I Am a Church-Goer

By Mischa Willett

A few of the reasons why a professor and poet keeps going to church.

In the late 1970s, a few of the hippie “Jesus Freaks” who had morphed into the California Vineyard movement took Interstate 10 east to the Arizona desert and set up some home groups. There, they encountered my mother, 15 years old and newly delivered of a son, me. I spent my early months in that movement of prayer circles, food donations, and murmured concern for the teenager whose father had recently died and whose husband had trouble obeying the law or coming home.

That church might as well have been my family, providing for us between my mother’s fast-food paychecks and babysitting between her shifts. We were counter-cultural, a message seared into my memory—in fact, the earliest one I can conjure is of being wrapped up one night and trundled off to a parking lot punctuated with oil drums out of which flames spewed like huge liturgical candles. The people I sang with on Sundays had come to burn their collections of secular music: into the fire Styx’ Masterpiece Theater; the turtles on the cover of the Grateful Dead’s Terrapin Station melting before my awestruck face. I was small, but I can still see the sense of release with which they performed this strange ritual. They were letting go of the former markers of their sense of self. Those barefoot brothers and sisters were starting fresh, defying the culture’s norms and its entertainments, were sealing a covenant to a new way of living with a burnt offering. I saw how dedicated they were to each other, to the gathering, to the Lord. I suppose I’ve always wanted to be that way too. So I went to church.

And all these years later, I keep going to church, for all the usual reasons: to meet other believers, to learn, to worship, to grow more deeply into the image of God I was created to bear. But I also go for some less usual motives, ones that I am, in what follows, trying to think through. 

I can say with gladness and with the Psalmist that I rejoice in the Lord’s statutes.

I Go to Church to Sing Hymns

There’s a hymn that we sing in our church whose final verses send me sobbing. “Come ye Souls by Sin Afflicted” by Joseph Swain was published first in 1781, but its sentiments are the sort any Christian would take comfort in at any time in the church’s history. We’ve just sung,

Blessed are the eyes that see him,
blest the ears that hear his voice,

and then we get to the line that goes, “His commandments / Then become their happy choice.” I don’t know why it affects me so much, apart from that I find it profoundly true. While there was a time in my faith journey during which I would have balked at this or that bit of ethics or orthodoxy, and while I, as ever, have a long way to go toward holiness, I am currently at a place in life where I can say with gladness and with the Psalmist that I rejoice in the Lord’s statutes. These are not some burden I am content to bear as a corollary to the benefits of salvation, but a joy, a gift, my happy choice.

But hang on a second. 1781? When this song I’m taking comfort in was written, the United States was like five years old? I find that incredible. I guess I don’t know much about the reading habits of my peers, but how many of us are steeping ourselves in the ideas, in the language of the late eighteenth century? Book club vogues might take a few of us back as far as Jane Austen, but usually not much further than that. Still, here I am being heartened, held up, by a Christian from nearly 250 years ago? For me, it’s evidence of the Holy Spirit’s work that I’m bathed thus in the prayers of a fellow churchman from centuries past.

This is something I love about singing hymns. They bind us together as a congregation, yes, but they also bind us to the broader Church “spread through all time and space and rooted in eternity, terrible as an army with banners,” as C.S. Lewis describes it. Swain and I and my restless five-year-old and the mentally ill woman in the pew behind me who embarrasses everyone (including those of us who wish we had her courage) by dancing up to the altar at communion time are all doing our bit to praise our Maker.

I also love hymns because they don’t force reverie. I am not guided by the melodic line or by repetition into stupefaction. There’s no feeling part usually, where the guitars come in and interpret how I’m supposed to be taking all this, just the permission to feel and think and respond as the images and the day and the Spirit suggest. 

There are a hundred reasons I love hymns—they give me Black tutors, putting the daily struggles I experience in a perspective I often need and lack; they give me female poets and thinkers from times and places that didn’t always welcome their writerly contributions in other literary genres; they emphasize areas of theology on which I might be loath to tread. The Wesleyan hymns fill me with joy, correct my failures of charity, and model the poetic and non-didactic Christian verse-making to which I aspire in my own writing.

