Posted By Melissa Bartell on December 12, 2010
Candlelight | Source: Morguefile.com | Click to embiggen
Reposted from my personal blog by request. Please note: during the month of December, I’m participating in a project called Holidailies, where bloggers commit to daily posts from St. Nicholas Day (12/6) through Epiphany (1/6). References to prompts are related to this project.
I don’t blog about church very often, because I think faith is personal. I don’t want a lecture about your religion, and I’m betting you don’t want a speech about mine. But today’s prompt is “religion in the holiday season,” so it seems appropriate.
Most years, we limit church to Sunday mornings, and we’re not terribly good about attending. Most years, we see churches in the evening only for Christmas Eve services, and sometimes special events like Lessons & Carols.
Tonight, however, found us sitting in church at 7:00 PM on a Friday evening, for a special “vespers” service, and while I still haven’t processed the entire evening, I wanted to take a moment and acknowledge the special feeling that comes from feeling connected to a community.
I’m a spiritual person, but I’ve never been a particularly religious one. I think a lot of that was reaction to spending a lot of my childhood surrounded by people whose religion was very conservative, and whose faith was the first part of their identity. When I was thirteen, I told my grandparents I didn’t believe in God, and a wise family friend stopped my grandmother’s melodramatic heart-clutching and gasping by explaining that such a statement was normal, and that as an upper middle-class thirteen-year-old girl who never had to worry about food being on the table or a roof being over her head, I simply didn’t NEED God at that point in my life.
I’m not thirteen any more, and I’m married to a man whose faith is deeply important to him, who sings Christian praise music with as much fervor as I sing show tunes, and who also understands that while our fundamental beliefs in being good people, and being good to others and doing good works in the world are the same, we use different language to describe them. We used to go to the Episcopal church together, and now we attend a warm, funky Unitarian Universalist church, and either way, we each have our own relationship with the divine, and more often than not it merges.
At Christmas time, like most people who grew up with any kind of Christian background – like my culturally Catholic Italian-American family, I crave more of the magic, the mystery, the ritual at church, but I also crave the soft welcoming touch of connection, and the certainty of being part of the family of humanity. So our new tradition is that we participate in our own church’s Christmas Eve services, and then we go find a midnight mass to attend after.
But, you say, tonight isn’t Christmas Eve.
No.
But it’s still the season of Advent, and even if the service tonight had nothing to do with Christmas in the literal sense, it had everything to do with community and connection and the burgeoning hope that bubbles forth from people who have those two things.
I said in church tonight that I’d been struggling with faith, lately, and letting myself disconnect more than I’d planned.
I’m not going to make any lofty promises about being perfect and getting a gold star for perfect spiritual attendance, because sometimes I’m closer to God when I skip church and spend Sunday morning cuddling my dogs or wrapping myself in the power of language by writing a letter or reading a good book than I am when I’m sitting in the sanctuary thinking I’m not into the whole breathe in-breathe out meditation thing that has become part of our service. (With no offense meant to those who do like that sort of thing. It doesn’t work for me, but it’s not going to kill me either. Me? I meditate by writing. Or singing.)
But I am going to be more AWARE of when I disconnect too much, and I am going to try and analyze what I’m feeling when I want to skip church, and be more open with myself.
Tonight I was called back into covenant, not just with God or the people I share my faith with or anything, but with myself, and as a friend recently reminded me, we’re in relationships with ourselves for our entire lives.
Tonight, singing pop songs with a sacred tone and sacred songs with a dance beat and, yes, breathing in and breathing out, I had one of those minor epiphanies that occur when, for the space of a breath or the length of a heartbeat, we are at one with the Universe and we recognize it.
Tonight, was a holy night.
But really, aren’t they all?
YOUR TURN: What were your thoughts about Friday night? Are you still processing? Answer in comments or write a post of your very own!
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Tags: advent, identity, vespers
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