Faith Journey

In her 1993 book “Dakota,” Kathleen Norris describes growing up in a Methodist church where her father was choir director. From toddler age she sang in the cherub choir, and took the sheet music home with her so her mother could play it on the piano while Norris sang along, sitting in her mother’s lap to practice. Although her early church experience was positive, Norris stopped going to church when she moved to New York City in her twenties.  She writes “church was an uneasy exercise in nostalgia,” and she no longer felt comfortable there. Eventually she left New York City, moving with her husband to her family farm in the small prairie town of Lemmon North Dakota, and started going to church again. Of her return, Norris said “I am just now beginning to recognize the truth of my original vision: we go to church in order to sing, and theology is secondary.”

Like Norris I have some warm memories of youth choirs and handbells at church, but also some associations with guilt for not reading my Bible enough, not being devout enough. Like Norris, I rejected church when I left home to get a degree from a liberal arts college (unfortunately in an Indiana cornfield rather than the more exciting New York City – but still a place of knowledge). It would be years before I returned. After I read a few of Norris’s and Anne Lamott’s books, and others, I crept back slowly, a timid wild deer ready to bolt at any moment. I eventually came to the conclusion that the journey of following Christ does not “belong” to anyone, and no one person or tradition could claim to have it “right.” I could find a church home that aligned to my own faith, rather than be guilted into trying to hammer my faith into the shape of a church that was not mine. To put it more poetically, Kathleen Norris gave me back the joy of the Psalms, and assuaged my guilt at enjoying the hymn-singing and fellowship, which I used to think made me a shallow follower. I discovered that even with all that old emotional baggage and guilt I took on in my early years, as an adult I found church comforting – the rhythm of the service and the liturgical calendar and the Lords Prayer and Apostle’s Creed. Singing hymns that humans have sung sometimes for hundreds of years, all over the world.  I love feeling connected to the living, and those long dead, and those not yet born who will join in these rituals like we all do every Sunday. I feel comfortably smaller – one thread in the tapestry, one page in the book. An important part but just a part.