Thoughts on Church and What We're Supposed to Be

I didn’t go to church this week. I ended up worshipping at the Church of the Holy Comforter, as my friend calls it, otherwise known as “accidentally sleeping in because you’ve had an exhausting week and got off work after midnight and forgot to set an alarm.” It was great. 

And you know, I made it through the week just fine. I’m not here to tell you that there’s a mystical recharging of the spiritual batteries every week when you attend service and I’m not here to tell you that God, like a petty, jealous significant other, is going to be upset with you when you miss your designated time to hang out with God and God’s family. Prior planning and a high comfort level with your current circumstances are going to carry you through the regular late spring days on a gentle breeze. In many ways and in the most profound of senses, you’ll be okay if you miss church. Plenty of you have been doing it for years and you’re still doing well.

But I will tell you what I did miss. I missed the chance to make music for free with people I enjoy being around. I missed the opportunity to see people across generations who I like checking in with and who support me in everything I do and through any season of my life. I missed a typically thoughtful lesson on something I care deeply about, Christianity and its life in the world. I missed my weekly reset, the time I take to remind myself that I hope for something bigger and better than anything I can do or make to come into this world.

More than anything else, going to church every week grounds me. It keeps me tied to a world outside my job and my home and my pop culture intake. Twitter might update me with news around the nation and around the world, but that’s always something happening somewhere else. It’s news being told to me in 140 characters or less, a brevity that can typically only draw me in with complete honesty or sensationalism. And still, it’s a story that I read. But going to church is different. I meet people who have different walks in life than I do, different struggles, different victories, and different metrics for both. I meet people who share their stories, the minutiae of their daily lives, and it opens up places in my community for me to see and feel and hear and do. Being there with other people forces me to go outside of myself, which is key for me, a person whose inner monologue is more than enough to keep me company. 

And there’s this thing that ties us all together, though each person sees it to a different degree. We all agreed to be here to follow, as best we can, the teachings of a man who died because he was trying to overthrow the damaging religious elite of his time, who told us to care for the poor and the orphans and the least of these, who told us to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us, who flipped over tables in the face of a system that was separating people from their hope for better times. We all came here to be a part of a movement that is supposed to be this man’s body on the earth, now that he doesn’t have one here, to continue his good works for him. We’re supposed to be this wonderful thing, the greater fool who sits here investing in the earth and its people because we think it’ll be better down the line, that with help, we can choose to make the sacrifices that will make this place a good place for our children and our children’s children to live. There is strength and desperate hopefulness implied in what we choose to believe and somewhere in our Sunday, we all catch a glimpse of that, no matter how tiny the sliver of light is for any given person.

Or that’s what it should be, anyway. I know that church isn’t that for most people. I know that church isn’t always that for anybody. I know that this world can drag us down and make us forget what could be driving us. I know that people can be just the worst thing that ever existed and I know they can break your heart or, even better, slowly wear it down until you don’t know what this shriveled fig is in your chest, but you’re certain you just misplaced your real heart somewhere else. I know that people can ruin lives. I know that churches, built of people, have ruined lives. I hate all of that with a fury fueled by a well of deep sadness about our brokenness. The world is a rough place with injuries that aren’t going to be healed with WWJD bandaids. If the church is going to be any kind of useful, we have to be better than that. 

I just saw Tomorrowland and I’m not going to spoil any of the plot, but at one point, one of the characters is describing what could be and why we find certain things so appealing. It’s because it’s “a future that expects nothing from you.” Oh, let’s be better than that. Let’s allow some expectations to be placed upon us and let’s meet them. Let’s work. Let’s grow the goodness to be found in the world and stifle out the bad. Let’s be better.

I’ll set my alarm on Sunday. 

How Things Have Been Done

When I was a young one in youth group, there were all these high school kids who seemed like whatever the early 2000’s version of the bees’ knees was. Probably something along the lines of, “Just the coolest.” The adults loved them, they walked naturally into leadership roles, and they all hung out together. They were this picture perfect group, the kind that you send to conferences as a representation of your youth group or send to interviews as a positive sampling of your youth choir. I guess they were the popular kids, just like any group has popular kids. To me, at the time, it just seemed that this was How Things Were Done, and you didn’t question How Things Were Done. 

