After a Five-Year Hiatus, I Went Back to Church on Christmas Eve.
It was...interesting. Here are a few of my thoughts.
Hi! I hope these final days of 2023 are good to you.
On Christmas Eve of this year, while I was home in Illinois, I went to church for the first time in probably five years. I’m not entirely sure why—I’m not religious, and depending on the day, I fall somewhere on the spectrum between agnosticism and atheism. Perhaps some of you resonate with that; perhaps some of you bristle at that. If the latter, great. The beauty of this world is that we don’t all have to hold the same beliefs about religion.
Religious freedom—the very thing our ancestors fought over for thousands of years, the very thing enshrined in our country’s constitution—includes people, like me, who choose not to practice religion at all. All I ask of you, Second Breakfast community, is that you hold space for my non-religious practice in the way I hold space for your religion practice, if you have one. And then do the same for others. There is room enough for all of us, and I think we can all learn something from one another (unless, of course, your beliefs deny the existence, freedom, and safety of others).
While I’m not religious, I’m deeply spiritual, and I spend a lot of time searching for meaning, purpose, and community. Much of this manifests in my relationship with nature. But it also manifests in my love of deep conversations, books, and writing this newsletter. This ongoing search feels especially important given what’s going on in the world right now.
Maybe that’s why, after all these years, I decided to return to my childhood church on Christmas Eve—to search for some sort of meaning in the familiarity of a sanctuary I spent most of my life standing in. A place where, at the very least, I could see the faces of those who have known my family and me for decades, and delight in the hugs from those I haven’t seen in many moons, but who would be happy to see me and vice versa. I was painfully aware that this is a privilege so many people have lost in the face of ongoing death and destruction around the world.
This “return” was made easier by the fact that my childhood church is a non-denominational Christian church that prides itself on being “a place for the whole person to feel both fully known and safe.” In other words, as far as churches go, this one appears to be pretty accepting and welcoming to people of all races, ethnicities, gender identities, sexual orientations, and faith traditions. If that weren’t the case, I wouldn’t go.
On a more surface level, I also just wanted to sing songs in the candlelight—a tradition I love that only happens during the Christmas Eve service. It goes like this: After the pastor finishes her sermon, she lights a candle and then uses it to light the candles of all the ushers. The ushers walk down the aisle, lighting the candle of each person on the end of the pew, who then turns and lights the candle of the person next to them.
One by one, every person receives the light of the candle from the person next to them and then uses it to light the candle of the person on the other side of them. As this is happening, everyone is singing Christmas songs while the lights are dimmed and then turned off. What’s left is a sea of people, standing together, each holding a lighted candle in the dark, singing in unison. Regardless of what meaning you assign to it, it’s a calm and beautiful scene, and I’ve been craving a bit of calm and beauty these days.
Most of my family didn’t want to go for various reasons, but my dad decided to come with me—whether out of genuine interest after a long time away or pity at the thought of me going alone, I’m not sure. Much of the experience was made special by our shared reactions: stifled bursts of giggles when my dad sang a verse at the wrong time in the wrong key, or our subtle side eyes when the pastor, in her sermon, insisted that we don’t have to be afraid because Jesus is with us.
I found it difficult to hear the pastor list off a litany of horrible things happening right now—children dying and starving in Palestine, hundreds of thousands of people in the U.S. living without shelter, teenagers terrified of coming out to their friends and families, people not being able to put food on their table, marriages falling apart, and people dying of illness and violence—and conclude that we don’t have to be afraid of those things because Jesus is with us.1
While I appreciate that may be comforting to some, it’s just…not comforting to me. If Jesus is truly “with us,” why are those things happening in the first place? I’ve yet to find someone who can answer that. I’m also pretty sure many of Jesus’ teachings were the antithesis of what many people condone today in the name of religion (read: discriminating against, persecuting, and even killing people who are different from us).
As I listened with as open a mind and heart as I could muster, I couldn’t help but feel like this message—saying Jesus is “with us” or that something is “God’s plan” when someone is experiencing one of the hardest moments of their life or the world is witnessing widespread violence—veers into false or even delusional optimism. It’s the same reason I have a complicated relationship with the platitude “Everything happens for a reason.”
Can you imagine saying that to someone who just lost a child, or who faces a terminal diagnosis, or who’s continually denied basic human rights, or whose entire family lineage was wiped out by a bomb or a natural disaster? Of course, many people just want a sliver of consolation when bad things happen—I often want that myself. We want something to be a lesson, a sign that not all hope is lost, that life can be good again, that we can live peacefully. And I think that can be incredibly powerful. But when does meaning-making turn from comfort-seeking to rationalization, or even worse, to outright discrimination, denial of human-led atrocities, and justification of ongoing harm?
For the record, I don’t believe the pastor was trying to smooth over or rationalize any of those things. But her sermon made me wonder if the tendency to leave things up to God or turn our fears over to Jesus can turn humans into passive actors, absolving us of our responsibility to actively create a better world, rather than just pray for one and hope that some higher power has got it covered.
On the other hand, maybe the comfort that such statements bring, that organized religion offers to some, gives people the strength and conviction to move forward, to create something better, when they thought they no longer could. What do you think?
I know this is not that simple, and I sure as hell (har har) don’t pretend to be an expert on anything, let alone religion, in this little Substack newsletter. But after all, the tagline of Second Breakfast is about “becoming more curious, compassionate, contemplative, and creative,” so I figure there’s room for these big questions in here somewhere.
Of course, this is just my perspective at a single point in time, and it’s one that’s ever evolving. If you have thoughts, as always, I’d love to hear them—just reply to this email.
Happy almost new year to you!
Elizabeth
It was around this time that I remembered why, for a whole host of reasons, I opt out of church and religion in general.
Oh Elizabeth once again you have hit the nail on it's head for me. One of the most wonderful things about Christmas is the music. I wish I could have been right beside you during that service. I would have loved the candle lighting, the music, the side eyes and the giggling. Not so much all the pastors words. I love spiritual music that I learned as a child and sang in the choir. I never tire of that. When I was traveling in Europe at the tender age of 22 cathedrals were always a quiet place for me to rest and recuperate from the rigors of travel. If I was fortunate there was music and if not I loved the solitude. Thanks so much for this piece.