Three thousand, four hundred and thirty three words about a great loss and Church.
N.B.: I wrote this on Sunday, but I delayed posting it until now because I didn’t want anyone from the MacEwan crew to find this before they’d been told about its contents in person. I think the timing will be okay now, though; at least, I hope so. I apologise in advance if this entry feels like a nine-foot Steinway falling on your head. Call me if you need to.
Well. These last few days have been insanely crazy for me, and even more so for some other people close to me. To use a crude expression, a really big piece of shit hit the fan last week back home in Edmonton. My best friend Misha’s brother, Ross, committed suicide.
I don’t even really know how to start writing about it. To be perfectly honest, I didn’t know Ross very well. I’ve hung out with him a few times. I knew about him mostly through what Misha told me. Right now, my thoughts are mostly of concern for her and for her family, and the hope that they’ll eventually be okay in the wake of this tragedy. For myself, I don’t really know what I’m supposed to feel, so I alternate between feeling nothing, and feeling guilty about feeling nothing; and feeling a lot, and feeling guilty for feeling that, too. Am I supposed to make sure my feelings aren’t as strong as those of the people who were closer to Ross? Am I supposed to feel more because I’m so close to Misha? Am I supposed to be able to function in a social situation? Am I supposed to not be able to? Am I supposed to answer “Oh, I’m fine, how are you?” when someone asks me how I am? These are questions that have come up in my head countless times since Thursday, when Misha called to tell me about Ross, and I’m not really any closer to being able to answer them.
This is kind of a big deal for me, too, in that I haven’t known anyone before who has died. When I was ten, my Grandpa Craig passed away, but I was ten, and I didn’t really have a deep relationship with him. And he was old. Old people are supposed to die. Young people aren’t; we’re supposed to get old first. That’s kind of how this world works. Ross was only a little older than me. In a few years, I probably would have been doing similar kinds of work to what he was doing, only in a different section of the arts, of course. He was a media guy; I’m a musician. It’s just so very strange to think that he’s not going to get older and complete the cycle of life, and that we’re all going to pass by his age and grow older than him and complete whatever it is that we each individually think we’re here to do on earth, and he’s just not.
And so, I don’t know what to feel, whether to feel, or how to feel what I feel if I should indeed be feeling, and I’ve been trying to keep my mind off it by doing other things. I went to what should have been the best jazz concert I have ever seen or ever will see, but my brain couldn’t process much of anything that went on. I went to some free outdoor concerts with some friends, but I had to leave halfway through because I couldn’t pretend to be okay any longer. I’ve been trying to transcribe, but that’s work that demands a lot of brain power and concentration that I just couldn’t give to it. Copying charts has been okay; it’s mindless. Playing the piano has been okay - not practicing, that demands brain power too - but just playing tunes I know and tunes I’ve written and tunes I like has been a comfort.
My roommates have been wonderful to me during these past few days. Josh has been full of hugs, Jackie has been full of compassion, Pete has been full of sympathy, Ben has been full of insight, and Kael has been making pizza for me when I thought I’d probably burn the house down if I tried to cook. (Jordan has been out of town, for those of you who were counting.) Friday night, Jackie had borrowed her friend’s car, and we took it out and picked flowers that poked through fences and spilled out into the sidewalk. We drove through Lower Allston and Cambridgeport, listening to Martin Sexton, to find the nicest flowers that weren’t still technically in people’s gardens, and made a few bouquets to put all throughout our house. Mindless. A beautiful distraction, if only for an hour.
