Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church

by Rachel Held Evans

  In my struggle to find church, I’ve often felt that if I could just find the right denomination or the right congregation, if I could just become the right person or believe the right things, then my search would be over at last. But right’s got nothing to do with it. Waiting around for right will leave you waiting around forever.

  The church is God saying: “I’m throwing a banquet, and all these mismatched, messed-up people are invited. Here, have some wine.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  Wine

  Oh, taste and see that the LORD is good!

  —Psalm 34:8 ESV

  EARLY IN HIS MINISTRY, BEFORE CROWDS, RUMORS, AND threats followed him everywhere, Jesus attended a wedding at Cana. It was just the sort of event the man was known to love, packed with eating and drinking, music and laughter, the scent of roasted lamb mingling with the perfume of flower garlands, the sweet taste of pomegranate, raisins, dates, and honey, the roar of animated conversations between family and friends punctuated by the music of bangles clinking around the women’s wrists. In first-century Palestine, even modest weddings were marked by three to four days of feasting. So when the wine ran out, the hosts—probably close relatives of Jesus without much money to spare—faced serious social embarrassment.

  Wine in this era was not a luxury. The scarcity of water, and its frequent contamination, made wine a necessity for cooking, nourishment, and hospitality. Along with grain and oil, the presence of wine indicated God’s blessing on a community, while its absence signaled a curse. Wine was a staple, the stuff of life.

  Concerned for their hosts, Mary informed Jesus of the situation, apparently expecting her son to do something in response. According to John’s account, Jesus resisted at first, but in an odd exchange that I suspect would make more sense if we had the benefit of observing facial expressions and tone, Jesus changed his mind. (Even the Messiah, it seems, obeys his mama.) He instructed the servants to fill six empty stone pots with water. Used for Jewish purification rituals, each pot held twenty to thirty gallons, and the servants filled them to the brim. When the party-planner drew from the pots to take a sip, he couldn’t believe it. The water had turned to wine! And 150 gallons of it, far more than they would ever need. This, John reports, “was the first of the signs through which [Jesus] revealed his glory” (2:11).

  It was a strange way to start a ministry—turning water into wine. And what sort of sign is it anyway, ensuring that a simple wedding feast carry on?

  It may be tempting to dismiss the miracle and Cana as a mere magic trick, an example of Jesus flexing his messianic muscles before getting to the real work of restoring sight to the blind and helping the paralyzed off their mats. But this is only because we have such a hard time believing that God cares about our routine realities, that God’s glory resides in the stuff of everyday life, just waiting to be seen.

  “God works through life, through people, and through physical, tangible and material reality to communicate his healing presence in our lives,” explains Robert E. Webber when describing the principle of sacrament. “God does not meet us outside of life in an esoteric manner. Rather, he meets us through life incidents, and particularly through the sacraments of the church. Sacrament, then, is a way of encountering the mystery.”56

  This is the purpose of the sacraments, of the church—to help us see, to point to the bread and wine, the orchids and the food pantries, the post-funeral potlucks and the post-communion dance parties, and say: pay attention, this stuff matters; these things are holy.

  “Sacredness requires specificity,” says Milton Brasher-Cunningham, a minister and chef. “The grand esoteric themes of theology have their place, but love takes root in those specific moments when we voluntarily and intentionally enter one another’s pain.”57

  Or enter one another’s joy, one another’s family, one another’s messes, one another’s suppers.

  Indeed, the word sacrament is derived from a Latin phrase which means “to make holy.” When hit with the glint of love’s light, even ordinary things become holy. And when received with open hands in the spirit of eucharisteo, the signs and wonders of Jesus never cease. The 150-plus gallons of wine at Cana point to a generous God, a God who never runs out of holy things. This is the God who, much to the chagrin of Jonah, saved the rebellious city of Nineveh, the God who turned five loaves of bread and a couple of fish into a lunch to feed five thousand with baskets of leftovers to spare. This God is like a vineyard manager who pays a full day’s wage for just one hour of work, or like a shepherd who leaves his flock in search of a single lamb, or like a father who welcomes his prodigal son home with a robe, a ring, and a feast.

