One summer morning a number of years ago I sat in a large room, filled with nearly a hundred people. They were all strangers, so I had picked an isolated seat in the back row. After some words and music, a man stood in front of us and began to speak, his hands gesturing, his arms sometimes angling outward in a gesture of embrace. His face was lit with a smile, then a look of puzzlement, followed by all the other expressions that might cross the face of a pastor on a Sunday morning. He was preaching, and while I heard his words, they didn’t resonate in my body or work their way into my heart.
Halfway through his sermon, I got up and walked out. There was nothing here for me.
I had spent many years before this Sunday morning in a state of disbelief. Every day during that time, I had walked or driven past one church or another, past these steepled buildings that reminded me of my younger years growing up in the world of religion. But I had left my childhood and adolescence behind and had come to believe I no longer needed the beliefs, rituals, and community offered by religion.
So what exactly was drawing me back to a worship service on that particular Sunday morning? Was I seeking the piety of my childhood; the piety that quickly melted away when I entered the harsher world of adolescence? Or was I trying to recapture the sense of belonging that had survived into my twenties – friendships, familiar faces and voices every Sunday, the gathering together of a community.
Whatever I was after, here I was on that summer Sunday morning, trying hard to listen, to find a way in, and failing completely.
The Bible tells us that if we knock, the door will be opened.
I was knocking.
So why did the door remain shut?
Writing teacher Peter Elbow says that the best writing in the world cannot be received unless we open our mind to the words. Surely the same is true of the spoken words of a sermon. So the question is, “Why wasn’t my mind open and receptive?” In other words, what barriers kept the preacher’s words out?
A quick look around our modern culture shows how easy it is to find such barriers. Plain unwillingness to believe in anything beyond the material reality which we see around us leaves some with no sense of spirituality at all.
Others, who are not willing to embrace atheism, who long for more than a merely material existence, find certain points of religious doctrine unacceptable. Some are put off by the patriarchal aspects of traditional faith.
And then there is the past. Glance back over history and you find a litany of sins committed in the name of God. Although in the long run of history the good done day to day may balance out and even greatly outweigh the bad, these kindly and beneficial acts are often lost in the shadows cast by religious war, by the misuse of power by religious institutions, and by the many flaws of ordinary believers.
But the failures of the past weren’t a real barrier for me. Why should the abuse of religion and the shortcomings of believers ages ago be a barrier to religious fulfillment today?
No. My barriers were much closer to home; they were to be found in my own life. I needed to examine my own history, not study the church’s. My answer for years to questions of God and faith had been, “How can I possibly know?” This response marked me as an agnostic, not an atheist.
But my stance as one who can’t know concealed something deeper, covering over deep disappointment, even bitterness, at certain of life’s outcomes. I had lost the understanding, or perhaps never possessed it in the first place, that religion can be strongest when we suffer loss, when some of life’s hopes and desires just don’t work out.
It was after years of living this life that I ended up walking into a worship service on that summer Sunday morning years ago. Even though I later walked out, it should be clear by now that my failure to respond to the sermon was in no way the fault of the pastor.
In fact, he is my pastor today, and I am glad to receive his ministry and care and to hear his words. A year and a half passed between the day I walked out in the middle of his sermon and the day that I eagerly returned. The day when the door remained closed and the day it swung open. What happened in between?
During the months before I returned for good, in my wanderings through the internet, I found a writer who frequently declared, “People today have nothing to believe in.” These words caught in my mind so that I often found myself echoing this phrase.
It took me a long time to realize that I wasn’t lamenting the fate of others. Instead I was mourning my own lack of belief. I was confronting the emptiness inside. An emptiness that could no longer be concealed by the busyness of day to day, by the glittering distractions that modern culture throws in our eyes.
It was sometime later that I felt a powerful urge to return to worship.
This time, when I knocked, the door opened.
Now that I have been a believer again for quite a few years, I wonder if there aren’t other people like I was years ago, wandering around the edges of faith, trying to find their way inside, into a world they sense is special, even essential. But the way is blocked.
Are you out there, searching? Have you knocked but received no answer?
Is the door still shut?
Don’t give up. You may be closer than you think.
