The last time I went to church

No, this isn't about "deconstruction," but it is about failing to find a church

The last time I went to church was in late August of last year. It took three different biopsies for the doctors treating me to determine I have breast cancer, and somehow, they were always scheduled on Fridays. My weekends became a blur of edibles, Ativan, and eating nothing but carbs. Weekly church attendance hasn’t been something I can handle for a few years now, but it seemed like a good idea to at least go and pray because, you know, I might die. 

So I took a train and a bus and went to Most Holy Redeemer in the Castro district of San Francisco. If any of that rings a bell, it’s because the Castro is the same Castro where Harvey Milk campaigned and the sidewalk crossings are painted in rainbow colors and yes, there’s a Catholic church there, and yes, it is queer friendly. MHR has a long history of ministering to the gay community. In the 90s, it was ground zero for funerals for the thousands of young people dying from AIDS. To me, it’s the holiest Catholic church in the Bay Area for exactly this reason: the people of MHR have seen suffering to degrees most people can only imagine, the institutional church has spit on them and condemned them for loving one another, and they still find a way to sing gloriously, preach wisely, and do the works of mercy every day. 

It’s a long trip from my house, and I don’t like driving on the freeway or the bridge, so I don’t make it there very often. The churches closest to me are laughably bad at their job, which is, you know, being a church: caring for the marginalized, welcoming the stranger, etc. At one, I heard a priest whose mouth actually began to froth with rage deliver a homily comparing abortion to the holocaust. At another, the priest spoke at hyper speed, clearly trying to get it over with as fast as possible, before disappearing at the end of Mass. At another, the priest died over a decade ago and has never been replaced with a full time priest, so you get the equivalent of a substitute teacher every week. At another, when the priest found out I was a journalist covering Catholicism, he started texting, emailing and calling regularly asking me to write stories about his church, but never asked how I was doing. 

At Holy Redeemer, for the first time since the diagnosis process started, I felt myself slowing down. Looking around at the men of a certain age, there was a profound sense of comfort knowing they understood suffering, understood terror and fear, and were still being transformed by faith. The priest, who I’d only met once before, gave me a hug and spent a good ten minutes chatting without trying to convince me to do anything. When I was studying to become a spiritual director, we talked all the time about consolation – the feeling that God, or what you understand to be God, is actively moving in your life. That’s what I felt, for an hour. That’s what church gave me that day. 

And then on the walk back to the bus and the train and the long trip home, I got distracted, tripped, and fell down hard, smashing my knee on the concrete. The sidewalks in the Bay Area are catastrophic, jutting chunks of concrete every few inches from tectonic plate shifts, tree roots, and plain old neglect. There was, of course, a group of guys sitting in the car curbside smoking weed who got to watch my inelegant tumble to the ground, and one of them asked if I was okay and then said, “you know you’re the third person to trip on that this morning.” Limping into a liquor store, I got a bag of ice and pressed it to my knee on the train ride home. Three days later, the breast clinic called and told me I had cancer. 

Kehinde Wiley, Sancta Maria, Mater Dei. 2016.

***

Over the last three years, I’ve been working on a book about the limits of forgiveness. And in that time, more and more people I know have quit Christianity because they couldn’t forgive the failures of whatever denomination they were a part of. And every Christian denomination has failed in one way or another. You don’t need me to tell you that. 

Deconstruction has turned into a whole brand, and ex Evangelicals in particular are now building very large and even lucrative platforms based on calling out their former faith. But there is sometimes a degree of smugness to people who talk about deconstruction, a sweeping away of the larger complexities of what it means to “belong” to a religion, a denomination, or a church. In their often justified anger at the failings of a church, some Exvangelicals, former Catholics, and other former Christians can tend to paint a picture where every person who attends church is part of a Trumpy, braindead, fascistic lump. I was working on this newsletter when I came across a very thoughtful post from Talique Taylor on this topic of Exvangelicals, and how this attitude also intersects with racism. Highly recommend giving it a read. 

But not every person who leaves a religion becomes an ex. And lots of people who still identify as Christians don’t want any part of Christian Nationalism. Many Christians support the right to abortion and believe in the full thriving of queer people. No, I can’t give you a number here, but I suspect there are more of these kinds of Christians out there than you might think based on the way mainstream media covers religion (if there is a single Trump voter out there who hasn’t yet been profiled by the New York Times, I’m sure a Times reporter is driving into a small town in right now looking for them).

Catholics, too, are far more politically and socially complex than the average news story about a schismatic bishop or teenagers on a bus headed for the March for Life might lead you to believe. And that includes Catholics who don’t belong to a church. In spite of condemnations of people who don’t attend Mass every week from conservative Catholics, there are in fact many cultural Catholics out there who might pop into church once in a while, but prefer to pray largely on their own. Because let’s be honest: Catholic churches are on the whole absolutely terrible at liturgy, preaching, music, welcoming the stranger, and so on. I have been looking for a Catholic church I can feel comfortable regularly attending that doesn’t require me to travel an hour or more for eight years. And I still haven’t found one. 

