The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [140]
August 28
AUGUSTINE
Who can be good, if not made so by loving?
—St. Augustine
Not long ago, I was asked by a college student how I could stand to go to church, how I could stand the hypocrisy of Christians. I had one of my rare inspirations, when I know the right thing to say, and I replied, “The only hypocrite I have to worry about on Sunday morning is myself.”
The church has had a hardening of the arteries in the sixteen hundred years or so since Ambrose, then the bishop of Milan, welcomed the convert Augustine into the body of Christ. Theological fine-tuning, some of it unfortunately inspired by Augustine himself, has led us to forget that Christian worship is not, in the words of Margaret Miles, “primarily a gathering of the like-minded” but a gathering of people “to be with one another in the acknowledgment that human existence originates in and is drawn towards love.”
Even when I find church boring, I try to hold this in mind as a possibility: like all the other fools who have dragged themselves to church on Sunday morning, including the pastor, I am there because I need to be reminded that love can be at the center of all things, if we will only keep it there. The worship service will most likely not offer an aesthetically pleasing experience, great theological insight, or emotional release, although any and all of those things are possible, and precious on the rare occasions when they occur. When I look at the way my life has unfolded, my presence in the Christian assembly is miracle enough. The congregation in Lemmon, South Dakota, has seen me come and go; mercifully, they’ve allowed my conversion to unfold in their midst without pestering me to see if I’ve been “saved” in just the right way, or if I know the Confessions in the Presbyterian Book of Order by heart.
And this is why St. Augustine is so precious to me. He helps me see, in the lengthy story of his own conversion—with its fits and starts, its meanderings and deep desires for faith—that mine has been a traditional Christian journey. When I’m at church at home, or worshiping as a guest in a monastery choir, I often think of the Augustines in our midst, who are still wandering in and out of the faith. I think of my own inconstancy in prayer, my own hypocrisies that I know by now are among the reasons I go to church: to burn them off in singing hymns, and in listening and responding to scripture.
And I am always grateful to the hypocrites around me, imperfect strivers like myself, because they’re the reason I now have this freedom. I am grateful also for Aidan Kavanagh’s comments on Augustine in his book On Liturgical Theology, which first led me to claim Augustine’s story as an inspiration and model for my own. “Augustine was a wandering catechumen for thirty years,” he writes, “attending worship, backing off from it and the community of the church. But he kept returning, and the result was that Augustine found himself being baptized and communicated at Ambrose’s hands in the midst of those whose singing and Amens had helped bring him home.”
I suspect that his gratitude to the worshiping assembly would allow St. Augustine to grasp more fully than many modern people the profound hospitality of Cecil Williams, the pastor of Glide Memorial Church in San Francisco, who insists that “the church is not just for believers.” In his book about the church, No Hiding Place, he says, simply, “When people come to Glide, we don’t ask them if they are atheists, Methodists, or Buddhists. We ask them what their names are and how they’re doing.”
On Easter Sunday at Glide the pastor invites people to tell their own stories during the service. One year he said, “There’s an empty tomb somewhere in this