Sundays in the City #8
“Let me keep company always with those who say, “Look!” and laugh in astonishment, and bow their heads.”
– Mary Oliver
If you asked me, as my close friends have done, “which church was most impactful?” on this pilgrimage of Sundays, I’d be hard pressed to name just one. It turns out that showing up to worship among strangers was an unexpected uncovering of the strangeness of my own heart. Only a few weeks in, it became crushingly apparent that over decades of sharing a customary liturgy among familiar faces I had come to believe that my subconscious biases were far enough abated and my spiritual underpinnings sufficiently robust to satisfy anyone out there who might be inclined to grade me.
I suspect this is both my own fault and the fault of an institution set on “defensing” itself against the increasing criticisms of waning relevance and its complicities in self-protection. Two particular battles not lost on this mid-century girl. What is midlife if not the stuck-open door to the revelation that ongoing relevance will always be intrinsically tied to vulnerability? So maybe that is why it seems to me that the protestant church in America has hit its own mid-life crisis. A spiritual and cultural “tipping point”, if you will, wherein loyalty to the spirit of the law might well involve breaking the letter of it. We have spent over 500 years assembling dutifully under the banner of reformation to the point of indulging it as the more affable cousin to the Jesus styled, cross bearing, and utterly stunning work of reconciliation.
When I read again the copious notes and quotes scribbled next to the names of 52 churches that graciously offered me welcome, there are five marked out as altars of remembrance for me. Places where in the span of an hour or two, as my friend Melissa says, “God came near”: A specific plot of ground where my own limited perspective was challenged by the boundless imaginations of Christ and the spiritual insight and practices of strangers. I suppose perspective is as good a place as any for transformation to begin.
Perspective is the “momentary culmination” of the ever evolving unfolding of truth. Made up of equal parts observation, experience and the passage of time, perspective is axiomatically fluid regardless of our human preponderance to defend it as a solid. While then, perspective is both formed and limited by its singularity of origin, it in turn, finds its flourish; its deepest virtue within a diverse community committed to humble curiosity and tenacious calm. Is it not historically evident that perspectives held in solitary confinement, or worse, gathered into villages (or dare I say denominations) of sameness, may for a time build large their “houses of consolation” only later to discover its foundation was built upon the proverbial sands? If the gospels say anything, do they not invite a spiritual unity miraculously birthed of discomforting diversity?
Perspective is a raw and malleable substance brought by one, to the long table of others; laden with plates of suffering, deliverance, want and plenty. Only after the hands of the many have stirred and spun, grasped and pulled, sweetened and diluted my meager offering, will its nourishment come to be known as satisfying. And on taking my leave, it will be known as both mine and beyond mine.
That is the best way I know to describe to you what was graciously gifted to me at those five places made sacred over the life and limits of 52 weeks. My sand castles laid bare; my hope made new…a simultaneous sunset and sunrise neither of my own making – neither for my own keeping.
