Sunday in America 1 comments

By Ann Conway

One of my favorite books is Number Our Days by the anthropologist Barbara Myerhoff. It is a 1978 ethnography of elderly Eastern European Jews, who gathered at a Venice, California senior center. Myerhoff’s “subjects” rapidly become her questioners (“So what do you want from us here?”). Despite being old, poor and isolated, Faegl, Shmuel and the others were passionate storytellers. “Because their invisibility was so exceedingly painful to them,” Myerhoff wrote, the elders “struggled to find opportunities to appear in the world, assuring themselves that indeed they existed.”

Individual and collective narrative was thus a method of transcending invisibility. Although secular in nature, the many “definitional ceremonies,” or rituals, of the Center served to transcend mourning. Seniors were bereft of not only family and friends lost in the Holocaust, but the Eastern European culture of Yiddishkeit from which they emerged. So they needed to reaffirm themselves through narrative and ritual. “Full recovery from mourning,” observed Myerhoff, entailed “preserving what has been lost, restoring it to life by incorporation into the present.”

These anthropological observations of community came to mind recently, as I perused Suzanne Strempek Shea’s Sunday in America: A Yearlong Road Trip in Search of Christian Faith, an account of Shea’s exploration of worship throughout the land: a church a week, ranging from Colorado Springs Cowboy Church to Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church to the Full Gospel Tabernacle Church in Memphis. Spiritualists, Catholics, Mennonites, Four Square Reformed, Friends, Evangelicals—they’re all here, at least for the two hours or so Shea devotes to each one. Sundays in America is a fascinating read, incorporating the writer’s experiences as well as short histories of each denomination.

The book attempts to answer the question: just what do they do in there anyway, on a quiet Sunday morning?

The Polish American author undertakes her journey because of a personal reaction to worldwide grief on the death of Pope John Paul II. She can’t stop watching the media coverage. An ambivalent Catholic, Shea’s faith has been shaken by the sexual abuse scandal and 9/11. So she begins her journey, often rendering perceptive, nuanced portraits of those Sunday mornings.

Sundays in America devotes considerable attention to how welcoming churches are; it dislikes those who talk about sin and fear, centering on “demons, damnation and discrimination,” in the writer’s view. Pointing out the blandness and lack of diversity in many denominations, Shea is “more excited about a faith that tells me I’m good rather than bad, that promotes the positive rather than running on fear.” The writer would “need in a new church home” a warm welcome, an attention to social justice, noninvolvement in politics or lifestyle advice, nonhierarchical decision making and “an art filled space that rang with awesome music.”

Good luck with that last one, I couldn’t help but think, although I wish the writer well on her pilgrimage, one sincerely oriented toward finding a place, not simply brief glimpses of religious practice.

At the same time, I cannot help but think again of the death of Karol Wojtyla, which inspired Shea’s journey. The Pope’s life, like those of the elders in Number Our Days, was irrevocably altered by the events of a murderous century. In their lifetimes, the precious nature of the good was underscored. But evil was not an abstraction, nor the idea of a God furious at its continual presence. For the Pope, worship, rooted in cultural and religious memory, offered the opportunity to overcome evil and transform its effects into renewing joy. To tell the story again. To make it and ourselves, as participants in community, visible and renewed.

Whatever our ethnic heritage, American culture remains one deeply uncomfortable with memory. It is ours to want the new and then to want again. The freneticism of our common life can impair our vision, for the one “quality” Shea neglects to mention in her perfect church is the presence of Christ: Christ containing our brokenness, radiating within the walls and outward, into the world.