If you walk into a church right now, you are almost guaranteed to see other people. It’s the busiest time of the year for churches — even the normally empty ones are full. But full churches are what I usually avoid.
My favorite thing to do is find an empty church and sit. Since I’m a single mother of two, it’s not hard to see why I’d be looking for a little peace and quiet. But there’s more to it than that, and it’s not always easy to explain. I’m after a certain kind of silence.
I first discovered this kind of quiet some years back, when I’d gone to Italy for what seemed to be no reason at all. Without any sort of plan, I decided to go inside every church I came across, no exceptions. No church too small, no marble too lurid, would stop me.
The poet Philip Larkin wrote in his “Church Going” in 1954 that when he stepped inside a church, he did so with the hope of avoiding anything that might be “going on.” This became my goal as well. To find what is left after the services, the people, the Sunday clothes and the pageantry — something big and empty and acoustically live — as Larkin describes it, a “tense, musty, unignorable” silence.
I first went into these churches determined in a sense of rebellion. I’d been a teen atheist in Catholic high school, and I’d joined the church choir out of sheer boredom. Now I go to church for real: once a week in the usual way, but still more often alone. At these times, I go insistent on the not. I bring no opinions, nothing certain; just me and the arc of the ceiling. And I go with a promise to myself: The moment it feels fake, I’m out the door.
Nothing will spoil the effect of this like going in search of an “experience,” or purposely setting out to pray. It’s a strange game of church-seeking and -sitting that I play — searching by not searching, hoping to catch something slanting in from the side, crabwise, or not at all.
In America these days, the front doors of churches are usually locked. But try the handle often enough, or go around to the side door, and you can find your way into various sorts of silences. Small churches in remote places are particularly good for this. A modest church in the Mississippi Delta padded with a thick, red pile carpet delivers one such silence. In New Orleans, there’s a German Catholic church first built in 1848, now deconsecrated; but its corners and corridors still hold a trace of what it once was.
Some large affairs, like St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan, remain naggingly commercial in affect: magisterium on ice. Other places accomplish more with half the effort: a storefront mosque in Genoa, its many rugs visible through a shop window; or a seaside Episcopal church on Dauphin Island, Alabama’s southernmost tip, with sea-humidified pews; or a neighborhood Greek Orthodox church in the Piraeus where the service starts before you are even aware of it — all these places collect something quiet that it is possible to witness, most especially when there is nothing particular to see.
Sometimes I’ll go to my own church, St. John the Divine in Upper Manhattan, one of the most beautiful cathedrals in the world, simply to find a good corner toward the back, the better to find a place to hide.
But why have I been going to church to avoid people?
Alone in church I find air, a silence like nothing else. In that quiet spot off to the back, I don’t have to explain anything to anyone, about my job, my family, my plans for the future. I can take a moment to do nothing at all. It’s the purposelessness of this quiet, the putting to the side almost every other task I have to do, that lightens the tension.
The voices that discuss church in the public sphere these days are usually quite loud. I can’t say that I understand them. They speak either in violent rejection of the failures of the church that raised them, or to make the evermore preposterous claim that churchgoing will cure all that’s wrong with society today. Neither of these make any sense to my silence-seeking concerns. It’s often among the “Nones,” the growing demographic for whom church is not a matter of tame belief, defiant unbelief, but an absence, that I get more of an echo of what I’m looking for.
Two years ago, in the days just before Christmas, I was struggling. Life was heavy, and lingering grief from the pandemic, the strangeness of becoming a single mother, and of a painful divorce, left me almost unable to move. It felt like I’d exhausted the last bit of patience from everyone I knew. Even prayer felt like a transaction, and transaction was precisely what I wanted to be done with, forever.
So I walked to the church that was closest to me every day I could manage. Some of the people who noticed were kind. I worried about becoming someone’s problem. I could have asked for help, but I did not. There was a very specific pane of glass that I would sit next to and try not to think about anything at all. A certain shaft of light caught the window at its least ornate, one clear spot of glass.
The church felt like a sailing ship, carrying me in infinite space. Few things have mattered to me more.
A church is, after all, most concretely a building: a place built to collect desire and to give a shape to hope. It is the precise architecture for what we humanly want, when no human being can fully know what it may be, or what will happen next. And sitting there, with nothing to do and no one saying a word, something does happen to me.
As Félicie in Éric Rohmer’s film “A Tale of Winter,” herself a single mother, describes it: “I didn’t think. I saw my thoughts.” It’s not that the shape of the roof or light from a window brings clarity; but it reminds me that clarity and decisiveness exist.
To me, at least, that’s worth the adventure of trying the door.
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