With hymns, one gets to sing into existence, to create with one’s own body, a living poem.

Importantly, hymns teach me to respond to the world. Thankfully, I am seldom left to my own devices, but I know my natural inclination toward callousness, toward being snide. I am capable of taking any wonder for granted. But Mercy has led me to a well where one drinks lines like these:

Oh Lord my God, when I in awesome wonder
Consider all the worlds thy hands have made
I see the stars, I hear the rolling thunder,
Thy power throughout the universe displayed:

Then sings my soul, my Savior God, to thee:
How great thou art! How great thou art!

Who, after that, can shrug? Who can move about in indifference, can indulge a sense of superiority or boredom? “Awesome wonder” is a prescription against malaise; it is the recommended default posture for the people of God. And this hymn (Carl Boberg trans. Hine, 1885) both reminds me of that and moves me into it.

This may be an obvious point, but another great thing about hymns is that we get to sing them. Surely I am not alone in sometimes showing up to church when I don’t really feel like being there. Surely most of us occasionally feel like spectators to the service, or perhaps frauds. Sometimes I just want to sit in my pew, arms crossed, tired heart closed off. But no. We have hymns to sing, which means I have to stand up. And if I can’t find words to pray, I can still mouth my way through these old familiars. Then, suddenly, I find that I’m no longer mouthing, no longer just going along with it, but singing. Suddenly, I am worshipping. My exterior, my exhaustion has been shorn clean through by the testaments I’m being asked to embody, and (of course) by the Lord.

That embodiment works, in part, because I know them. The rector at my church bores easily, so he’s always introducing newly written songs to the congregation. We stumble through them dutifully, but if the program grants us “It is Well (with my Soul)” every once in a while, or an “Old Rugged Cross,” we blow the roof off the place. Everyone puts an oar in and we heave our little pitched roof out over Lake Washington. That’s part of knowing something deeply and well. Once the choreography is in you, you can actually dance it.

Probably the reason I most like hymns, though, is that they permit me to live inside of poetry. I write and teach people about poetry for a living, and I’ve loved it for as long as I’ve been able to speak. There is for most of us something about beauty that makes one want to join in with it. Sadly, one can’t get inside a painting; I’ve found that climbing up on the theater stage is likewise discouraged. Encounters with great works of art are mountaintop experiences for me, but they’re still things that happen to me, phenomena I view. But with hymns, one gets to sing into existence, to create with one’s own body, a living poem. Even that needs to be qualified, though, because we don’t create the hymn-sing with only our bodies, but with our breath. In hymns, then, one co-creates with God using our created flesh and the breath that is on loan from Him to make something both beautiful and true. I suppose that combination is what I find so overwhelming and perfect about them.

I go to church for many reasons, but even if I didn’t have any of those, I’d go to church because that’s where we sing hymns.

A dinner invitation always shows up just in time, or a windfall odd job, or a scholarship for which I’m dubiously qualified.

The Offering Plate, or I Go to Church to Remember

For reasons probably better left to social economists, but possibly having something to do with my six-figure student loan debt, recent humanities degree, and the fact that teachers don’t get paid during the summer, I found myself awhile back without any money. Or, I should say, “We found ourselves without any money.” I have a wife who I’m supporting financially (such as it is), and she was pregnant at the time. So there we were, without any money… and when I say, “without any money,” I mean all credit cards full, a check already written for rent which if cashed today will bounce, and we didn’t have any food yesterday and can’t afford any today. Broke. “Flat broke” doesn’t seem to get it because there’s an inverse here: once a paycheck comes from the warehouse job I’ve taken to fill in the gap, it’ll be gobbled up by prior commitments (see the aforementioned rent check and credit card debt). So there’s the inverse; from here, flat broke would be nice.

