Attending church each week helps turn him right side up | Interfaith Column | July 3
Published 11:16 am Friday, July 3, 2009
By Kent Chadwick
Why go to church, synagogue, temple or mosque each week? I go to get turned right side up.
And I need that righting weekly since almost without fail I flip back upside down sometime after Sunday.
Maybe it’s that moment I start worrying about money that reverts me. Or maybe it’s a wave of envy of a friend’s success that pushes me over.
Or maybe it’s that opportunity I missed and now regret that flips me. But once I’m upside down my world gets small and hard.
Upside down I lose the wide horizon. My nose is to the ground. My hands are clenched so as not to lose what I think I have. My balance is off, so I worry about falling and failing.
Fear then whispers, like a friend, its age-old lies: things are scarce; fate is unforgiving; you are all alone. Upside down, just getting through the week feels like a success to me. Upside down, I live that quiet desperation Thoreau saw and lamented in the people around him.
Yet on Sunday morning, passing the threshold of Rolling Bay Pres-byterian Church where I attend, or the portal to any holy place on any holy day, I feel that upside down gravity loosening its hold on me.
Song and silence, streaming sunlight over flickering candlelight, prayer and poetry, love and listening all call me into the present. Becoming present to the present brings me to a liminal space that is both deep and dizzying.
I look around and see family, friends and strangers trying to welcome the same mystery I’m feeling: that amazing sense that we are home right now if we just could believe it.
Then more often than not a chain reaction begins. The spirit in that place tugs at one upside down person and then another, until a critical mass is reached and suddenly people are flipping right side up all over the sanctuary.
You see it in that sudden smile, that sudden tear, that gesture of love from a husband to a wife, or a mother to a child. When I flip right side up it feels like saying “Yes.” It feels like surrendering. It feels like waking up. It feels, well, right.
And right side up is how I want to be. Right side up the world is a beautiful place, where pain is balanced with possibility, where hope, that “thing with feathers” in Emily Dickinson’s words, does truly perch in the soul. Right side up, I know there is enough for everyone, that there is both beauty and sadness, that history can be redeemed, that forgiveness is possible, that we aren’t alone.
Right side up, I understand I’m more valuable and less important than I thought. Right side up, I start to get some of those puzzles Jesus kept posing: how the last might actually turn out to be first; how giving things up can bring you something better; how the kingdom of God could actually be at hand; how there’s no better time than now; how smart it is to risk everything for love.
My son Luke has been a great example to me of living right side up. Luke’s never met someone he didn’t want to greet. Over his 22 years of constant illness Luke has perfected living for today. Luke’s greatest joy is in making someone smile.
What Luke shows me is that living right side up spreads blessings all around you. He makes you feel good. So the whole community rejoiced when he had a successful double-lung transplant last year and had 12 great months of walking and feeling strong. He’s had serious setbacks this last month and is recovering slowly over at the University of Washington Medical Center. Knowing the greatness and fragility of life as it shines in Luke makes me want to share in it, right side up.
Kent Chadwick is a member of Rolling Bay Presbyterian Church.
