Church Going

I still remember with radiant clarity the day I stopped going to church. It was an unbelievably bright Sunday morning, light from the window spilling all over the bed I was lying in. There was something about the brightness of that light yoked with an image I had held in my head for many years while I attended Mass like a dumb ox, and suddenly I found myself saying to my wife, "I'm not going to church this morning. I'm not going to Mass anymore." Those words that morning were a declaration of independence. They were also a volley in the ongoing war between my wife and me. She was a Catholic who played by all the rules. She questioned neither church rules nor doctrines; she took everything as a given. Until a few years earlier I had been the same way myself. But that morning I was declaring my independence from those rules that made no sense to me. One of the rules, at least as the nuns in school had given them to us, was that if you deliberately missed Mass, even once, you would go to Hell and burn for all eternity. On that morning in 1967 I stunned myself by deciding to risk Hell. I would no longer go to church, attending a Mass I didn't understand, and depart an hour later no different and no spiritually richer than when I had gone in.

Later, during the years my sons were growing up, I returned to Mass. Ostensibly I did it for them, but I was also going for my own reasons. I had discovered by accident, when my now ex-wife asked me one morning to take the kids to the family program, how interesting the speaker at that program was and how pleasant it was to get to know the other people attending. But beyond these lesser interests was a wish that had been with me from as early as I can remember: a wish for a place that was beyond the relative, beyond time, beyond doubt, a place of certitude in which Truth existed with a capital T and to which all lesser truths would have to yield.

When my sons left home for college in the late 80s and early 90s, they stopped going to church; not much later so did I, once again. I left because there was no longer a family program for me to attend and because I had no sons to go with and because I found I was still a dumb ox passively watching Mass and because it still didn't make sense: the words, the gestures, the ceremonies did not affect me the way a poem, a novel, a film, a painting, or a piece of music could.

But something larger was at stake. For many years I had found it difficult to reconcile the universe the astronomers were discovering with the universe as presented in organized religion. The final stroke was a passage I ran across in 1996 in Timothy Ferris's Coming of Age in the Milky Way. He says, "If we possessed an atlas of our galaxy that devoted but a single page to each star system, so that the sun and all its planets were crammed on one page, that atlas would run to more than 10 million volumes of 10,000 pages each. It would take a library the size of Harvard's to house the atlas, and merely to flip through it at the rate of one page per second would require 10,000 years. . . . And there are 100 billion other galaxies." Those words so riveted me that on the day I read them I started keeping what I call a Factbook, a computer file of randomly discovered facts testifying to the astonishing nature of this place we call home. Ferris said many other things in that book that astonished me. The overall effect was a universe so enormous, so cold, so distant, so immensely old, slamming up against a man-made religion of mere vestments, words, and gestures.

I first encountered Philip Larkin's "Church Going" in the...