Tuesday, March 11, 2008

Church is a large part of southern culture, something I’m trying to experience more fully, but when you have a chronic aversion to regular church attendance, well, then you may be at an impasse. I went this Sunday, marked it a great victory on the cosmic scale, and during the service I reflected on post-collegiate life, a kind of spiritual state of the union for the past five years.

You may not believe it, but there was a time when I could go on a retreat–do the whole rustic thing, complete with gross-smelling drinking water and communal showers and waking up at thoroughly unchristian hours–to learn the secrets of leading inductive Bible study. I guess there’s falling off the wagon, and then there’s leaping off the wagon, with cement shoes firmly attached, right into a no-wagon zone.

These days, Sunday mornings tend to feature stringent criteria for churchgoing. It can’t be too rainy or too sunny, too muggy or too chilly, and traffic must be just so, but only if I got enough sleep and have ample time for breakfast and a shower, despite the fact that I set my alarm clock 20 minutes before the start of service.

Invariably the morning will fail to meet one of these requirements, so I will vow to catch the sermon online, possibly early afternoon. A matinee screening of Cloverfield later, though, followed by some Mexican takeout, and it’s time for bed. I’ll just save that online sermon for next week, you know? It’ll be a double feature.

Pastors will sometimes hold forth on the theme of passionate, active participation. Don’t just mindlessly go to church each week, they’ll exhort, and simply go through the motions. But what if you’re not even there? What if you’re trying to get back to zero and attend enough to qualify for going through the motions?