Last night, Saturday, I went to see the movie Into The Wild with Ben. One doesn’t have to be socially interactive with a movie. I wasn’t faced with the choice of lying or bringing down the party, because the movie wasn’t going to ask me how I was doing. Fabulous. The movie was a true story about a guy who, after graduating college, gave his life savings of $24,000 to Oxfam, and hitchhiked across the United States doing odd jobs and searching for spirituality and truth. It was a great film. Afterwards, Ben and I went for beer and greasy burgers at this little restaurant in Harvard Square, and talked about a lot of things. Our house, Boston, the musical tastes of our roommates, his teaching job, my adventures at Berklee, beers we like. We also talked about spirituality, religiosity, and how they relate to the movie, and to how I’m dealing with what happened. Talking with some people about all matters religious or spiritual is sometimes pretty stressful, depending on whom it is you’re talking with. It’s a conversation that most people avoid. Talking with Ben about it, though, was wonderful. All people go through phases of intense religiosity and phases of strident atheism at some point in our lives, and especially as twenty-somethings, we think we’re completely alone and unique in that struggle of faith. We’re totally not. We’re all the same, every single one of us. We all angst about the same things (yes, I just used “angst” as a verb), whine about the same things, and we all think the world is out to get us; it’s like junior high school, but with less acne. The struggles that we have only differ in content because of the differences in what we were raised to believe. It seems like Ben and I are at a similar place in our search. Back in Edmonton, I attended a church for three years as a singer in their choir. Even though at the time I was working there I would have considered myself an atheist, the feeling of peace that prevailed in the sanctuary during the service was a huge comfort to me each week. I mentioned that to Ben during our conversation, and decided just then that I wanted to attend a church service this morning to see if I could find that peaceful feeling again - another ephemeral escape from my brain. Ben said he’d go with me, and when we went home, we thought of all the biggest, oldest, and most beautiful churches in Boston that we could. We checked online and found service times for the Old South Church, and so, this morning, off we drove to Copley Square.
The Old South Church is part of the denomination of the United Church of Christ, which is the American sister denomination to the United Church of Canada. That was the denomination of the church I worked for back in Edmonton. They are traditionally a very liberal denomination, and I believe that were I ever to decide to join a church, the United Church - American or Canadian, wherever I end up - would be the one I would choose. The church I was at in Edmonton was very vocal about how they were open and inclusive and welcoming and all those other warm, comforting adjectives. I swear, though, even after being there for three years, I still felt like a newcomer every time I walked in those doors. It’s possible that this was because I started out as a member of the choir and not as a member of the congregation, and it’s possible that it was because I was employed there - i.e. being paid to not suck at singing - that other church members may have thought my reasons for attending were not entirely altruistic. But regardless, if you preach welcoming and inclusion of everyone, you should walk the talk, and I never felt that any of the members did, at least toward me.
There were two service times listed for the Old South Church: 9:00 AM and 11:00 AM. We decided to go to the early one because Ben had to start his shift on the Pedicabs at noon. The 9:00 service was really, really small - there were about fifteen people there. It took place in the smaller chapel as opposed to the large sanctuary. We all sat in a circle around a communion table, and the minister - who we both really enjoyed listening to, by the way - had everyone participate in a discussion of the morning’s reading, instead of just talking at us about it. It was a wonderful atmosphere. It was cathartic. I cried. I found that peace that I wanted to find. I was also surprised - and pleased! - that after the service, so many people came over to talk to us. Here was the welcome I’d been missing from the church in Edmonton. What a beautiful thing. I was very glad that Ben was there with me; we were asked, of course, why we chose to attend church this morning. I floundered for an answer, but Ben said that he’d ridden by it many time on his Pedicab, and wanted to see what it was all about. I appreciated the deflection. The people who talked to us were so wonderfully nice, and seemed genuinely interested in who we were and what we did and why we came. They introduced us to other people who then talked with us, and then, in turn, introduced us to even more people. In the space of an hour, I felt more at home in the Old South Church than I ever did during the three years I was at my church in Edmonton. Ben had to leave for Pedicab in the middle of our conversation with a lovely woman named Liz - we’d lost track of the time because so many people wanted to talk to us! I ended up talking with Liz some more, and told her about Ross, and the real reason I wanted to come to church today. I stayed for the second service at 11:00 in the large sanctuary - complete with the choir and handbells and organ and congregation of thousands - and she sat with me through it. It was another huge comfort, and I cried some more. When I looked up and I saw a beautiful, open space, and people all around me who were filled with peace and with love, the tears seemed to take on a different meaning, and somehow, it was okay for them to be there.
