What is Church for?

My wife is Catholic and I am not—not by a long shot.  But since we’ve come back to the US, going to mass with my wife on Sundays is the best way for the two of us to connect, as a couple, with the Korean community.  It also makes the in-laws happy.

As a laissez-faire agnostic, I naturally don’t follow the service very carefully—it helps that the mass is said in Korean—but I do need to do something with the time.  Last Sunday, I found myself questioning whether or not this was perhaps the origin of ‘sitting still and being quiet’ for yours truly.  Upon closer thought, I’ve decided that whether or not I believe in and worship a deity, I do indeed go to church when I go to church.  Or, I can if I choose to attend my own church in the church of others—a church of sitting still and being quiet.

Let me lay it out like this.  Monday through Friday, from about 8:00 am until about 5:00 pm, give or take (actually, it’s from 8:00 am to 9:00 pm on Tuesdays!), my thought must be directed toward my duties as instructor and student.  Graduate school is for sure a full time job and then some.  Saturdays is for chores and errands before anything else.  I might be heard at 8:30 on Saturday morning already reciting my own rosary: “laundry, dishes, wash the car, get a haircut, go shopping for light bulbs…amen.”  So, the joy of attending church, for me, is that from 10:30 until noon on Sundays, my brain can basically do whatever it wants.

I might have done a good deal of begging, complaining, or crying; but through whatever technique of persuasion I won the privilege from my parents, at the age of 9 or 10, to do the following things ever Sunday:

1.     To read a book during church, as long as it stayed on my lap.

2.     To sit by myself in the back of the sanctuary, or even in the balcony seats that were sometimes used as a choir loft.

3.     To leave the service early (after communion, which, being unbaptized, I never received)

Why did I want to do any of these things?  Because, obviously, church was boring.  It wasn’t for me, it wasn’t about me, and nothing about it spoke to me.  At that age, I ‘already’ had it figured out: life lessons, check; institutionalized morality—that makes sense; adults and their coerced children wearing dressy clothes because ‘that’s what you do at church,’ double-check!  The spiritual, recuperative potentials of more general features of the experience, like stillness, meditation, and such, were not at all coherent, let alone compelling.

But in those situations (1-3) above, what was I actually doing?  In fact, all those activities touch what I consider as essential to church anyway—sitting still, being quiet, and reflecting.  So while some people (some of them even Catholic friends of mine!) might wonder why I don’t have issues attending a church to which I don’t belong in any spiritual sense, it makes a lot of sense to me.  And I’m happy to have that time.