I recently found this reflection while looking through my grad school google drive. It is a question that continues to stay with me and feels just as relevant now as it did in the pandemic.
The Eastside trains aren’t running from Brooklyn to Manhattan. I am detoured up the Westside. I dash across avenues to get to the service before the locked doors to the church no longer have someone around who can let me in. Along the way I see the common things of NYC, unhoused people waking from their night of sleeping on the streets. They, like me, seek coffee and need to get their bearings a bit before beginning the day of figuring out how to survive during a global pandemic. I do not linger to help, I must get to a worship service in time to hear my friend to preach, hoping it will support my spiritual life. Seeking guidance for the big questions that I have about inequality and injustice in our world. These words will motivate me to action?! It will be my first time in an in-person worship experience since we all needed to stay home. I have been hungry for this and even though it will be a small group of us, less than ten, I think it will be nice.
After many text messages I emerge into the worship space, a large empty complex of riches, beauty, clean toilets and respite from the heat. I wonder back to those people I passed on my way here. What could be done with this space to support their lives? Isn’t what we do here in this opulent space supposed to matter to what happens outside? Would Jesus be so concerned about being on time or would he have lingered and invited the banker and tourists and unhoused to join him for worship? Just then, I realize that I had forgotten to invite my own mother who would have been happy for the experience. At the end of the service, I left feeling much like I do each time I take a road trip and buy McDonald’s: fed but not satiated.
Fast forward a couple months later and I find myself back in my spiritual home of Vermont. I am there to see my friend give birth. We are 4 days past the due date and there is concern. The birth of the couple’s previous child was pretty harrowing, so we are anxious for a smooth experience. I check online and realize that the Cathedral will be meeting in person this week. I must go to church. As I arrive, I am nervous that they will not remember me, I will not be welcomed. But as I walk up to the outdoor gathering, I am told it is ok that I am not on the list, just write my name down. I am asked if I had been a member of the church – YES! I was a member of this congregation. And I see some familiar faces of the kind of Church folks that remind you why church matters.
The service was simple, the vestments seem made by one of the many good seamstresses of the congregation. A child is running back and forth behind the altar. People have brought their own lawn chairs, I awkwardly place a folding chair sitting near a familiar face with some physical distance. We sing through masks and pray with the modern inclusive texts that bring me comfort. The sermon is equal parts interesting and boring enough to allow my mind to wonder. During the prayers of the people, I speak the name of my friends and their unborn child so that they may have a birth experience where we can feel God’s presence walking with us. At the end of worship, I speak to familiar faces, we check in about vaccination status and comfort levels with hugging and mask wearing and we catch up on each other’s lives. It is fast and perfect. I leave filled with the spirit.
I learn that during the pandemic they have been using their church building as a clinic for BIPOC folks to get access to medical care. Vermont is WHITE. And yet they have figured out how to support their neighbors beyond a sign or a flag that says Black Lives Matter.
I am privileged enough to have these experiences and be the liberal one who says things and does no things. So I ask this question about church because I love opulent buildings and in-person worship, but I also wonder about how our limited notions of church as building, instead of the whole creation, can have us preaching instead of living the gospel.