Theoretically, you could call yourself a Christian without ever going to church. You could study the Bible on your own, worship on your own, tithe to charity and do volunteer work on your own, practice your moral code on your own, and share the message of the gospel on your own. You wouldn’t have to set foot in a church. It would be okay. But I think that the reason people go to church is to feel that peace, that power, that knowledge that yes, there is something in this world that is bigger than me, that is bigger, even, than my capability to understand it, and whether I choose to call it God, or something else entirely, I can’t deny that it’s there.
I like Old South because even though the building and the history are old, the congregation is not. Dick, one of the men that Ben and I were talking to this morning, told us that more than a third of the congregation is under 30. Again, this was another complaint I had with my church in Edmonton; the church ladies, in addition to being very rich and very clique-y, were very old, and very opposed to any changes in the way the church was run. They wouldn’t walk the talk they were forever talking about being a progressive denomination. (If they called themselves progressive, I’d seriously hate to see what they’d call conservative.) Most of the old church ladies in Edmonton had been going to this church since they were kids, sitting in the very same pews they sat in with their parents all those years ago. They hated when anything wasn’t done the way it was in 1959. You can’t expect people to want church to be the same thing for them now that they wanted it to be in 1959, because the world is not the same place it was in 1959. The world not the same place it was ten years ago, or a year ago. For people who were somehow connected with Ross - and even for some people who weren’t - the world is completely different and turned upside down from how it was last Wednesday afternoon. A church has to be able to adapt to that changing need in a changing world if they ever want to have a hope of attracting more people to come, to say nothing of keeping the people that they attract. I think that some of the younger people in my Edmonton church were trying to make these changes, but in the interim, they let a lot of people down, and lost a lot of brilliant potential church members. I don’t necessarily think that they were working toward the right changes, either. I do know that the Old South Church was like that at one point in time; I had mentioned to Liz, the lady who talked to me the most, how I didn’t feel as welcome after three years in Edmonton as I did in after an hour in Old South, and she said it took a long time for Old South to get to be how they are in terms of welcoming, but it was important for them to make that change. They had a committee working on it for years. Apparently, I’m not the only one who felt that way.
The thing that would bother me the most about going to church is the very same thing that bothers most “spiritual” non-church-goers about going to church. (Like I said, we’re all the same; there’s nothing here you haven’t read somewhere else or thought before for yourself.) It’s the negative associations I’d have with the religious right - those people we hear about on the news preaching that “God Hates Gays” or whoever else they decide to pick on. I truly, truly believe that these people only choose to act this way because homosexuality makes them uncomfortable on a level that has nothing to do with religion, but on a level of inability or unwillingness to understand or be compassionate toward others. I can’t understand how someone could call himself a Christian and preach hatred toward any other human. Everything I know about Christianity - which, admittedly, is not as much as I’d like to if I’m making sweeping, general statements like all of these - says that the message is love. Even if you don’t believe that Jesus was literally conceived by a virgin, was the son of God, and rose from the dead three days after he was buried, if you believe he existed at all, you have to believe that even as a work of fiction, the story of the life of Jesus is one of the greatest love stories ever told. (What do I believe, you ask? Well… I’m unable to believe the literal, but beyond that, I don’t really know.) It breaks my heart to think that certain church denominations and religious groups believing in these hateful messages have driven some people, some of my closest friends, to turn their backs on their faith, which was once such an important part of their lives.
Another thing that Ben and I talked about after we saw the movie was humanity’s belief that if everyone were happy, the world would be a better place. On the surface, it looks like a pretty valid argument. However, what would your happiness mean if you’ve never known true sadness? You have to know some terrible things in order to fully appreciate the gifts you’ve been given. I think that a similar thing can be said for people who practice any kind of religion. I don’t think that a person who has grown up with the church as a minor, underlying part of his life since he was young can experience faith in the same way as someone who has had many struggles and doubts in her journey to find it. I don’t think that people who are afraid to question why they believe what they believe truly know what they believe. I think that you have to be open to questioning your faith, in whatever your faith may be. Questions will, we hope, lead to answers, which is why we ask them. The knowledge you would gain from asking these questions would either affirm your faith, or it would move your faith in a different direction. If you lost your notion of God through questioning why you love him, you had a reason for it. That reason would give you something else to have faith in, if you knew where to search for it. Through a loss of one thing, you gain another. Through the knowledge of sadness, we can have true happiness. I think it’s all related.