But I’m not here to complain about my poverty; I actually don’t mind a bit of it. I’ve been in the desert for a long time and I’m used to the taste of manna—which is good, because I get plenty. This has happened to us more times than I care to recall, but I want to tell you about this one simply because it was so strange: as perfectly providential as a ram’s sauntering by just when you’ve got a mind to put a knife in one. A dinner invitation always shows up just in time, or a windfall odd job, or a scholarship for which I’m dubiously qualified, but, as if from heaven, every time: provision. Daily bread. (Or, to be perfectly honest, at least weekly bread.)         

So on this one day, we had a picnic planned with some friends. Such simple pleasures abound among the cash-strapped: lots of walks and trips to the public library have us feeling rich compared with our solvent, land-owning peers. While we came up with some food to share at what would thankfully be a potluck, it was also determined that we should provide the paper plates for the gathering. Now, I know this will seem ridiculous to some of you who have not been in similar circumstances, but we seriously could not afford paper plates. My wife and I drove to the grocery store on our way home from church to pick some up and checked our account balance in the parking lot to reveal that we had exactly $8.00 (ignoring for the present the already-written rent check).         

“Terrific!” I said, “we can get plates and a bag of apples too!”         

“Not so,” replied the level-headed Mrs. “We’ve agreed to have coffee with those visiting friends tomorrow and we have to save the $8.00 for that.”         

A quick calculation showed her correct. The level of embarrassment at having to turn down old friends for a visit because of money divided by not bringing plates to our picnic and feigning forgetfulness equals we’re not going into the store. I’m not sure it was rock bottom, but things were grim: our last money committed and none coming for a while. And no plates.         

I’m not saying I prayed right then. Maybe I did, but if so, it wasn’t my default response to this particular predicament, I’m sad to say. Cursing is more like it—though I remember being in a fine mood that day, even after finding out the real parameters of our desperation. So good-natured cursing.         

It’s a place where I know God answers prayers.

This is all probably too much build-up: what happened next was a small miracle, if there are such things. But two aspects have given me pause and I thought, for the edification of the body, and for who knows what other reasons?—the heart is a complicated vessel—to share them.

We got back in the car and proceeded to drive around the corner… where all of our needs according to various riches in Christ Jesus were supplied. Which is to say, leaning against the bus stop was a sealed package, I-kid-you-not, of paper plates.   

As I say: small miracle. But a strange one because so specific. It isn’t as though someone were getting rid of a bunch of things, and among them was a package of disposable plates. They were the only object on the sidewalk apart from the pole announcing the stop. How would I have reacted if they were cups, for example? Would I think, nice try? Would I have noticed them at all?

Instead, I laughed. I pulled over the car, which had travelled about thirty feet from the thwarted grocery trip, picked them up, and laughed my head off. What, seriously, can the odds be? It isn’t as though this stop is a regular place where people leave things they don’t want. In fact, I’ve never seen anything left there before. Nevertheless, right there, stuck in the sidewalk brambles: the horns of the exact ram I needed.         

The other thing I want to notice about the encounter, though, is psychological in nature (probably), but not individual. That is, I think of that bus stop as holy now. I want to pray at it. It’s a place where I know God answers prayers, and so, silly as it sounds to this pilgrim, I feel the pull of holy ground. To kneel there. To build something, perhaps.         

This feeling is something I was trying to get at in a poem I published a few years ago in my second book, The Elegy Beta, called “Dream at Bethel.” Jacob has his famous dream while using a rock for a pillow and so turns the rock into a shrine as soon as he wakes. Silly Jacob, I tend to think in my Protestant modernity, you’ve been visited by an angel and your initial reaction is idolatry? To cage and limit God to a place? To do a ridiculous ritual involving wasting good olive oil? But then, thought the poem, isn’t that what we’re all doing in church?         

Like I said, this wasn’t the first time something like this has happened to me. The miraculous and impossible and audacious happen so frequently in my life that I’ve come to regard “Provision of Manna” as a line item in my general compensation package. But I share with Jacob the impulse to make a gesture of remembrance.

