Take me to Church

Church has been on my mind lately. Not going to church, no not really. It's hard to see myself as part of a congregation anyway. That thought alone leaves an uncomfortable ache at the pit of my stomach. I have been thinking of church, the building. This started on Friday morning. Because I had a late morning, I slept in. By sleeping in, I mean I woke up at eight. That's not exactly sleeping in to some people but that's extremely late for me. Anyway, I had a lot of time to prepare myself to face the day so I put the radio on to a station that I like mostly because of the music they play. They had a game on where they had listeners call in and guess where they had hidden a microphone. The clue to this guessing game was that they played a church bell and people had to guess which church that was. I am not an expert at Catholic churches, hell, I am not an expert at churches, simple. But I didn't know different churches had different bells and that some people had this unique ability to discern the sounds; or maybe they had a different clue that I wasn't aware of.

Later that day, I was having a conversation with an acquaintance who told me that it had been long since he attended Lunch Hour. Lunch Hour is the coming together of members of the Christian Union at campus who get together to sing and pray and whatever else they do at one every weekday. He then casually mentioned that they (the Christian Union) had an event that night and he, casually, extended an invitation. Of course, I politely declined this, I am assuming, well intentioned invitation. And immediately my thoughts on church crept in. The fact that these people who got together for Lunch Hour met in a lecture theatre, and for 60 minutes, that room ceased being a lecture theatre but an, apparently, holy place.

Later that night, I was busy working quietly on my laptop when I heard this sudden singing. It was very sudden, no microphone preparations or the sound of a piano or a guitar. No, it was this sudden off-pitched singing that annoyed me to no end and I had to put music on and listened to it on my earphones. Well, I have been living here for three years now and for these three years, I have been consciously aware that there is a church somewhere behind my bedroom's vicinity, but I have never seen it. You could say that one of the reasons is that I am rarely in that room during the day. You could also say that I just don't like exploring the area where I live. But I never really think about this church other than on Sundays and the last Friday of every month when they have this all night session. Like this past Friday. And whenever I think about it, it's with varying levels of irritation.

My first memory of church is a building structure which was a nursery school. This I gathered from the alphabet and number charts and other nauseatingly colourful drawings all over the walls. Even right now, when I think of church, I think about that first memory. I have been to several churches throughout the years. And almost all of them were not churches in their own right. That nursery school with colourful drawings that distracted me from listening to the sermon. Under that tree next to a bridge and road and people who were selling flowers and all these, needless to say, stole my attention from the pastor. In one of the city's public primary schools and whenever I was there, I couldn't help thinking of myself, not as a congregant, but as a pupil who attended the interpublic primary schools debates and public speaking competitions in that very same hall. That high school dining hall where every once in a while you could hear a spoon falling in the silence of the hall, and where I struggled to stay upright since I couldn't help but fall asleep during the sermon, and the smoke coming from the kitchen near the end of the service. That recreational hall in high school (adjacent to the basketball court) where all I did was think about the previous evening when we had danced to secular music and watched not so very holy movies with girls screaming over unattainable Holywood men. The most recent was just a tent and I am glad I was never there when it rained.

Anyway, I don't know why I am going on and on about this, but I want to go to church. Not to pray or listen to sermons. But I want to visit a church and look at the building, and replace my memory of church from walls adorned with charts specifically meant for kids who are learning to read to walls that inspire meditation and hope through their art (not Bible verses, and surely to God, not photos of the pastor and their partner).

The title of this post is from the song Take me to Church by Hozier.