  We have the choice, every day, to join in the revelry, to imbibe the sweet wine of undeserved grace, or to pout like Jonah, argue fairness like the vineyard employees, resent our own family like the prodigal’s older brother. At its best, the church administers the sacraments by feeding, healing, forgiving, comforting, and welcoming home the people God loves. At its worst, the church withholds the sacraments in an attempt to lock God in a theology, a list of rules, a doctrinal statement, a building.

  But our God is in the business of transforming ordinary things into holy things, scraps of food into feasts and empty purification vessels into fountains of fine wine. This God knows his way around the world, so there’s no need to fear, no need to withhold, no need to stake a claim. There’s always enough—just taste and see. There’s always and ever enough.

  PART V

  Confirmation

  TWENTY-THREE

  Breath

  Jesus said, “Peace be with you! As the Father has sent me, I am sending you.” And with that he breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit.”

  —John 20:21–22

  THE SPIRIT IS LIKE BREATH, AS CLOSE AS THE LUNGS, THE chest, the lips, the fogged canvas where little fingers draw hearts, the tide that rises and falls twenty-three thousand times a day in a rhythm so intimate we forget to notice until it enervates or until a supine yogi says pay attention and its fragile power awes again. Inhale. Exhale. Expand. Release. In the beginning, God breathed. And the dust breathed back enough oxygen, water, and carbon dioxide to make an atmosphere, to make a man. Job knew life as “the breath of God in my nostrils,” given and taken away. With breath, the Creator kindled the stars, parted a sea, woke a valley of dry bones, inspired a sacred text. So, too, the Spirit, inhaled and exhaled in a million quotidian ways, animates, revives, nourishes, sustains, speaks. It is as near as the nose and as everywhere as the air, so pay attention.

  The Spirit is like fire, deceptively polite in its dance atop the wax and wick of our church candles, but wild and mercurial as a storm when unleashed. Fire holds no single shape, no single form. It can roar through a forest or fulminate in a cannon. It can glow in hot coals or flit about in embers. But it cannot be held. The living know it indirectly—through heat, through light, through tendrils of smoke snaking through the sky, through the scent of burning wood, through the itch of ash in the eye. Fire consumes. It creates in its destroying and destroys in its creating. The furnace that smelts the ore drives off slag, and the flame that refines the metal purifies the gold. The fire that torches a centuries-old tree can crack open her cones and spill out their seeds. When God led his people through the wilderness, the Spirit blazed in a fire that rested over the tabernacle each night. And when God made the church, the Spirit blazed in little fires that rested over his people’s heads. “Quench not the Spirit,” the apostle wrote. It is as necessary and as dangerous as fire, so stay alert; pay attention.

  The Spirit is like a seal, an emblem bearing the family crest, a promise of belonging, protection, favor. Like a signet ring to soft wax, the Spirit impresses the supple heart with the power and prestige of God, and no one—not kings, not presidents, not the wealthy, nor the magisterium—can take that identity away. The bond of God is made of viscous stuff. He has put his seal on us, wrote the apostle, and given us his Spirit in our hearts as a guarantee (2 Corinth
ians 1:22). In the rite of confirmation, which acknowledges the presence of the Spirit in a believer’s life, a thumb to the forehead reminds God’s children of their mark: the seal of the gift of the Holy Spirit. It’s as invisible as your breath but as certain as your skin, so pay attention; don’t forget who you are.

  The Spirit is like wind, earth’s oldest sojourner, which in one place readies a sail, in another whittles a rock, in another commands the trees to bow, in another gently lifts a bridal veil. Wind knows no perimeter. The wildest of all wild things, it travels to every corner of a cornerless world and amplifies the atmosphere. It smells like honeysuckle, curry, smoke, sea. It feels like a kiss, a breath, a burn, a sting. It can whisper or whistle or roar, bend and break and inflate. It can be harnessed, but never stopped or contained; its effects observed while its essence remains unseen. To chase the wind is folly, they say, to try and tame it the very definition of futility. “The wind blows wherever it pleases,” Jesus said. “You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit” (John 3:8). We are born into a windy world, where the Spirit is steady as a breeze and as strong as a hurricane. There is no city, no village, no wilderness where you cannot find it, so pay attention.