Some year, I was probably in 8th or 9th grade, there was a meeting of youth choir directors at my church, and they had a kind of panel with some kids from our youth choir. It’s beyond me to say what the purpose of the panel was- maybe they wanted to hear what we liked or disliked about our choir and then take those insights and questions back to their own choir? Who knows. But I remember making a comment about how we had had these older kids who seemed like rock stars to me and how, after they graduated, we didn’t have that anymore (it was a transitional year), and how that was a tragedy of sorts. In response, one of the choir directors told a story, as adults who speak to children and teenagers are wont to do, about how when some of those strong voices graduated from his choir, the choir as a whole actually got better. It turns out that those strong voices had been singing flat.

As a Christian, I live and die by understanding the hidden meanings behind parables, so of course Middle or early High School Me would have read the meaning behind that statement. It was probably maybe about working better as a group even though the leaders had gone and finding new leaders or something. But, in fine Christian tradition, I misunderstood the parable, at least at first. It never occurred to me when I was a kid that the older popular kids could have ever been at fault. I  completely missed that bit of the story, the part with the flatness. 

Now, on the flip side of history, looking at that weird mess that is teenage life from the adult side, I see the same things happening. But now I have the problem of liking the popular kids. I weirdly seek their approval. This is something I completely don’t understand because it’s the opposite of what I would have done in the past. When I was growing up, I couldn’t have consciously cared less about what someone else thought about me, other than grown-ups. I was too busy reading or practicing or helping out adults to be worried about what people my own age thought. I got called an old soul and I want to claim that title, but I don’t know that I deserve it. I think I was just a focused soul, one that couldn’t be bothered with people her own age. 

But then I got to college and post-college and suddenly the people my age were people whose approval I wanted. I wanted friends who liked me and I wanted strangers to walk away with a positive impression of me and I wanted to excel at work because money and resumes and the future, and also, I want people to like me. I started to think more about how other people perceived me and how I measured up to others. And, as the story always goes, I started to see how much I fell short in those comparisons. 

That’s a shame, because I like the person I’ve become, with the exception of a few items that have left room for improvement. (I promise, Body, we’re going to start jogging again and taking multi-vitamins. Stop whining so much.) I have friends who like me. I have friends among the kids at youth group who like me. We’ve found the weird things that make us awesome and just embraced that. Given the option, of course I’d hang around with these kids.

And I want to tell them to say, “Screw it, I don’t need you anyway,” when the popular kids come around, but I also know that the popular kids have the ears of the adults. The popular kids are in positions of leadership. The popular kids can sway the direction of the group. If the popular kids don’t like you, even if they aren't vocal about it, you’re left to fend for yourself and that’s hard in teenage-land. The problem here is not with my wonderful little weirdos who’d be friends with anyone who walked their way with a smile on their face, it’s with the popular kids who know they can pick and choose and that others watch their picking and choosing. It's that they don't choose to wield that power for good. 

This is not new territory. These are not new stories to be told. We all went through this. My question, though, is why do we continue to go through this? Why do we, as adults, who know that this tiered structure of high school is happening, do nothing to stop its perpetuation? Is it because we know that the rest of their lives are going to be lived out in some semblance of a popularity contest? Or are we just too apathetic or self-absorbed or afraid to step in and make any real changes? 

I suppose it’s all a little revolutionary, telling everyone they’re equal even if they’re quiet or too loud or don’t know what to say when they meet someone or say the most awkward thing possible or don’t know how to connect with others. It must be really outside of the box to give a person value despite a lack of social skills. We are, after all, social creatures. It’s our default state to value those who can navigate the social waters with perfection. 

Only… can I ask you one thing? This week, this month, this year, use the energy you have to choose once, just once, to do something other than default. Get past that devaluing you want to do. Invest in someone, and not just someone you like. The world will be a better place if we do that. If we all do that.

