My family and I got kicked out of church when I was a kid. Actually, we kicked ourselves out. There I am in my lacy white dress, circa Christmas eve 1988, obediently sitting in the massive sanctuary beside my dad. My mom lingers outside the doors, watching my two year old brother zoom around the hallway. The other two year olds are in the nursery or sitting by their parents, but my brother doesn’t like the nursery and won’t sit anywhere at all for longer than a few moments at a stretch. Our church going has dropped off since he was born, but we always make an exception for the night we dim the lights and strike matches to candles and sing Silent Night. We don’t talk about God much at home, but something about this night of candlelight and Christmas hymns feels magical to me. 

It feels magical to my mom too. And maybe that’s why she relaxes, as the notes of the old hymns drift out through the heavy wooden doors. And that’s when a latecomer to service pushes open one of those doors, and my brother bolts into the sanctuary. I hear the rustles coming from the back of the sanctuary, and at first I ignore them, focusing on the tiny rivers of wax running down my little white candle. But the noises ripple towards me, and when I look up I see my brother, running straight down the church’s center aisle toward the massive candles burning on the altar. My mother is quick-stepping behind him, but she’s in heels, and he has a head start, and the congregation is frozen as my brother jumps onto the altar without a break in his stride. He weaves around the candles so tightly that one of them wobbles back and forth, and the congregation gasps. By the time my father and I rise to our feet,  my mother is containing him, the minister takes a breath, the unscheduled show is over and the Christmas service can go on. And go on it does, without another hitch, without another difference except for a few backslappy men at the end making light with my father about the whole thing. 

My mother will not make light of it. She will decide that church is too much. And no one offers to help her figure out a way to make it not too much again, to figure out how we can fit into this community in this building that’s big enough to park a Boeing inside. No one writes us a note or gives us a call when we stop showing up at all. My parents insist they are fine with this. Church is a personal choice. If we want to show up, it’s our business. If we don’t – well, that’s our business too. My parents still call it our church, but we don’t go again for years. I cut to the chase, or what to me, feels like the truth. We didn’t have a church.

Here’s the thing. Not going to church in the community where I grew up was kind of like being the only freshman not to pledge a sorority on a Greek campus. EVERYONE went to church. Okay, I’m sure they didn’t, but many people did go (Wednesdays and Sundays both!) and even the ones who didn’t go regularly still seemed to have an affiliation with some kind of religious group or other. Because our church going waned while I was so young, I didn’t have my head around, you know, any kind of spiritual component to the experience. The magical glow when we lit the Christmas candles was the closest I ever got, and once that ended with a bang the faith of church was lost to me. To me, church felt like a social club that didn’t want us.

It didn’t help that my religious exposure came in the form of other kids, who weren’t equipped to enlighten us non-religious kids with divine truth. Of course they tried anyway. Sample conversation:

FIRST BOYFRIEND: You have to completely and utterly believe in God and Jesus Christ.

ME: What if I don’t?

FIRST BF: You have to.

ME: Why do I have to?

FIRST BF: Because you have to believe in Jesus and God to get into heaven. Everyone who gets in, believes.

ME: What if I’m not sure?

FIRST BF: Then your soul is going to hell.

ME: (silence)

FIRST BF: (silence)

ME: What?

FIRST BF: (slightly choked up) I’m just really sad for you right now. Because I know where your soul is going.

I wasn’t sold, especially as he told me that people guilty of murder and rape and all manner of Really Evil Thing-Doers would go straight to heaven as long as they sincerely believed in the Holy Trinity, while I would literally be on fire for all eternity for daring to question the existence of God. 

This was about the time my perspective on church turned from feeling left out to feeling scornful. The kid at school who argued passionately for creationism – come on, hadn’t he read our science textbook? The young man at the hayride who earnestly told us the earth was thousands of years old and mocked evolution – seriously? The Young Life minster and his wife who invited me to their events – stop trying to recruit me into your Jesus army. 

With the exception of the minister and his wife, who I didn’t give the least chance to, the message of these holy recruiters was clear – there was no room for questioners. So, they had a lock on the father, son and Holy Spirit. Fine. I had 9th grade science and my parents’ subscription to Time magazine and all the confidence of a book-smart socially fragile high schooler who couldn’t wait to blow out of her small town. And when I finally did blow out of my small town, one of the safest places on my college campus was….temple.

I took my friend Matt up on his invitation to go to temple because it felt like just that – an invitation, not a thinly veiled attempt to push Jesus down my throat. I didn’t know the customs or the language or the songs, but somehow that was all right. In temple, I could sit there, knowing and yet not knowing what was going on, but it felt okay to just be. 

So, God and I weren’t done. Church and I weren’t done, either. One night in college, feeling like the depression demons were feasting on my insides, I was pacing around campus. On a whim, I tried the door of the church building, and it was open. I slid into one of the middle pews and sat, breathing in the silence. There was no miracle fix for the pain I was feeling that night. But being in the empty church felt like when you’re sick and someone who cares covers you with a blanket. 

A few years later, depression was breaking me yet again, and I scraped together enough money to pay for my own therapy. I didn’t set out to seek counseling with a religious tone, but of the choices I could afford, I liked the sound of the pastoral counseling center the best. Jesus, I swear you come after me in the most innovative ways, you sneaky Pete. 

The therapist who walked into the room turned out to be someone I’d known since childhood – one of the nice ladies at the pool, the mom of a girl a year or so younger than me. In my family, she was known as Mrs. F, mother of Leila, aren’t they lovely, both of them always so sweet and smiling. I came to know her as Joan. She was the therapist who got me to take SSRI’s, kindly yet firmly arguing over multiple sessions that they really could help me, sharing with me that she’d taken them herself. 

Within a few weeks of the SSRI’s hitting my brain, the dark clouds that haunted my mind for years started to recede. I went from frequent crying and yelling in my sessions with Joan (bless you Joan, for tolerating this and caring about me during it all) to talking, thoughtfully, like a hurting-but-figuring-it-out human being. Living with depression really does feel like having a storm cloud trapped under your skull, and once the cloud finally broke over mine, I started noticing more. Like, the poster on the wall of Joan’s waiting room, that said “Everyone is a child of God. Everyone is important.”

Joan and I never talked about the poster. We never prayed in our sessions, or had an overtly religious component. It could be because of my liberal use of the work “fuck” in our early sessions together. More likely, it was because between my stubborn refusal to take medications and my limited therapy sessions, we had so much ground to cover that it probably didn’t make sense to pause and talk holy-like with a professed skeptic who needed lots of other help. But, the poster struck me as a deep and simple truth. Years later, after I’d had my daughter and depression-slash-mania broke me good, the message of that poster made me feel brave enough to try going someplace I never thought I would – back to a church service. 

Photo credits: love cross by James Chan, ornaments by Erika Varga, alone by John Hain, monster by Marketa Bouskova and Star of David by hurk. All from Pixabay.