  The Spirit is like a bird, fragile alloy of heaven and earth, where wind and feather and flight meet breath and blood and bones. The rabbis imagined her as a pigeon, the Celts a wild goose. Like a dove, she glided over the primordial waters, hovered above Mary’s womb, and descended onto Jesus’ dripping wet head. She protected Israel like an eagle, and like a hen, brooded over her chicks. “Hide me in the shadow of your wings,” the poet king wrote. “Because you are my help, I sing in the shadow of your wings” (Psalm 17:8, 63:7). The Spirit is as common as a cooing pigeon and transcendent as a high-flying eagle. So look up and sing back, catch the light of God in a diaphanous scrim of wing. Pay attention.

  The Spirit is like a womb, from which the living are born again. We emerge—lashes still wet from the water, eyes unadjusted to the light—into a reanimated and freshly charged world. There are so many new things to see, so many gifts to give and receive, so many miracles to baffle and amaze, if only we pay attention, if only we let the Spirit surprise and God catch our breath.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Wayside Shrines

  How far I have to go to find you in whom I have already arrived!

  —Thomas Merton

  FOUR MONTHS AFTER THE MISSION’S LAST SUNDAY, I sped down Route 278 in Northwest Alabama, the windows of the Acclaim rolled all the way down and Gillian Welch singing the Elvis Presley blues from the speakers. A hot August sun summoned fingers of steam from the asphalt that grabbed vainly at my tires as they tumbled past another tractor supply store, another barbecue joint, another Baptist church. The air conditioner didn’t work—at least not without shrill objections from the compressor belt—but the morning air was redolent of earth and pine and cool enough as long as I kept moving. With each mile marker that whizzed by, the sun rose higher in the sky and the destination ahead grew sharper in my imagination.

  “All guests who present themselves are to be welcomed as Christ,” St. Benedict wrote in his Rule, which has guided fifteen centuries of monastic life for monks and nuns across the world. “Proper honor must be shown to all, especially to those who share our faith and to pilgrims.”

  Perhaps it was this promise of an open door that inspired my pilgrimage to St. Bernard Abbey in Cullman, Alabama—a quiet Benedictine monastery hidden in eight hundred acres of loblolly pines. Or maybe, after what seemed in hindsight like a recklessly untethered church-planting enterprise, I longed for something anchored, something old.

  Built in 1891 by German immigrants whose community dated back to the 700s, St. Bernard houses a community of around twenty monks, a prep school, a hospitality center, and the famous Ave Maria Grotto—a sprawling, folk art–style miniature village created by resident Brother Joseph in the 1920s and ’30s and a popular tourist attraction for people who like sprawling, folk art–style miniature villages, or who are on their way to Florida and need a stretch. I’d called ahead to secure a room within the monastery, which I found simple but well-appointed and mercifully cool, thanks to a window unit that greeted me with a cheery, guttural yawn. The guestmaster left the key hanging from a thumbtack on a corkboard in one of the compound’s vast and silent hallways, where the air itself seemed fragile enough to break. I blushed as each of my steps echoed like gunfire in the deserted cloister, certain the sound waves alone were enough to topple the porcelain Virgin watching from the glass table in the corner. For a moment I wondered if a three-day visit was too ambitious, if even a lifelong introvert could stay this still.

  I found my way to the church about an hour before evening mass and settled into a back pew. Afternoon light poured in through the wide clerestory windows, setting the sandstone walls, columns, and parabolic arches aglow. Ahead, a ten-foot Byzantine-style crucifix hung suspended over the stone altar, depicting Christ crucified on one side and Christ victorious on the other. The ceiling above, made of stained Alabama pine, reminded me of Bible Chapel, or of the hull of a ship, upturned. Below was a blue slate floor, dark and cold as the sea.