Or else, think about it in this way. In my art history class we learned about painters in fifteenth-century Flanders (now Belgium) who took stories from the Bible and set them in their present time - fifteenth-century Flanders - to help faithful people relate to the stories in the Bible on a personal level. Can you imagine an artist doing such a thing today? Can you imagine a picture of a fourteen-year-old girl sitting on her bed, texting or something, and all of a sudden this strange apparition comes into her room and says “Oh, by the way, you’re now pregnant with the son of God”? Can you imagine her telling her parents? (“No, mom, I swear, I never did!”) Can you imagine her sixteen-year-old boyfriend upon hearing the news? (“Who the hell have you been seeing?”) If you were her mom, would you believe her? If you were her boyfriend, would you stay with her? Can you imagine a man who appeared in your city one day, proclaiming to be Jesus coming back again like he promised two thousand years ago? Would you believe him? Would you write him off as one of the “crazies” who stand on the street corner and yell “The end is nigh!” and call the police or the mental hospital? How are we going to know when it’s the real deal? What kind of faith are we going to have to have to not write it off simply because we don’t understand? I don’t have that kind of faith in anything or anyone. I greatly admire people who do. I think, though, to have that kind of faith, you need to honestly and openly ask yourself what you’re going to believe when the time comes to believe it, and that itself would take a lot more faith than most people have.
I hope that in my life I can find more people who are okay with this kind of enquiring.
So, after all that, (applause and cookies to you if you read it all!) I think that Ben and I will be going back to the Old South Church at some point. I don’t know whether, for me, this is directly because of Ross, or whether it’s something I’ve subconsciously wanted to do for a while and never felt like I had a reason or an excuse to carry out. I don’t know whether it’s something I’ll stick with once I’ve come to grips with the fact that my best friend is now an only child, or whether I’ll end up letting it slide. However, I’ll take the peaceful escape and the inclusion into a community of love and a celebration of life for as long as I need it.
Well. These last few days have been insanely crazy for me, and even more so for some other people close to me. To use a crude expression, a really big piece of shit hit the fan last week back home in Edmonton. My best friend Misha’s brother, Ross, committed suicide.
I don’t even really know how to start writing about it. To be perfectly honest, I didn’t know Ross very well. I’ve hung out with him a few times. I knew about him mostly through what Misha told me. Right now, my thoughts are mostly of concern for her and for her family, and the hope that they’ll eventually be okay in the wake of this tragedy. For myself, I don’t really know what I’m supposed to feel, so I alternate between feeling nothing, and feeling guilty about feeling nothing; and feeling a lot, and feeling guilty for feeling that, too. Am I supposed to make sure my feelings aren’t as strong as those of the people who were closer to Ross? Am I supposed to feel more because I’m so close to Misha? Am I supposed to be able to function in a social situation? Am I supposed to not be able to? Am I supposed to answer “Oh, I’m fine, how are you?” when someone asks me how I am? These are questions that have come up in my head countless times since Thursday, when Misha called to tell me about Ross, and I’m not really any closer to being able to answer them.
This is kind of a big deal for me, too, in that I haven’t known anyone before who has died. When I was ten, my Grandpa Craig passed away, but I was ten, and I didn’t really have a deep relationship with him. And he was old. Old people are supposed to die. Young people aren’t; we’re supposed to get old first. That’s kind of how this world works. Ross was only a little older than me. In a few years, I probably would have been doing similar kinds of work to what he was doing, only in a different section of the arts, of course. He was a media guy; I’m a musician. It’s just so very strange to think that he’s not going to get older and complete the cycle of life, and that we’re all going to pass by his age and grow older than him and complete whatever it is that we each individually think we’re here to do on earth, and he’s just not.
