Why I make Sam go to Church

+ a radiation update

The truth of the matter is, I think Sam and Annie would now go voluntarily; the heading should probably have Jacob’s name. In fact, I think Sam would make me go to church, if I stopped, but I’m titling this post in honor of a beloved essay by Anne Lamott, which helped me stay in the pews as an emancipated young adult. In it she explained beautifully why she made her squirmy 7 year old, Sam, attend despite his protests.

This substack serves as a way that I can send out the latest news in cancer to a wider audience, but it’s also grown into a project for me to reflect on community, and interrogate some of the “whys” in my life when I’m facing a problem that cues up mortality.

The why that’s on my mind today is church, and church people, and why I’ve stayed even as most people I’ve known over many iterations of Christian community have stopped going. Why do I get up and tame my hair and and quickly drink my coffee in the car Sunday, even if I don’t feel like it, and why do I make it a non negotiable for my kids? I could say its because we’re Catholic and church attendance is an obligation, but that wouldn’t be true. The actual yes to this increasingly uncommon practice comes from my intuition that we’re better together than we are alone, and church is one of the few places left that asks us to be together, in person, next to people we might not know or like, hearing a message we can’t hit pause on, and even one we might not agree with. The Catholic Church in particular, but frankly all churches I’ve attended over my 44 year tenure, are by nature embodied. You can’t know people or experience the Eucharist by watching a screen or listening to a weekly inspirational podcast. Showing up to worship makes real community intertwined with sacrament, and we desperately need both.

Church too, in all the iterations I’ve had on it in life, is where I learned that the vulnerable are worth caring for, and so intrinsically it stands out to me as an important place when I face my own vulnerability. One of the most poignant memories of my youth was my mom’s own 3 year journey, ages 50-53, from healthy person to early death from Leukemia. What rises from the mental fog of that dark and complicated time for me, most, was her church. 24 year old me, ripe with college knowledge on intersectionality and ontology, was quick to criticize the male leadership, biblical literalism, and extended bouts of being slain in the spirit that marked The Pentecostal Church of Memphis. When I visited her she made me attend, and I found myself sullen and resentful. But when she began needing 24 hour care, blood transfusions, rides, and constant prayer, those people showed up, and showed up again. I have photographic memories of women with long skirts and elaborate buns surrounding her, rhythmically singing a fervent song of intercession in tongues, offering this service in hospitals and at her house and at the Sunday evening service. When I would travel from Cincinnati to see her, which was not often because I didn’t like her other half, I always found new trinkets, candles and cards, delivered by her legion of church ladies. The house filled with these and casseroles. When her husband resigned from cleaning and care giving it was these ladies that made a sign up rotation and scrubbed the tub to sanitary enough for an immune compromised person to use. They were unfussy and not looking for recognition, and of course, didn’t expect reciprocity. They attended her funeral in black skirt suits, and sang tearful songs, and brought cakes.

As I’ve started down this cancer road, I hope my children, too, realize that it’s church and church people, mostly, that are holding us. They’ve seen them come over to pray for me, anoint me on our patio, and rally the Lydia’s House guests around me in the shelter yard. They know their grandmother Diane prays for me daily at Mass. They know the food we eat, almost every day, comes from church people. They know that the Bruderhof, a Christian community, sent us a young couple to help after we went out and visited and shared our need, in light of my diagnosis. And I think they know that if I needed hospital vigiling or blood transfusions, those requests would go out to the extended community I know through Christianity and the responses would largely come from friends and strangers, all kin in Christ.

They may not know, but I should tell them, that Carol delivers me breakfast every Monday morning and then cleans the shelter; Amber prays for me when ever she passes MaryEllen street, which she does alot, because it intersects with the street she lives on. Jeannette texts me weekly to let me know she’s thinking of me, in between doing legal favors for Lydia’s House, because she’s an attorney. I didn’t meet them all at church but they share a (minority) trait in common, which is that they are weekly church attenders.

I know there are many reasons beyond wanting a calmer morning coffee routine that have driven people from parish life. There’s lackluster sermons, crying kids, contemporary praise music, and (the one I hear most often) Trump supporters, sometimes all packed into 1 pew. Church can be “cringy” as the kids would say, and people are often annoying. But if church is a very average looking field to most onlookers I’d sell everything and buy it; from longitudinal experience I know there’s treasure buried there.

My sister sent me a screen shot of my name on a prayer list at my grandmas Pentecostal congregation in Arkansas. I smiled, knowing I’m now the recipient of the prayers of some of the same women that held my character of a mama when she leveraged her bald head to get better service at restaurants or charmed the chemo nurses in her daily “recliner meets poison” sessions. In the absence of her physical presence, Christianity and it’s gangly community is the inheritance she left me. And whenever I am no longer here in body, it’s the inheritance I, too, will leave my children.

PS: Some news: I had my radiation appointment and will do radiation daily starting November 10, for 15 consecutive weekdays. I’ll do photon therapy at the Barrett Center in Clifton, and apparently it has a weathering effect, as in I will feel more like a piece of furniture left out over the winter as the treatments go on. That’s the latest…