To Forsake or Not to Forsake

Once, my father told me on a drive about his opinions concerning the church and COVID-19. He said that the doors, rather than remain closed, should have been open for everyone. And when Texas suffered its snowstorm of the decade, and all the power and water were shut off, he stated that the church in our hometown should have used its kitchen, one of the best in any church, for providing food. The gym, rarely used beyond basketball season and youth group meetings, should have been open for people to find shelter. And it would have been wise to have had a generator to run power in the event of a blackout.

“We did nothing during the blackout,” he said.

It was difficult to argue with him. After all, a church’s calling has been to serve, and for a long time, many churches have chosen the easy route of going after a wider congregation, sending missionaries to Africa, and abandoning its objective to support local communities, for the reason that local communities no longer exist. The church stayed closed for the entirety of COVID-19, likely due to the fact that the congregation is now far older than it used to be. I tried to marry the two problems together by suggesting age, wondering if there was a lack of younger muscle to assist with all of these practical solutions? Church attendance is lower than ever; we all know this, and especially by the young. And the attendance that does happen to be consistent is of a retired kind. But COVID-19, unlike other diseases, was neither the bubonic plague — thanks to our modern scientific understanding of illness — nor was it as routine as the flu. It existed in a space where it could kill people, but not many.

Later that day, my father phoned his friend, and on this very subject of death, his friend told my father that Christianity had received a shake up. My father asked why that was. He said it was because most Christians realized that they did not want to die. “And that’s just not right,” my father’s friend said over the phone. “We as Christians, because we know what’s coming, should welcome death.”

Perhaps that is the crux of the matter. Many Christian people, in all likelihood, have a difficult time reconciling heaven, whatever version of it, with the remainder of their life in the flesh. We have not spoken about what lies in between the spectrum, as COVID-19 could also wound a person to debility, and that, strangely, is the suffering that seems most like waste. But here was a foundational tenet expressed by a Christian man that was completely true, which is to say that believers of the faith should be willing to make sacrifices. Christians are called upon, in fact, in not uncertain terms, to give up themselves, though it is seldom followed. How the United States of America can simultaneously call itself a Christian nation and be steeped in a gaudy sort of wealth remains to be explained. Though the United States prides itself on giving and charity, which it performs admirably in real economic terms, much of this seems random, ad hoc, and poised to be wasted. Here was a moment of explicit panic, where an objective and directed call to action was requested by Christians, and my father was upset that nothing was done.

It would make sense for my father to be upset. As a man of action, making a decision is always better than not making one. Thus making the French dictum, “When in doubt, do nothing,” an appalling one. It is far more difficult to see a death that is avoided, invisible as it is, than with food and shelter not being provided. The invisibility is one of expectations, and exists inside one’s head, rather than exist out in the world, and it is easier to see how much more convincing our imagination can be.

I wonder if my father has considered the more painful hypothesis that many people who claim to be Christian are not Christian at all. That many, alone and friendless in a world that continuously uproots them with work, suffering, disease, and economic terror, rely on a place like the church for communion and like-minded conversation. That the calling for Christians to assist the poor is no longer the conditions of the religion when existing alongside social welfare policies of the kind that limp along in the Western World. The church exists symbolically rather than in actuality, which makes symbolic gestures and beliefs that much more potent. That makes, for example, the question of Israel, a country thousands of miles away with its own problems, far more important a discussion point than the lives of the malnourished in the state of Texas. In this context, the issue plaguing churches right now is likely what side to take between Israel and Palestine, due to recent events, rather than the question of why the church kitchen has not been used to its fullest extent.

