First Thoughts

I went to church today with a friend.

It was such a wholesome experience, the people were all so friendly and so welcoming and vastly different to the church experience I had growing up. It was such a small and tight knit community, it really felt like family you picked for herself. I also feel like church is such a big part of her life and I feel honoured to have been given a chance to get a glimpse and I am grateful to her for sharing it with me!

I enjoyed the service - the pastor’s voice, community music, the sermon (more on this below), and just hanging around the people. I liked the whole vibe of the place, I can see how comfortable everyone is there with themselves and with each other and that is always a beauty to watch. Everyone was there because they chose to be there and that is quite special. I loved how welcomed I felt, how everyone was so comfortable that I just also felt comfortable.

But at the same time I also felt a bit like an imposter, almost like the privilege to exist within this community requires me to believe in God/Jesus and as it stands being agnostic I felt a bit almost like I was lying. I know that’s really not how it works and I’m pretty sure no one thought that but it’s how I felt looking back. It made me wonder whether such communities can exist outside of the religious framework and whether it’s possible to have something tie a bunch of people together outside of religion.

It made me think back to when I was a kid and I really believed in a God and I remember so vividly how I had “My First Bible” and it was like my favourite book at the time (way back in kindergarten) and I lent it to a friend and she returned it all sticky and I was so sad. I was the kid who would write little post-it notes to God and stick them on my window believing He’d read them when he had time. The girl who dragged her parents to Sunday Mass and the kid who would read Bible passages and do Easter reflections. But as I grew up I had so many questions and the rigid framework of the Catholic church didn’t allow space for such curiosity and so I concluded that it wasn’t for me. It didn’t help the matter that Sunday School was not welcoming, church choir was not welcoming (they told me they had too many sopranos already), confessions felt like an invasion of privacy and an obligation, and belonging to a really big parish meant I never really felt that sense of strong community.

I think growing up I took the Bible stories very literally, but as I started to learn more about the world and science, it all started to not make sense to me and so I just put it dismissed all of it. But service today kinda changed a bit of that for me. The way the readings were interpreted in a more down to earth application, the way she was so comfortable being vulnerable in front of a whole bunch of people and sharing her own stories. Today I wondered if maybe religion isn’t about literally believing that water can be turned into wine or that there can be immaculate conception or that you can rise from the dead. Maybe it’s not about having to believe that the stories actually happened literally. Maybe it can be about taking the teachings of the Bible and applying it to your every day life, having the love and kindness and compassion for others flow through you into the world. Maybe it’s not about being in an old man sitting high above the skies watching over the world, but about believing in a higher power that can bring communities like this one together, a community of people who are so welcoming and wholesome and just wonderful to be around.