Mark Galli, editor in chief of Christianity Today, gave this recommendation for the following essay: “I can wax eloquent on why commitment to a local church, especially weekly worship, is vital for life. But such an essay sounds more convincing coming from someone who, rightly or wrongly, we don’t expect to see in church—like this Hollywood screenwriter.”
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By playwright and screen writer Dorothy Fortenberry, for the Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly Journal, Fall 2016.
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“You don’t have to like it. You just have to go,” I tell my five-year-old kid every Sunday when she complains about going to church. Every Sunday, even though she would prefer to stare at my smartphone, I make her go anyway.
Even though my smartphone is extremely wonderful.
Even though our religion — like all religions — has been responsible for terrible things.
Even though I often find the whole thing nutty and tacky, like a theme restaurant or the kind of museum you visit on a road trip.
Even though, when I was a kid and was similarly dragged by my mom, I was convinced that I would never go again of my own free will.
Every Sunday, we go.
This is my attempt to explain why.
I live in Los Angeles. I am a screenwriter.
Being a screenwriter in Los Angeles is like being on a perpetual second date with everyone you know. You strive to be your most charming, delightful, quirky-but-not-damaged self because you never know what will come of the encounter. Maybe it’s just a coffee. Maybe it’s the coffee that leads to a job. Maybe it’s the job that leads to a series. Who knows! So, you wear flattering jeans and an expensive, casual shirt, and you smile.
This is not such a bad life. Compared to other lives that I have lived, it is, frankly, an awesome one. I am very, very happy being a screenwriter in Los Angeles. It’s a marvelous gig that I am grateful for.
But being on a perpetual second date can get exhausting. Constantly feeling that you should be meeting people, impressing people, shocking people (just the right amount) is a strange way to live your life. And one of the reasons that I go to church is that church is the opposite of that.
I do not impress anyone at church. I do not say anything surprising or charming, because the things I say are rote responses that someone else decided on centuries ago. I am not special at church, and this is the point. Because (according to the ridiculous, generous, imperfectly applied rules of my religion) we are all equally beloved children of God. We are all exactly the same amount of special. The things that I feel proud of can’t help me here, and the things that I feel embarrassed by are beside the point. I’m a person but, for 60 minutes, I’m not a personality.
Another thing that I value: When I go to church in Los Angeles, I am a white person in a majority nonwhite space. In a city that’s an oxymoronic 70 percent minority, that shouldn’t be a special occurrence, but it is. Even more special is that I have come with no particular agenda. I have not come to teach or volunteer or try a new cuisine or inhabit a new neighborhood. I have not even come to act as an “ally.” I have come to sit next to people, well aware of all we don’t have in common, and face together in the same direction. Halfway through church, I turn to the congregants next to me and share the peace. I wish that they experience peace in their lives. That’s it. They wish the same for me. Our words are identical. Our need for peace is infinite.
Church is a group of broken individuals united only by our brokenness traveling together to ask to be fixed.
But church is not just about how I feel or whom I’m surrounded by. It’s about faith. This part is harder for me to explain.
I like being Catholic because long ago, people who were smarter than me and thought about it much longer than I have time to figured out what I’m supposed to believe. All I have to do is show up and recite a long list that starts with “I believe” and ends with “the life everlasting.” Whether I actually believe all the stuff about Jesus and Mary and Light from Light, true God from true God varies. Most of the time, I do, I think. Sometimes I don’t.
The single most annoying thing a nonreligious person can say, in my opinion, isn’t that religion is oppressive or that religious people are brainwashed. It’s the kind, patronizing way that nonreligious people have of saying, “You know, sometimes I wish I were religious. I wish I could have that certainty. It just seems so comforting to never doubt things.”
Well, sometimes I wish I had the certainty of an atheist. I wish I could be positive that there was no God and that Sundays were for brunch. That dead people stayed dead and prayer was useless and Jesus was nothing more than a really great teacher.
But I believe too much, at least sometimes, to be certain about that. Sometimes I feel like I believe almost everything the church teaches and sometimes I feel like I believe almost nothing, but if I’m anywhere from one to 99 percent on the belief scale, my response is the same. If it’s more than zero, I should go to church. (continued…)
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