I have never been enthralled with formal religion, and my husband’s utterly rabid atheism ensures its absence from our home. But my own beliefs include a sense of the wonder of the universe and I have some sort of vague but valued spirituality, which includes an also vague but loved and kindly god, perhaps looking down on us with gentle fondness. On Sunday last, my 87 year old mother dragged me to her church, the First Congregational Church of Portland—she preferred not to drive and there was a party for her significant other’s 90th birthday party immediately after the service. I go with her perhaps once a year, when she urges, begs, occasionally demands that I do so.
I am always intrigued with my own reaction to these services (which I try so hard to avoid). I usually find the sermons of interest, urging human behaviours of which I approve, containing little or nothing that I find genuinely objectionable. The church itself is a thing of beauty. In front, behind the alter and the organ, there are two or three beautiful wooden spires towering about the congregation. Attached to these are lovely swirling, three-lobed carvings, presumably representing the trinity. To the sides are dramatic stained glass windows, with biblical scenes to one side and nature’s beauty to the other. The congregation is arranged in a semi-circle, seated in conventional wooden pews, with little slots for hymnals and for the tiny cups handed out at communion. There is a balcony available as well. The preacher is dressed in flowing black robes, with a colorful satin cloth draped around his neck and down the front.
This church, whose members tend to be upper middle class, considers itself ‘open and affirming’, which means that they invite people in off the street and they welcome the gay and lesbian community proactively. They do good works, they invite artists to display their art in excellent monthly exhibits. There are many reasons I should approve of this church, despite the difference in our world views. God’s place in the world view displayed at the church is far more central than in my own—which focuses more on people and their/our actions.
Anyway, the personal reaction that confuses me is the degree to which I am touched by what happens in church. We say The Lord’s Prayer (which my mother paid me in my childhood to learn by heart—and I still remember), we sing Doxology (a song I also know by heart and that reminds me of my grandfather, who was a preacher in a Congregational Church). This Sunday, near the 4th of July, we sang America the Beautiful (a song I learned as a child, and which I sang when I was homesick, living in Turkey, far from home). The church is also renowned for its excellent music. This Sunday the choir sang some lovely songs, and there was a nice solo; other Sundays they’ve had a fantastic group that plays bells and chimes. There are also readings to which the congregation responds, also reading. Some of these I also find touching. Both in songs and in readings, I find myself unable to continue singing or speaking, because the tears are in my eyes and my throat closes.
In East Kalimantan, when doing ethnographic research among Uma’ Jalan Kenyah Dayaks in 1979 and ’80, I attended the local church services occasionally. Their church was a very different one, in a rude building (though better than people’s homes), with crude benches for the congregation, an ordinary table for the altar, simple beams for the cross. A version of Christianity had been pressed upon them by fundamentalist American Christian missionaries (reinforced by a government that had insisted at gunpoint in the 1960s that they choose Christianity or Islam over their recent animist beliefs). Their Christian religion was called KINGMI. The people were genuine in their then-current commitment to Christianity, nonetheless. One sermon I remember had me chuckling a bit, because they used the term, daging, to translate ‘flesh’. Daging is the term used in daily life for ‘meat’—which struck me as funny, if technically correct. The preacher, trained by the missionaries, also called for a division of labour within the household that replicated the American sex roles of the 1950s: Dayak women were encouraged to bring their husbands some tea or coffee when the husbands returned home from the fields. I found this both amusing and irritating, since these people were far more equitable in terms of sex roles than most groups, and in fact the women were more consistently involved in hard agricultural labour than the men.
But the point of this diversion is that despite these ways in which I disagreed with what was being said, I remember vividly the feeling of community oneness that came over me in one of these Kenyah services. The congregation was singing together—it could have been during a rendition of one of those songs I knew so well, sung in Indonesian. I don’t remember, but what I do remember is that I suddenly understood something new about religion that I had never fully experienced myself. This community (or at least this congregation—there was another, Catholic group that worshipped separately) was acting and feeling as one in a way that was touching and meaningful to me.
I ask myself why, when I am actually rather agnostic, I am so touched by these church services. Is it their links to my distant childhood, my family connections? I am also intrigued that although they are meaningful at some level, I do not seek them out, nor even find them pleasurable. They touch something in me, related to my values; they are deep and somehow painful—perhaps it is in my realization of my own impotence in bringing about the desirable conditions and good actions that so many of us, human beings, want.