Stories From the Bells

So I rolled up to handbells last night figuring there would be at least one person absent because there’s always one person absent. We always need a sub and typically that sub is me. Well, has been me for the past few years, as my job has really limited me from being available for bells of late, so the life of a sub it is. But at yesterday's rehearsal, when there wasn’t a place for me to be, I realized I was that person. I was still here in this college town despite having graduated four years ago. I was old. I didn't belong. I hadn’t really ever felt that way before.

I started playing handbells my freshman year of college. I mean, I had played as much handbells as you played in elementary school as a church choir kid (we’re a specific and special breed) and I can read music, but I wasn’t a part of a bell choir until freshman year. I had a campus minister ask me what that was all about. “I mean, you just don’t hear of many people going to college and joining a bell choir.” And if I had been the person I am today, I would have told him that the world would be a better place if you did, but at the time, the question stumped me. I had a straightforward answer: the chancel choir, who sang on Sundays, met on Thursdays and that conflicted frequently with marching band. I couldn’t give up band, but I could replace choir and that’s what I did. 

I didn’t realize that I was just trying to fill my college schedule the way my high school schedule had been filled because I didn’t realize that my college schedule would be under so much more academic strain than my high school schedule. But as other activities fell to the side when the physics major started heating up, I kept up with bell choir. It was a fun thing, an hour or so of my week where I interacted with people outside of my age group who weren’t trying to teach me something, tying me to the bigger group of the church proper.

I don’t know if all church bell choirs are like this, but our choir is full of the fastest wits and the most intentionally sassy women I know. They crack jokes about songs and composers and how there’s no way we could play any of this and after all that, they pull off songs with aplomb. They’re also some of the sweetest and most supportive people I know- for years, one of the members of the bell choir let me stay at her house so I could play at the Moravian Love Feast every December after the dorms had closed. So bell choir practice in and of itself is usually a party and a half. 

Take today for example. Today, as we were waiting for the other member of the bass bells pair to show up, one of the trebles made the announcement that she and her husband (the present bass bells player) were going to have a baby, which was accompanied by the typical shouts and squeals and smiles and questions, and then followed by jokes about why she’d make that announcement without the other bass bell player there. Then he arrived, about five minutes late,  and the father-to-be held up a pencil and said, “I came prepared for bells tonight! Also, we’re having a baby!” And the newly arrived bass player said, “You brought a pencil?!”

Which, yes, cheesy music situational joke, but I love it. I love hanging out with these people. It’s why I found myself on a warm April evening sweating in the choir director’s office, windows open, wondering to which committee one has to submit a request in order to get a fan installed and when they meet. Despite the heat, it’s a comfortable place. Like so many other parts of church, this is home. This is a constant in a university community where so many things change every four years. 

I’ve been ready to go. Just, the most ready to be somewhere else, doing something new. But this is something I’ll miss deeply and it’s tempting to hang on to that kind of thing for all it’s worth. I know there are things I won't want to leave. In my last few days in town, I’ll walk campus and take an Old Well picture and a bell tower picture and think about all the mornings walking half an hour up to class from Hinton James North or Rams Five. I’ll run an eye over the libraries and the pit and my junior year dorm and take that last opportunity to glory in the loveliness of this place. And after that, I’ll be able to let those things go.

But these people, these groups, I’m not ready to leave that. Which is good, you know, it shows that there’s something worth staying for and that I’m not just running. One of the podcasts I listen to takes question suggestions and mine was, “How long do you have to live in a place to be able to say you’re from that place?” and they tweeted back, “It depends on how much you hate where you’re from.” I loved that.

I’m not from Chapel Hill. I don’t think I’d ever be able to say that I’m from Chapel Hill,  not if I stayed five or six or ten years from now, even. Not that I’m ready to run back to Caldwell County (hi, family, I love you!), but this, this was not going to be a place that I was from. It’s good to see that. It’s good to know that. Ultimately, it’s gonna be good to leave that. 

Just not yet.