  Carved into the columns that flanked the nave, as if supporting the sanctuary with their shoulders, were the figures of ten saints. Among them were John the Baptist, looking frazzled as always with his disheveled hair and protruding ribs, King David holding a lyre and crown, St. Boniface wearing a scowl and brandishing the ax he used to cut down the oaks of pagan worship, and St. Bernard, the monastery’s patron, bearing both a crosier and a sword, his role as an apologist for the failed second crusade unforgotten even among his fans. (I confess I had rather hoped to see a portrayal of the Lactation of St. Bernard, the oft-depicted scene from a legend in which the saint kneeled before a nursing Madonna and was hit with a squirt of milk from her breasts, curing him of an eye infection. The image always makes me smile.)

  It was a Monday, so as the five o’clock hour approached, only a few gathered for mass. A smattering of students, teachers, and parishioners walked in one by one, dipping their fingers in stoups of holy water, crossing themselves, and genuflecting before the crucifix before finding places in the pews, their bodies spaced out like the pieces on a chessboard at the end of a game. Finally, a line of robed monks filed into the choir, took their places, and began to chant. Their voices rose and receded like the shadows playing on the walls, and it was as if the sanctuary suddenly woke up, its stones inhaling and exhaling the timbre of ancient, holy songs.

  “Glory to God in the highest. And on earth peace to men of good will. We praise you. We bless you. We adore you . . .”

  “Holy, holy, holy Lord God of hosts. Heaven and earth are full of your glory . . .”

  “Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world, have mercy on us . . .”

  I fumbled my way through the Kyrie, Gloria, and Sanctus, watching the people around me for cues for when to kneel, cross myself, and mumble along. Everything proceeded with a sort of hushed routine, a shared familiarity that made me feel like a tourist to these people’s faith. The Catholic Church discourages non-Catholics from receiving the Eucharist, so I remained in my seat as the twenty or so congregants approached the altar to receive the elements. The “Not Catholic?” part of my brochure suggested I use this moment to “pray for the reunification of the church,” which, though I’m sure it was unintended, sounded a lot like, “You sit here and think about that schism you caused.”

  It wasn’t until the next afternoon—after the monks chanted through Vespers at the conclusion of mass, after dinner was taken in silence in the refectory, after we sang the sweet prayers of Compline together in the empty and darkened church, after the Grand Silence of the night hours, after struggling to make it to Morning Prayer at six a.m., after a silent breakfast, after two glorious hours spent reading Julian of Norwich in the sunshine by the lake, after accidentally locking myself out of
my room—that I actually had a conversation with someone.

  “I’ve just been dying to talk to you!” said Susan, the blonde, middle-aged woman with a Virginia accent who sat across from me at the guest table at lunch. She spooled her spaghetti around her fork with attentive vim, her nails painted magenta, a tangle of gold and silver bracelets catching the light. “Well, I’ve been dying to talk to anyone, really. I didn’t realize they kept silence during breakfast and dinner.”

  “Silent breakfast is fine by me,” I said. “I’m not exactly a morning person.”

  Susan released a generous peal of laughter, startling an elderly monk at the other table. “I don’t like silent anything. And yet here I am! But isn’t this place wonderful? I mean, you can positively feel the presence of the saints in every room. When my husband said he had business in Irondale and wanted me to come along, I found this place on the Internet and took it as a sign.”

  Irondale was a solid hour away, but Susan struck me as the type to take everything as a sign.

  “And what brings you here?” she asked, her face pinned with delighted expectancy.

  “I’m a writer from the Chattanooga area, and I’ve been studying the subject of silence for a project I’m working on. So I thought: what better place to learn about silence than a Benedictine monastery?”

  Just as I had rehearsed. No mention of books (or they ask for titles), no mention of the blog (or they assume I’m a mom), no mention of religion (or they get weird). You don’t become a Silver Medallion member with Delta without learning a few things about small talk.