And so, I don’t know what to feel, whether to feel, or how to feel what I feel if I should indeed be feeling, and I’ve been trying to keep my mind off it by doing other things. I went to what should have been the best jazz concert I have ever seen or ever will see, but my brain couldn’t process much of anything that went on. I went to some free outdoor concerts with some friends, but I had to leave halfway through because I couldn’t pretend to be okay any longer. I’ve been trying to transcribe, but that’s work that demands a lot of brain power and concentration that I just couldn’t give to it. Copying charts has been okay; it’s mindless. Playing the piano has been okay - not practicing, that demands brain power too - but just playing tunes I know and tunes I’ve written and tunes I like has been a comfort.
My roommates have been wonderful to me during these past few days. Josh has been full of hugs, Jackie has been full of compassion, Pete has been full of sympathy, Ben has been full of insight, and Kael has been making pizza for me when I thought I’d probably burn the house down if I tried to cook. (Jordan has been out of town, for those of you who were counting.) Friday night, Jackie had borrowed her friend’s car, and we took it out and picked flowers that poked through fences and spilled out into the sidewalk. We drove through Lower Allston and Cambridgeport, listening to Martin Sexton, to find the nicest flowers that weren’t still technically in people’s gardens, and made a few bouquets to put all throughout our house. Mindless. A beautiful distraction, if only for an hour.
Last night, Saturday, I went to see the movie Into The Wild with Ben. One doesn’t have to be socially interactive with a movie. I wasn’t faced with the choice of lying or bringing down the party, because the movie wasn’t going to ask me how I was doing. Fabulous. The movie was a true story about a guy who, after graduating college, gave his life savings of $24,000 to Oxfam, and hitchhiked across the United States doing odd jobs and searching for spirituality and truth. It was a great film. Afterwards, Ben and I went for beer and greasy burgers at this little restaurant in Harvard Square, and talked about a lot of things. Our house, Boston, the musical tastes of our roommates, his teaching job, my adventures at Berklee, beers we like. We also talked about spirituality, religiosity, and how they relate to the movie, and to how I’m dealing with what happened. Talking with some people about all matters religious or spiritual is sometimes pretty stressful, depending on whom it is you’re talking with. It’s a conversation that most people avoid. Talking with Ben about it, though, was wonderful. All people go through phases of intense religiosity and phases of strident atheism at some point in our lives, and especially as twenty-somethings, we think we’re completely alone and unique in that struggle of faith. We’re totally not. We’re all the same, every single one of us. We all angst about the same things (yes, I just used “angst” as a verb), whine about the same things, and we all think the world is out to get us; it’s like junior high school, but with less acne. The struggles that we have only differ in content because of the differences in what we were raised to believe. It seems like Ben and I are at a similar place in our search. Back in Edmonton, I attended a church for three years as a singer in their choir. Even though at the time I was working there I would have considered myself an atheist, the feeling of peace that prevailed in the sanctuary during the service was a huge comfort to me each week. I mentioned that to Ben during our conversation, and decided just then that I wanted to attend a church service this morning to see if I could find that peaceful feeling again - another ephemeral escape from my brain. Ben said he’d go with me, and when we went home, we thought of all the biggest, oldest, and most beautiful churches in Boston that we could. We checked online and found service times for the Old South Church, and so, this morning, off we drove to Copley Square.
The Old South Church is part of the denomination of the United Church of Christ, which is the American sister denomination to the United Church of Canada. That was the denomination of the church I worked for back in Edmonton. They are traditionally a very liberal denomination, and I believe that were I ever to decide to join a church, the United Church - American or Canadian, wherever I end up - would be the one I would choose. The church I was at in Edmonton was very vocal about how they were open and inclusive and welcoming and all those other warm, comforting adjectives. I swear, though, even after being there for three years, I still felt like a newcomer every time I walked in those doors. It’s possible that this was because I started out as a member of the choir and not as a member of the congregation, and it’s possible that it was because I was employed there - i.e. being paid to not suck at singing - that other church members may have thought my reasons for attending were not entirely altruistic. But regardless, if you preach welcoming and inclusion of everyone, you should walk the talk, and I never felt that any of the members did, at least toward me.
