Not Necessarily Holy

I can honestly say I didn’t feel like going to church this morning. I didn’t feel like not going per se, I just didn’t feel the usual driving urge to get there. I didn’t sleep well last night -- again. There have been too many moving parts in my life lately, none of which I’ve had a moment to stop and consider – all seem to wash over me, as if I were floating in the surf, holding my breath, waiting for the next chance to inhale. Exhale.

So truth? The only reason I got to church was out of habit. The only reason I was a half hour early for the early service was some latent desire for punctuality (I’m often enough late). I got there first, beating Patricia into the empty parking lot and the dark building by a nose. I turned on lights in the parish hall and around, cranked up the coffee and unlocked the back door. I had just sat down with a cup, looking out over the little garden with the St. Francis and the copper water buckets that catch the rain from the roof when Patricia walked in.

“Why so early?” she said.

“Accident. I got here early so I wouldn’t be late,” I told her, and then as an afterthought, “I sure hope I’m not VOD today.” Of course, Susan, our church secretary always sends us reminders during the week when we’re the vestry on duty (VOD isn’t an incurable disease). “I would of heard,” I said.

“Not necessarily. Susan was sick all last week,” Patricia informed me. I followed her to the sanctuary and sure enough, printed on the back of a two-week old bulletin, there was my name. I would have seen the bulletin last week of course, if I hadn’t been out of town on a work trip. Being VOD, means opening and closing the church. It means making sure the scheduled acolytes and layreaders are acolyting and layreading. It means reminding folks it’s their turn to do coffee.

So I settled into the early service, resolved in my duty. But other than the reading about if your eye offends you, gouge it out (which never fails to irritate me) and the Eucharist (which never fails to remind me of some tangible connection to God), I have to say, I sat there, going through the motions, hearing the sermon but not being engaged with it, saying the confession of sins (given my long list, this is usually one of my best opportunities of the week to get it all out—at least mentally, during the “Most merciful father, we have sinned against you in thought, word, and deed . . .”) but not feeling all that sorry or contrite. Even the prayer after communion, one of my very favorites, “Eternal God, heavenly father, we thank you for feeding us with the spiritual food in the sacrament of the most precious body and blood of your son, our savior Jesus Christ . . .” didn’t move me any more than a Hallmark card. It was all lost on me, all wasted.

I sat through Sunday School, the series on Saving Jesus. Today was the meaning of the parables like the leavened bread and the mustard seed. We always stray from the original topic anyway. Someone said the problem with the church was Paul, who didn’t quote a single Jesus parable. The church as an institution, we all agreed, as we always do, has its issues—like the gouge out your eye thing or like the Catholic church where you can’t take communion if you’re divorced unless the marriage is annulled (a few of us were standing around the kitchen before Sunday School actually contemplating that one)—and you can annul a marriage even if you have children, a strange practice for a house of God, I have to say.

Now normally, I would probably enjoy spending a little time hashing over the wherefores and whys of all that imperfection that comes with the institution we call our church. But I didn’t.

After the regular service, when all the choir robes were hung, I’d counted the collection and watched Betty Whittier crumble up the leftover communion bread and put it out the back door for the birds, after everyone had gone but Rick and Christine Beard (who did have coffee duty marked on their calendar), I headed to the kitchen to help with the remaining coffee cups.

The Beards make me smile. Rick told an off-color joke about Easter, which made Patricia grimace while I laughed out loud (ask Rick, when Patricia’s not around). Christine put forth a very fun question: Who all at St. Dunstan’s is “naturally holy”? Well none of us nominated ourselves or each other for that matter, and in the end agreed that even sinners like us had a chance to be holy once in a while.

But for me, this morning wasn’t my morning to be holy. I wasn’t particularly moved to be at church. It’s just that’s where my economy-sized car is trained to go Sunday morning—it really just didn’t occur to me not to go. What did come into my mind though, was the fact that I am so grateful for our imperfect institution, our church, our parish, the habit that brought me to our modest but close-knit community, to spend those unwanted—too tired and too confused hours—among people I love and whom I think love me back.

And maybe that’s all that Jesus would have cared about—that we get together in the first place and find the Kingdom of God is not a small self-contained space in front of our computer screen and it isn’t always earth-shaking revelations or earnest attempts to become better than we are. Sometimes maybe the Kingdom of God is just about showing up. Or, as Patricia said in the sermon, about choosing life. Maybe I did hear something after all.