I went to church last Sunday. That sounds pretty normal, but not for me – I can count the times I’ve done it on one hand. But this time was different. This time it was where I needed to be.
When I was growing up, my family didn’t really have a religion. My parents were sort of “Chinese-Judeo-Christian-Agnostic.” We celebrated Christmas because that’s what Americans did. At funerals, we burned incense and made offerings to our ancestors.
My parents baptized me “just in case.” Best case: You avoid eternal damnation. Worst case: You get a little wet. That’s an offer they couldn’t refuse.
When I started raising kids of my own, religion never really came up. I married a recovering Catholic who had no more interest in church than I did. I toyed with Buddhism and meditation, but more as a philosophy than a religion. And when Easter or Christmas rolled around, we dyed our eggs and trimmed our trees with no mention of crucifixions or holy virgins.
So you can imagine my surprise when I got a text message from my daughter inviting me to her baptism. I was struck dumb, Old Testament style.
My first thought was that she had joined a fundamentalist cult. They must have abducted her and brainwashed her with peyote. I imagined her living in a heavily armed compound in Idaho with nine other sister-wives, churning butter and mopping floors for their charismatic leader and his three dozen kids.
But then she sent another text: “Hey, wanna hit me some ground balls?” I grabbed a bat and glove and headed out the door.
Ever since she was eight, baseball and softball have been our together time. Now that she plays in college, I’m not her coach anymore, but when she’s home and she needs to work out I’m still her go-to guy. Playing catch is something we’ve done for a dozen years. It feels as comfortable and familiar as an old catcher’s mitt.
While the ball whizzed back and forth between us, thwacking into our gloves, I asked her about her church, her faith and what it all meant to her. She told me about the community, and how they had welcomed her so warmly. She talked about wanting to focus, not just on living, but on living right and living well. She talked about compassion, and forgiveness, and striving for something bigger than just her own desire and will.
I had braced myself to hear something strange and foreign. Instead, everything she told me sounded completely familiar. So much of my life has been spent searching for those same things: community, compassion, meaning, grace. I came away heartened and relieved, but a little confused.
Then, the week before her baptism, I went to the music camp I’ve attended for more than 25 years. It’s held at a rustic church camp, out in the woods. Every summer we gather there to share music and friendship, and to heal the little wounds we carry around in our everyday lives. It’s where I go to remember who I am and who I want to be.
One day, I was walking down a path there, and I saw something glinting in the sunlight. I stooped over and picked up a small, crude, metal cross. It was tarnished and bent, and made from four old-fashioned carpenter’s nails, soldered together onto a loop of wire. I put it in Lost and Found, but at the end of the week no one had claimed it, so I pulled it out and took it home.
The writer David Foster Wallace once said that everyone worships something, and that the single best reason to worship a God, or a life force, or a set of moral principles is that the alternatives are so astonishingly bad. All too often, we humans worship power, or pleasure, or money, or fame. And those things will suck the soul out of you and leave an unfillable void – a gaping “God-shaped hole.”
My daughter’s baptism was a joyful and raucous affair. She was beautiful and radiant, and she wore my beat-up old cross on a thin silver chain. The parishioners welcomed us warmly, and their gospel choir shook the rafters and rocked us to our feet.
In his sermon, the pastor urged us to see the wounded among us – wounded in body, mind or spirit – and to help them heal. “Church,” he said, “is not a building. It is a little bit of heaven here on earth. It is where we can go to be the best that we can be.”
By that definition, there are as many different “churches” in this world as there are people to fill them. We parents can only hope that our children find the ones that are right for them.
Amen.