The Catholics I know who’ve given up on weekly Mass don’t call it “deconstruction,” a term that still throws me as a former English major, but the statistics are pretty obvious and not hard to find (and hey, while we’re here, I wrote a whole book about why people leave religion). People quit the church for very good and obvious reasons. They’ll just keep doing so. In spite of whatever screaming trad on Twitter or in the comboxes of articles will tell you, that is not going to change. Churches either have to accept and deal with their decline or embarrass themselves fighting it to no avail. That’s my professional opinion as someone who’s been writing about religion for fifteen odd years now. 

But as a Catholic? I like the contemplative space of going to Mass even while I vehemently disagree with the church on many, many, many issues. So this isn’t a story of deconstruction. I’m far too weak-willed to cut ties like that. There is only one space in the world where I can go and not worry about work, email, or the million responsibilities that make a nonstop clattering noise in my mind and that is church. 

But once I decided to start writing about the church, once I moved from the back pews and started getting closer to the front, the ugliness started to crowd out the good. When you’re talking to a victim of clergy abuse on the phone in your car while sitting in the parking lot of a pet food store, the next time you look at a priest, you’re going to hear that victim’s voice in your head, even if you know that priest. And to be fair, I am friends with a number of priests who struggle mightily with the church’s history, its failures, and its shortcomings. But they see their role as helping to rectify some of that, to make things better for a few people, to listen to someone who the church has hurt. This is what they have in common with some of us who are journalists on the God beat. 

Personally, though? I may be a writer who covers the church, but I am tired of the rejection I get time after time from churches. Years ago, I showed up at a church to help serve a meal to the homeless, and the woman arranging the plates of cheese and crackers shouted at me, an actual, ear-hurting shout, that I was NOT allowed to fan the crackers out “my way.” I’ve heard that shout over and over again in the years since. Trolls on the internet have made it very clear that I’m everything from demonic to an axe-grinding lesbian (I wish!). But more often, the rejection comes from “nice” liberal Catholics, the same ones who turn up at talks I give asking how to get people to come back to church. 

So many “nice” liberal Catholics wear a Janus face. They want people back in church, but when those people show up (me, for example), they’re always doing something wrong. Maybe these liberal people want women’s ordination, or for gay priests to be able to be out, but, just to choose one story out of many, I had to quit an online Catholic women’s group when they started muttering about “biological” women needing “special” groups of their own. 

I understand that many Catholics got their hopes raised after Vatican II and have spent the decades since ruing the fact that the church didn’t transform in the ways they’d hoped. I’m not old enough to be part of that group, but I have seen that attitude turn into bitterness and cliquishness at parish after parish, and it still consumes many column inches in Catholic media. There is a sense in so many parishes that they are just waiting for the “right” people to show up and save the day, and this can be a slippery slope into homophobia, racism and sexism from people who claim to be against those very things. The hierarchy is rotten, the priests are overworked and miserable, and the people at the bottom are fighting for scraps.

So I stopped going regularly, stopped looking for “my” church where I might “belong,” because getting involved in a church meant risking either being disappointed, being infuriated or being iced out. When I got cancer, the idea of trying to find a priest who might give me the sacrament of the sick seemed fraught with problems: what if he’s read my stuff? What if he disapproves of my not having kids, my non-Catholic spouse, my queer friends and family? What if it doesn’t work and I die anyway? What is the point? 

What is the point? The point is to get closer to God, and when church gets in the way of that for me and millions of other people, who’s to blame? There is just too much noise in my head, too many stories I’ve covered of abuse and ill treatment, too many signs that I don’t belong when I go to church these days, but I’m too invested to quit. Somehow I always find myself going back, because the rituals and the sacraments matter that much. But the church has disappointed me so many times that I can only go as an anonymous blob in the back pews. I miss volunteering, having people who know my name, and being part of a community. But I’ve also seen those same church communities passive aggressively drive away newcomers, become embittered and joyless, and refuse anything that resembles change. These days, I do service outside of church walls and find community there too. I’m a blob in the back rows when I do make it to church, and it’s sad, but it’s also fine. It’s Christianity as survival.

And maybe that’s actually a blessing. After all, you can see more from the back than you can from the front. The other Catholics who have most shown up for me during cancer have been the ones forced to the margins of the church and sometimes out of it: the queer ones, the priests who get arrested at demonstrations, the nuns the church tried and failed to silence, the Christian Anarchists and Catholic Workers, the people who might not go to church every week but will never give up on it altogether because they have the Beatitudes memorized, the people who don’t care if you show up every week either because they love you for trying. I may not be much of a Bible banger, but from what I remember, that’s what Jesus did. He loved people because they tried.