, we attended several Catholic celebrations. Seeing him cross himself, genuflect, and know exactly what to say in response to what the priest said at the sermons surprised me. How did he remember it all? Once again, I felt out of place and embarrassed that I didn’t know how to conduct myself in those situations. When he rose to receive communion, I stayed behind. It was awkward with people walking past me, staring as though I was some sort of heathen, but I never felt I had earned the right to receive communion. That was a Catholic thing that Catholics did. It wasn’t for me.

While dating, we attended his nephew’s Holy Communion. There was a lot to it, and everyone knew what to do and when to do it. I imagine I looked like something in an old Benny Hill skit – when everyone sat down, I was standing. When they stood, I was sitting. Where was the rule book for this? The Priest attended the after-party and asked me what I thought of the service. I told him that I had kept score and explained that there were five ups, four downs, two kneels, a shake, and a bow. This was in the mid-1990s and I didn’t realize that the Catholic Church was kind enough to create a rulebook titled Posture During Mass. I wish I would’ve known about it before attending that ceremony.

When my husband was asked to be a groomsman for a friend’s Catholic wedding, I panicked. Just the thought of having to do this by myself while he stood at the altar sent me into a cold sweat. It was during the Rehearsal that I learned another Catholic tradition that I was not previously aware of. At the time, I didn’t realize what it was, although I’ve since labeled it “Passing the Peace.” Too bad I didn’t realize that’s what I should call it before it happened. At some point the Priest told us to “Pass the Peace” to those around us. Never having done this before, it wasn’t until my third “Pleased to meet you” that I realized I was doing it wrong. They weren’t saying “Pleased to meet you,” they were saying, “Peace be with you!”

Fortunately, I never burst into flames in church, and even more fortunately, my husband still wanted to marry me, lacking in Catholicism skills as I was. My husband attended St. Bernadette Church in Illinois, and he took me there one day. It was a beautiful church, the kind you see in movies, with stained glass windows and pink marble everywhere. We decided that it was at that church that we would hold our wedding ceremony.

Since I didn’t have a religious background, it seemed only appropriate that I would revert to Catholicism to marry my future husband. There was only one problem. My husband was a sinner in the Catholic church. He had previously gotten divorced. We found that there was a workaround for this terrible sin – he could have his marriage annulled. To me, an annulment was used after a drunken weekend in Vegas, not for someone you had been married to for seven years. This is going back over 30 years so my memory may be a little fuzzy, and things may have changed since that time, but I remember it being explained to us that my husband and his ex-wife would agree that their marriage was a mistake and they never loved each other. That was a ridiculous idea to me. Of course, they loved each other – they were married for nearly a decade! I swallowed my opinion, and we moved forward with our plans. After all, who was I to question the Church.

In a meeting with a representative of the church about what would be expected of us to go forward with the annulment (which I already didn’t agree with), we were told that it could take anywhere from several months to a year before the process would be complete. HOWEVER…there was a way to speed up the process. The speed at which the annulment process could be completed would be dependent on the amount of donations we contributed to the church. Wait….what? First, we were told that my husband would have to admit that he never loved his previous wife, which wasn’t true, and now we were being told that the date of our wedding could be sped up based on how much money we gave to the Church? The concept was incredibly offensive to me, so we decided that we would find a non-denominational church to begin our life together.

We found such a church with a wonderful pastor who we both cared deeply for. He was a gentle, soft spoken man who counseled us prior to our marriage. We were told that there was not a fee to be married at that church, and any donation we could comfortably make would be sufficient. This became our church. It was quite a distance from our home, but we went every week, making connections, learning God’s message. We were married in that church, and two years later our first child was Baptized there. It was shortly after that event that we were told that our Pastor was being moved to another church. We were devastated. Apparently, this is normal, but it came as a surprise to us. We had developed a relationship with this Pastor. It was because of him that we traveled so far from our home every week to attend that church. After he left, we stopped attending. We were both very disappointed.

We moved to a new town a couple of years later and had our second child. Again, we decided it was time to get back to church. We wanted our child baptized so we decided to start attending the local Catholic church. Since we were already married with that annulment business behind us, we again decided that I would become Catholic and would raise our children in the Catholic church. We attended Church every Sunday although I never felt particularly moved by the service. It was very robotic, and the interactions seemed more rote than spiritual. But I persisted. The envelope program bothered me. Every month we received an envelope in the mail that contained the weekly donation envelopes, along with an envelope to pay for the envelope program. The weekly message was more focused on donations than the Bible.

In a telephone conversation with a member of the church, I explained that I was interested in attending catechism classes and the baptism of our second child. I was told that the baptism would take place after a six month review of our contribution to the envelope program. After that period, they would evaluate our donations and inform us whether our child could be baptized in the Catholic church. It felt like the Church was telling us that God would only welcome our child if we were wealthy.

I understand the concept of the tithe, and I understand that the church has expenses, but it always seemed so excessive. It didn’t help that a wealthy family member once had a member of his Catholic church show up at his front door expressing disappointment with his contributions. It also didn’t help that a friend of my husband was an investment advisor whose top customer was the local Archdiocese. The Catholic church was not hurting for money, and rather than helping their parishioners grow spiritually, they seemed to be solely focused on raising money and shaming those who may not have been contributing what they felt was a fair amount.

Swallowing my disgust, I moved forward with the plan to attend catechism classes after the Sunday service. On that first day, the entire sermon was focused on the financial statement of the church and the guilt that the Catholic church uses toward its parishioners. I tried to take a calming breath when copies of the financials were passed out to us, but it was when they handed one to my three year old that I knew I was done. The Catholic church was not for me, or my family.