Everybody is right, and that is the problem. Later my father lamented that he had been trying to do his best to remember the powers of grace and humility. Without those things, he went on, how do we know we follow God? And yet these problems that he had with his own church would not go away. So he left, with the hope that when he did so, he would have that grace and humility offered back to him. He wanted to be contacted, to present an opportunity for the congregation to want him back. He wanted a chance to have a discussion on why leaving this church during this time was to go to another church who kept their doors open. Nobody contacted him. Nobody wondered where his tithes went. This after thirty years in attendance. My father was now caught in the double-bind of having to offer grace and humility in how the matters of charity were to be conducted, while also requiring of himself the fortitude to stand up for what he believed to be right. He went back and forth so many times in our conversation, escalating in volume and hand gestures, as if this was the first time in his life that he had undergone a catch-22. Choices for my father until this moment had been obvious. Cleaning his hands with toxic chemicals while working at the plant seemed obvious, until a memo circulated that recommended the employees desist immediately. Working for decades and saving money seemed obvious until our century, when suddenly the financialization of the economy made everything not more stable, but less. If the world persists in changing norms at this pace, imagining a religion keeping in lockstep for 2,000 years seems dubious.

One moral to make is the one we all know and are taught by our religious parents. That the church is run by men and women who are sinners in the hands of an angry God, and that God is the only sacred thing left. But each denomination draws its own conclusions. For the denomination I grew up in, the Quaker denomination, church exists in the gathering of souls, and as such can be anywhere. The symbolism is living, and open to updating. This has made Quakers progressive in our history, especially as abolitionists. But their fluidity also makes Quakers substantially different in many parts of the country, where other denominations refer to rituals and routine, habits that keep their doctrine aligned, at the cost of modernity. For some, like French author Michel Houellebecq, ritual is everything, and the cost of modernity is actually an atavistic benefit. What would Christianity be, he philosophized, without the beautiful cathedrals? Without the candles? It is only in those places, he said, where I am still Christian. This too is another reason, I suspect, to be a believer in the 21st century, which entails witnessing. Witnessing something larger than oneself. For many years, the Catholic Church used this power of awe to their own advantage, and for many its misuse broke the power of this witnessing. But what perhaps we did not realize is that, in rejecting this power of ritual, we realized there was nothing inside of it. That the truth did not make us free, as the verse in the gospel of John foretold, but rather the opposite. Could it be that, in our age of science and industry, we have learned such deeper truths as to make our part in the universe not more grand, but of such contrasting banality as to weep at all its indeterminism? It is like suggesting that it is not only we who are sinners, but our angry God is a sinner as well, sinning for suggesting that existence should be manufactured to crave symbolic ritual over the love of one another, no matter what the good book says.

As a self-imposed outsider, I was fascinated by my father’s claims. I have not been to church in over a decade, having come to the conclusion that a community in name only is no community at all. Nothing is organic about church, nothing is as sacred as we imagine it to be. So dedicated was I about being a Christian that, as a child, going into the chapel in the dark — with the moonlight pooling through the stained glass — was an exercise in reverence. Now it exists in my mind as a structure, though beautiful, ultimately meaningless. Possibly, for some, harmful. Who is to say? The world of Christianity, like any other ideology, makes some bleed and others blessed. For some it is a balm to addiction, for others a cause for radicalization. As a result I saw my father’s frustration as an opportunity to care for his opinions, and to make them known. Not all churches rejected their mission during COVID-19, during freezing weather, regardless of context they continued whatever is left of the covenant that began two millennia ago. Some chose instead to keep their own congregation safe. Who are we to suggest what rightness exists in such madness? But for my father his disappointment was manifest. “I have been burned more by Christians,” he concluded, “than anyone else.” Was it shameful of me to agree with him? The delineating line between those who claim to be Christians and those who are not has never been tenable. All are sinners. But still there existed in him expectations. That, I suppose, was the final difference between him and me: he had expectations of his church, and I had none.

Marvin Gaye’s father had a brain tumor in his head when he shot his own son through the heart, at the climax of an argument between him and his wife, on April 1, 1984. “Jesus left a long time ago, said he would return,” Gaye sang on the album What’s Going On? which sits in the CD player of my car. What expectations can we have, ever again, when we learn news of this kind? And this news is the kind that is all there is. “I go to the place where danger awaits me,” Gaye went on. “And it’s bound to forsake me.”

Originally published at https://theroyleline.blog on May 16, 2021.