Church Enough For Me

Me and Jesus, to quote the oft-covered song by Tom T. Hall, got our own thing going.

I spent the last 40 days – Lent, in the Christian tradition – on a journey back to what I’ve always known. I don’t need no fancy preaching. The shore marked with my own footprints, a pulpit made of stones, the hymn of the sea, and a handful of sand dollars.

That’s church enough for me.

I tried, like I did at Advent, to have a Catholic experience of Lent. There’s a rough rock tumbling around in my memoir project that has to do with being Catholic. I want to smooth it with understanding what it might have meant for my mother and grandfather to be Catholic. How did that religious persuasion shape their beliefs, inform their choices?

My personal Catholic experience was derivative, lightened to the point of a complete fade compared to the rigid French-Canadian Catholicism of my grandfather’s generation, and to a large extent my mother’s.

What I’ve been trying to get at in my Catholic journey is a sense of what it was like for them to be Catholic. My empathy game is so strong I probably feel it before you do, so it was no wild imaginative leap to believe I’d glean something of what they may have felt going through the liturgical year myself.

But my own feelings were the only thing I felt.

And what I felt most persistently was why am I here? I loved the ritual of Mass, and St. John’s full of so many souls on a Sunday made me want to kneel with them in the joy of simple belonging.

But I needed the laminated cheat sheet to make it through all the prayers. I never had enough cash for the second collection. And ultimately – unwittingly – I committed a mortal sin.

About mid-Lent, I bumped into an old friend from my Coastal Journal days after Mass. She pointed out I ought not to be taking Communion because I was not in a state of grace. It was a mortal sin to do such a thing. And if she didn’t say something to me about it, that would be her own mortal sin.

Like everything except the most basic Catechism, I am not entirely sure what it means to be in a state of grace, or why not being so puts a soul in such peril. But mortal sin sounded like I was marked for a smiting by God himself. That didn’t sound good.

Even though I am pretty sure I offend God at least five different ways daily – probably more – I don’t need to add mortal sin to the ledger of worries already in the queue of my midlife maladies.

I never went back to Mass after that. Half my Lenten journey was about as far from a Catholic one as you can get.

That doesn’t mean it wasn’t holy. Me and Jesus, as I said, got our own thing going.

I knew there were rules about the Communion wafer. But I thought I just needed to confess my sins before I stuck it in my mouth. I figured I do that every single morning when I ruminate in my journal. And anyway, when I went to a UCC church, everyone got some bread to dip in the grape juice. Was it really so awful as to be a mortal sin?

He’d forgive me. Jesus, I mean. About Communion. That’s what I think.

I could hear him saying, “Look it’s not really like that. I don’t need you to do anything besides show up and actually care. If it were up to me, there wouldn’t be all this [waves arm in a dramatic scriptural gesture]. But if you want to be a Catholic, well, then you gotta do it their way.”

I hit the highway instead.

Or should I say the beach?

In my muck boots, I plodded along the low-tide Popham wrack line this Easter morning, sifting shells from seaweed with my eyes.

“What are you looking for?” A woman asked.

“Sand dollars,” I said, looking up.

She walked toward me with her hands cupped. “Here,” she said.

I opened a palm, and she tipped a handful of sand dollars into it.

“Are you sure?” I said, astonished. I’ve found a bazillion sand dollars since 2020. I still have every single one. They are the bread crumbs that led me on my own clumsy walk of faith. Each is an answered prayer, an idea born, a fear abandoned.

“I have more than enough,” she assured me, squeezing my other hand with her now free one. She continued down the beach.

Now that’s my kind of Communion.

“Peace be with you,” I called, and she turned back to wave.

Together and to each other we shouted, “Happy Easter!”

Revised on April 4, 2024.

(It’s not quite ready yet, but if you’d like to read more about “me and Jesus,” please subscribe to A Reading from the Journal of Yesterday, my coming-very-soon Substack. Originally, I thought this project would literally be posts of personal writing from 42 years of my journals – and my present-day reflections on getting to know the “people I used to be.” But I expanded it to include anything from my extensive unpublished archives, including the Jesus Shorts I wrote and shared with a few pastor friends in 2010. I’m having way more fun revisiting creative work, but culling through it takes more time than simply pulling 1984 from the shelf and wincing through pages of early adolescent breakups. A Reading from the Journal of Yesterday is free – but thanks in advance if you would like to pay a little bit for it. That’ll help keep me in motel fees while I finish my memoir. Either way, I hope you will subscribe!)