I go to church to commune with the saints, to learn, to sing, to be healed. But I also go because I need a place—a rock, an altar—on which to make a sacrifice. A place to lay my dreaming head, lost as it is in wonder and gratitude at the grace and good humor of the Fount of Every Blessing. 

I’d never felt more alone than at that moment.

I Go to Church Because I am Weak (and the Church Needs Weaklings)

I think I was seven when I started wondering if I should kill myself. I shared a room with my brother, and I remember rolling over one insomniac night to ask him how he managed the agony of existence. What was the point? I didn’t have quite these words, not having read Keats yet, but—what was his plan for processing through this vale of tears?

He said he had no idea what I was talking about. What pain? Your life is fine.

I’d never felt more alone than at that moment. I suppose I realized right then that a certain tendency toward death—this gnawing sense of an ending—wasn’t in everyone. Not everyone wanted to destroy themselves. I bore a kind of mark, a burden, a weakness.

Things didn’t get much better from there, and if I’m honest in a way that is probably inappropriate, I still wrestle with suicidal ideation and recognize myself as a depressive. It’s something I’ve learned to manage, more or less, but whenever I hear about a suicide (a friend, even a celebrity) I’m… how do I say this… jealous. Like they’ve been granted entrance to the country I’ve long sought but to which I’ve never had the courage to get my passport stamped.

I realize this is a case of massively disordered loves. But I still need to be reminded, to be ordered, and that’s one more reason I go to church. I need to be told on the regular that my life is not my own, that I have been purchased by God and as such am valuable to Him, and also that I exist in and for a community of believers.

But another reason I go that sounds the same but is actually totally different is to share my pain with others. Not to share it because I need to get something off my chest, or because it’ll make me feel better, but to give some of it to them. Recently, I’ve been thinking that our pain, our weakness, is itself a gift, and, like most gifts, one we’re meant to share.

I’m not talking about absolution of sin or anything like that, nor even about theology or community or any of the other obvious ways in which going to church might be helpful for someone who is weak in certain ways. I mean I go to church to bring the treasure, the responsibility that is my particular set of weaknesses, to share with the gathered body as a ministry to them.

This is something I learned from my wife, God bless her. We go to an Anglican church in Seattle (it’s wonderful) and we’re both quite new to the tradition. In fact, we’re new to traditionalism itself. Part of Anglican liturgy is the public reading of Scripture. No exposition necessarily, just the reading aloud of the assigned bit from the Old and New Testaments each Sunday, by one of the parishioners. I love it; I love being ministered to in this way and by all manner of persons. (That fellow I’m inclined not to like? He brought us the good word from Isaiah during Advent!) Some readers are better than others, of course; some more practiced or with more musical voices. But we all work to make it happen.

Anyway, early in our church’s life, it was my wife’s turn to read, and she was assigned the passage from Revelation 21:1-4. She, aware of my struggles and wrapped in some of her own, a bit faltering and unused to the microphone, began: “He will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself will be with them.” But as she continued, the gravity of these promises pulled her earthward: “He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain any more, for the former things have passed away.”

She shattered.

There she was: pretty as a peach, a mother of two, standing atop this lovely carved lectern just disassembling right in front of us. It was great—because she didn’t apologize or anything. She just wept. She wept like these words were real. As if to say, Are these things really going to happen? Every tear?

I saw then what a ministry that was. A strong person could have composed themselves. In letting herself be weak, though, in front of all of us, she gave us the text in its proper gravity, gave us the promises of God afresh. Had she more poise, or polish, we might have just heard a monotone, forgettable rehearsal of a Bible verse. As it was, we witnessed something like a miracle, made completely of human frailty and God’s grace toward it.

My lack of composure helps to
establish our church as the kind
of place completely without the
veneer of respectability.

Moments like these have given all of us permission to offer our grief or vulnerability both to God and to each other in the progress of a church service. In my daily life, I’m a bit of a tough guy. Wrong side of the tracks, see? Built like the fighter I am (another weakness) and with a quick temper (I’m working on it), I’m the sort of person children instinctively quiet down around.