There were two service times listed for the Old South Church: 9:00 AM and 11:00 AM. We decided to go to the early one because Ben had to start his shift on the Pedicabs at noon. The 9:00 service was really, really small - there were about fifteen people there. It took place in the smaller chapel as opposed to the large sanctuary. We all sat in a circle around a communion table, and the minister - who we both really enjoyed listening to, by the way - had everyone participate in a discussion of the morning’s reading, instead of just talking at us about it. It was a wonderful atmosphere. It was cathartic. I cried. I found that peace that I wanted to find. I was also surprised - and pleased! - that after the service, so many people came over to talk to us. Here was the welcome I’d been missing from the church in Edmonton. What a beautiful thing. I was very glad that Ben was there with me; we were asked, of course, why we chose to attend church this morning. I floundered for an answer, but Ben said that he’d ridden by it many time on his Pedicab, and wanted to see what it was all about. I appreciated the deflection. The people who talked to us were so wonderfully nice, and seemed genuinely interested in who we were and what we did and why we came. They introduced us to other people who then talked with us, and then, in turn, introduced us to even more people. In the space of an hour, I felt more at home in the Old South Church than I ever did during the three years I was at my church in Edmonton. Ben had to leave for Pedicab in the middle of our conversation with a lovely woman named Liz - we’d lost track of the time because so many people wanted to talk to us! I ended up talking with Liz some more, and told her about Ross, and the real reason I wanted to come to church today. I stayed for the second service at 11:00 in the large sanctuary - complete with the choir and handbells and organ and congregation of thousands - and she sat with me through it. It was another huge comfort, and I cried some more. When I looked up and I saw a beautiful, open space, and people all around me who were filled with peace and with love, the tears seemed to take on a different meaning, and somehow, it was okay for them to be there.
Theoretically, you could call yourself a Christian without ever going to church. You could study the Bible on your own, worship on your own, tithe to charity and do volunteer work on your own, practice your moral code on your own, and share the message of the gospel on your own. You wouldn’t have to set foot in a church. It would be okay. But I think that the reason people go to church is to feel that peace, that power, that knowledge that yes, there is something in this world that is bigger than me, that is bigger, even, than my capability to understand it, and whether I choose to call it God, or something else entirely, I can’t deny that it’s there.
I like Old South because even though the building and the history are old, the congregation is not. Dick, one of the men that Ben and I were talking to this morning, told us that more than a third of the congregation is under 30. Again, this was another complaint I had with my church in Edmonton; the church ladies, in addition to being very rich and very clique-y, were very old, and very opposed to any changes in the way the church was run. They wouldn’t walk the talk they were forever talking about being a progressive denomination. (If they called themselves progressive, I’d seriously hate to see what they’d call conservative.) Most of the old church ladies in Edmonton had been going to this church since they were kids, sitting in the very same pews they sat in with their parents all those years ago. They hated when anything wasn’t done the way it was in 1959. You can’t expect people to want church to be the same thing for them now that they wanted it to be in 1959, because the world is not the same place it was in 1959. The world not the same place it was ten years ago, or a year ago. For people who were somehow connected with Ross - and even for some people who weren’t - the world is completely different and turned upside down from how it was last Wednesday afternoon. A church has to be able to adapt to that changing need in a changing world if they ever want to have a hope of attracting more people to come, to say nothing of keeping the people that they attract. I think that some of the younger people in my Edmonton church were trying to make these changes, but in the interim, they let a lot of people down, and lost a lot of brilliant potential church members. I don’t necessarily think that they were working toward the right changes, either. I do know that the Old South Church was like that at one point in time; I had mentioned to Liz, the lady who talked to me the most, how I didn’t feel as welcome after three years in Edmonton as I did in after an hour in Old South, and she said it took a long time for Old South to get to be how they are in terms of welcoming, but it was important for them to make that change. They had a committee working on it for years. Apparently, I’m not the only one who felt that way.