Many years went by, and we tried different churches in the area around our home. We never felt a connection to any of them. As time went on, our desire to find a church that we felt we could connect with began to wane. We watched televised sermons; I started to read the Bible. For as long as I remember, I’ve felt a connection with God. I speak with him daily. I pray every night. From the day our children were born, they said their prayers before going to sleep. One of them recently sent me this meme which made me laugh because it was so accurate:

I’m interested in learning more about the story of Christ. Not because I’m getting older and suddenly want an admission ticket to Heaven, but because as I’ve grown older, I’ve become increasingly interested in history and understanding the Bible and everything surrounding the story of creation and Jesus Christ. I’m envious of people who were raised in the church and can quote Bible scriptures and know their importance and relevance.

One of the most meaningful parables I’ve ever read is the story of two babies:

In a mother’s womb were two babies.

One asked the other: “Do you believe in life after delivery?”

The other replied, “Why, of course. There has to be something after delivery. Maybe we are here to prepare ourselves for what we will be later.”

“Nonsense,” said the first. “There is no life after delivery. What kind of life would that be.”

Of course, I believe in God.

After many years of not attending church, and after the craziness of 2020, a friend told me about her church. The church offered online services so in January 2021 we decided to check it out to see if it was something we would be interested in. Almost immediately, we loved the church and felt it was what we had been searching for. Although the church was nearby, we remained as online visitors for a couple of weeks. We suffered what we felt was a devastating personal setback the following February. Having just come through the Covid pandemic, our own personal illness, and other personal circumstances, we were lost and devastated. We became hostages in our home and were trying to adjust to a new life that had been forced upon us.

While in the shower one day I felt an overwhelming feeling of a message delivered to me. I’ve never felt anything like it before or since. It was at that moment that I felt I received a message from God. I couldn’t explain it any other way. Running downstairs, I went to my husband and told him that I felt I had been given a message that we were supposed to move. After 21 years in the same house, and a lifetime in Illinois, the message was that we were to move to Texas to be near our children who had relocated there two years earlier.

Within months, we packed our house and moved to Texas. The Sunday before our big move, we attended the in-person service at the church, and I was moved to tears. Through the shock of an unexpected lifestyle change, the grief of dealing with a new life, packing our house, relocating to another state, and two years of living in Texas we never once missed a Sunday online service with our church. It was something we looked forward to every week. We clung to those services like a lifeline, because they were. More times than not we would watch the message and feel it was delivered directly to us. They were speaking to us. It was uncanny.

Since we were now living in Texas, where the weather goes from hot to hotter to Hell, it was nice to watch the people in church reflect the season changes. From sundresses to light sweaters to big, beefy sweaters, we could connect with the church through the weather from the home we had always known. The pastors in the church switch off and although we loved them all, we had our favorites. My husband followed along on the chat and would check in with the online church community to let them know we were there. We were strangers in a strange land but felt part of a community in a Church over a thousand miles away. We were learning the Bible and the story of Christ.

One Sunday morning as we sat down to watch, we noticed that the service had been pre-recorded. Since this was out of the ordinary, my husband sent a message through the Chat, and we were told that “this was the new normal.” We were stunned. My husband has more of a personal connection to the members of the church than I do so he sent a message expressing our disappointment. The lead pastor at the church arranged a meeting with us. We were grateful. We were going to be able to express our disappointment and hopefully get back to our church.

Unfortunately, that didn’t happen. Instead, we were told that the online church would become a message that was recorded 10 days earlier. They were trying to perfect the audio and visual quality of the message so that it could be presented to the newly created prison ministry. We had lived through the occasional technology issues that popped up during the weekly service, but we dealt with them. We understood the “come as you are” message and believed that we are all imperfect sinners. We couldn’t give the Church perfection, and we weren’t expecting perfection from them.

The following Sunday we sat down and watched the recording. It wasn’t church. There was no talk of the weather outside, there was no one else in the room with the pastor. It was a recording. During the week, the church posted video clips on their Facebook page of the previous Sunday service. This did not align with the recorded message. The person on the Facebook videos was not the same person speaking in the recorded message. We were watching a pre-recorded video. There is no message in that.

Ironically, during one of the newly recorded sermons, the pastor spoke of his love of sports. He likes to record his favorite sports games. It’s important that no one talk to him about who won the game or what the final score was prior to his watching the game. If he knows the outcome of the game, he doesn’t watch the recording. He didn’t catch the irony of what he was saying – a live performance is different – better – than a recording.

The most disappointing part of our call with the pastor was when he explained that they had seen a church in another community increase their following significantly by perfecting their recording. Now it made sense. As a family member once said to me…church is a business.

That phone call happened months ago. We haven’t attended church since.

I’ve learned a lot in my quest to find a spiritual path. The only source I can rely on is God and my relationship with Him. It is a personal relationship. I’ve been let down by every church I’ve ever attended.

My relationship with God is a personal one, whether that’s right or wrong. My life has been deeply blessed. I’m not sure what I’ve done to deserve the life that I have but I am profoundly grateful. I thank God every day for the blessings he’s given me, and I know when His hand is working in my life. It’s my choice to learn more about the Bible and the history of Christ. I’m still learning daily, and I’m doing my best to live a life that would make Him proud.

Since I’m nearing retirement, my goal is to read more to help myself grow in my relationship with Christ. I can’t rely on others – on businesses – to guide me. I’m not completely giving up on finding a good church home, but as I’ve had to do many times before, I’m going to take a little time to overcome the hurt.

Peace be with you…and also, pleased to meet you!