But in church nearly every Sunday, I bubble over with tears. I don’t just dab my eyes; I have to wipe my whole face most times. We pray the post-communion prayer about “assuring us in these most holy mysteries that we are living members of the body of your Son and heirs of your eternal kingdom” and I think, heirs? Us? And, oh that sweet assurance! And we are living, despite everything, living members! I just can’t contain myself. The things that have gone wrong in my life or in my neurobiology disallow strength or even neutrality in response to such guarantees.

I’m sure that’s upsetting for some people to see, but I hope that it’s also encouraging somehow (including to those same people). What it is, though, is permission. My lack of composure, my responsiveness to the liturgy, helps to establish our church as the kind of place completely without the veneer of respectability.

That’s a good thing, too, because, like most places I suppose, at St. Ambrose we attract a lot of broken types. The homeless woman who somehow brings little gifts for my kids each week. The Ukrainian lady whose husband flew himself back there from safety in America to help somehow and who sits red-eyed in the back for the whole service. Those people know to come to church and know how to be at this church in part because of the weakness with which my wife and I have been gifted. Does that make any sense?

My friend Richard Kenney has a poem that starts out,

The rocks look wrinkled and the sea sore
And what do the willows know of war?

That’s a great question. On the one hand, nature knows nothing of war. The trees never band together to fight off the bears, and when we humans are blowing each other up, nature just witnesses, presumably in mute horror. But on the other hand, the thing about willows is that they’re always weeping. What the poem teaches is the proper—almost we might say the real human—response to war. How is it that I just go about my life as though nothing is happening? At least the willows have the good sense to cry about it.

Most of us have some version of this to offer. When our deacon’s wife had a miscarriage, they knew to bring their pain to church because another congregant had been open about—had publicly grieved over—their struggles with fertility. But if they hadn’t, might the deacon and his wife have considered it a private matter? Would they have grieved silently? What might that pressure have done to their marriage?

We live in a time and in a country of avoidance, almost of phobia, when it comes to pain. But the Church is blessedly an outpost of an eternal kingdom and so should operate outside either of those borders. We are a people healed by stripes! Is it so unimaginable that our pain can be a gift not only for our hallowing but as a means of grace to others? After all, our redemption comes through another’s pain: the sweet rivers of redeeming love flow from a wound.

Church is a lot of things for me: the center of my social and artistic life, the place I practice my actual talents, for music, for leadership—but I love it in part because I’m a weakling who can hardly stand to stand up most mornings and the church was made for, and needs, people like me.

Conclusion

I hear Christians talking all the time about how they love Jesus but they don’t like the church. I used to talk that way—like all I needed was the Bible, prayer, and Jesus. Like all the churches had got it wrong somehow. And maybe they have. Maybe no institution is perfect this side of glory. But we’re still tasked with being in this one, with becoming all together the bride of Christ, she for whom Christ sacrificed himself, the beloved.

I think of church differently now. It’s no longer an extra thing I do on the weekend. In fact, the practice of churchgoing has so risen in my esteem that nearly everything else has become secondary. I am not a professor who goes to church; I am a churchman who is a professor. Church—and more specifically, the eucharistic table—is now the center of my life. The narrative in my head plays out as a series of encounters at the altar rail: there’s a Sunday, then an etcetera into which I fit most of my waking hours, then another Sunday.

And there’s a thousand reasons—O for a thousand tongues to sing!  requested Charles Wesley—for the reversal, but I’ve just got this one tongue, and this day on which to share some of them. I am still learning to die to myself, still learning to discern the Holy Spirit’s voice amid the noise I have created in my life and in my soul, but the desert is different for me now; I wander no more, and if I thirst—oh taste and see!—I know the spring from whence refreshment comes. 

Photos by K. Mitch Hodge and Stephanie LeBlanc on Unsplash.

Mischa Willett is the author of The Elegy Beta (2020) and Phases (2017) and editor of Philip James Bailey’s Festus (2022). His poems, essays, translations, and academic articles appear in a wide range of venues. He teaches English at Seattle Pacific University. More information can be found at www.mischawillett.com.