The thing that would bother me the most about going to church is the very same thing that bothers most “spiritual” non-church-goers about going to church. (Like I said, we’re all the same; there’s nothing here you haven’t read somewhere else or thought before for yourself.) It’s the negative associations I’d have with the religious right - those people we hear about on the news preaching that “God Hates Gays” or whoever else they decide to pick on. I truly, truly believe that these people only choose to act this way because homosexuality makes them uncomfortable on a level that has nothing to do with religion, but on a level of inability or unwillingness to understand or be compassionate toward others. I can’t understand how someone could call himself a Christian and preach hatred toward any other human. Everything I know about Christianity - which, admittedly, is not as much as I’d like to if I’m making sweeping, general statements like all of these - says that the message is love. Even if you don’t believe that Jesus was literally conceived by a virgin, was the son of God, and rose from the dead three days after he was buried, if you believe he existed at all, you have to believe that even as a work of fiction, the story of the life of Jesus is one of the greatest love stories ever told. (What do I believe, you ask? Well… I’m unable to believe the literal, but beyond that, I don’t really know.) It breaks my heart to think that certain church denominations and religious groups believing in these hateful messages have driven some people, some of my closest friends, to turn their backs on their faith, which was once such an important part of their lives.
Another thing that Ben and I talked about after we saw the movie was humanity’s belief that if everyone were happy, the world would be a better place. On the surface, it looks like a pretty valid argument. However, what would your happiness mean if you’ve never known true sadness? You have to know some terrible things in order to fully appreciate the gifts you’ve been given. I think that a similar thing can be said for people who practice any kind of religion. I don’t think that a person who has grown up with the church as a minor, underlying part of his life since he was young can experience faith in the same way as someone who has had many struggles and doubts in her journey to find it. I don’t think that people who are afraid to question why they believe what they believe truly know what they believe. I think that you have to be open to questioning your faith, in whatever your faith may be. Questions will, we hope, lead to answers, which is why we ask them. The knowledge you would gain from asking these questions would either affirm your faith, or it would move your faith in a different direction. If you lost your notion of God through questioning why you love him, you had a reason for it. That reason would give you something else to have faith in, if you knew where to search for it. Through a loss of one thing, you gain another. Through the knowledge of sadness, we can have true happiness. I think it’s all related.
Or else, think about it in this way. In my art history class we learned about painters in fifteenth-century Flanders (now Belgium) who took stories from the Bible and set them in their present time - fifteenth-century Flanders - to help faithful people relate to the stories in the Bible on a personal level. Can you imagine an artist doing such a thing today? Can you imagine a picture of a fourteen-year-old girl sitting on her bed, texting or something, and all of a sudden this strange apparition comes into her room and says “Oh, by the way, you’re now pregnant with the son of God”? Can you imagine her telling her parents? (“No, mom, I swear, I never did!”) Can you imagine her sixteen-year-old boyfriend upon hearing the news? (“Who the hell have you been seeing?”) If you were her mom, would you believe her? If you were her boyfriend, would you stay with her? Can you imagine a man who appeared in your city one day, proclaiming to be Jesus coming back again like he promised two thousand years ago? Would you believe him? Would you write him off as one of the “crazies” who stand on the street corner and yell “The end is nigh!” and call the police or the mental hospital? How are we going to know when it’s the real deal? What kind of faith are we going to have to have to not write it off simply because we don’t understand? I don’t have that kind of faith in anything or anyone. I greatly admire people who do. I think, though, to have that kind of faith, you need to honestly and openly ask yourself what you’re going to believe when the time comes to believe it, and that itself would take a lot more faith than most people have.
I hope that in my life I can find more people who are okay with this kind of enquiring.
So, after all that, (applause and cookies to you if you read it all!) I think that Ben and I will be going back to the Old South Church at some point. I don’t know whether, for me, this is directly because of Ross, or whether it’s something I’ve subconsciously wanted to do for a while and never felt like I had a reason or an excuse to carry out. I don’t know whether it’s something I’ll stick with once I’ve come to grips with the fact that my best friend is now an only child, or whether I’ll end up letting it slide. However, I’ll take the peaceful escape and the inclusion into a community of love and a celebration of life for as long as I need it.