Just a Building

A couple of weeks ago a former classmate of mine posted a link on Facebook to THIS ARTICLE, which describes how the original Good Shepherd Church in Frankfort was "desacrilized" in a ceremony. The building isn't going anywhere. The Frankfort Historical Society wouldn't let you tear down a bird house in that part of town. But it's no longer a church. Sure, the stained glass windows are still there, and the steeple still rises to the sky, but the crucifix was taken down from the wall (You can see that in the photos that accompany the linked article), and the altar was removed. It's just a building now.

I can't say that I was shocked when I read the article. I knew the day was coming. The Catholic community in Frankfort had outgrown the church long ago, and in 1997 a new church was built on the outskirts of East Frankfort. For the last 14 years the building in downtown Frankfort mostly sat empty. There was an occasional small wedding there, and I think maybe the Catholic school kids went to mass there, but that was about it, and once the school was moved from downtown to the campus of the new church, I don't think the building was used at all. It will become a museum now, and will most likely have many more visitors than it's had for years.

And maybe the Good Shepherd church goers in Frankfort are okay with that. They've had a decade and a half to make the new church their own. And it's a fine church. It's very different from the downtown church, with its stained glass windows, peeling plaster, and haloed statuary. The new church is warm and open and large, and filled with lots of natural light from the many non-stained windows. Even the Jesus on the crucifix behind the altar is a risen Jesus. No room for agony in the new church.

But it's not my Good Shepherd Church. I moved out of Frankfort in 1990, when the church was still in its original location. And it was overcrowded, sure. Masses were Saturday at 6:00 and 7:30 and Sunday at 8, 9:30, 11:00, and 12:30. And even then the 11:00 and 12:30 services were standing room only. But still...it's the church I remember, and I'm sad that it's gone. I remember many a Sunday during service staring up at the ceiling, at the faux Gothic architecture, and thinking that the designs looked like icing on a decorated cake. I remember looking at the stations of the cross that were posted all along the sides of the church. I remember the time when I was an altar boy, walking beside Father David Gamm, a fun-loving priest, as he was sprinkling the congregation with holy water. He bent down and whispered to me, "See the old lady with the glasses. I'm aiming for her!" And darn if he didn't hit her right in the glasses with a big spray of water! Speaking of getting hit, I remember the time a child in the balcony dropped his hymnal on my mother's head. SHE didn't do anything, but I've never seen her so embarrassed! I have hundreds of memories like those wrapped up in this now unholy building, and I'm sad that it's not a church anymore.

But that's not the real reason for my sadness. What's really bothering me is that I can't shake the similarity between this church I grew up in and this soul of mine that I grew up in.My faith in God isn't gone. I believe in God as much as I ever have, maybe even more. But my faith in organized religion and in church is badly shaken. When I was a child growing up in that church, I used to LOVE religion. I wanted to BE a priest when I grew up. I used to sneak the missalette out of church so that I could "read ahead" and see what the readings for the following week's mass would be. I'd study the readings (which always were one Old Testament reading, one Psalm, one non-Gospel New Testament reading, and one Gospel reading) over and over, trying to find what it was that linked them together. I'd outline my own sermon, and then compare my sermon to the one that the priest gave. As soon as I was old enough, I became an altar boy. I sat in church and listened to the hymns, the old Catholic hymns that still give me comfort today ("Whatsoever You Do," "Be Not Afraid," and "The Prayer of St. Francis" are some of my favorites). They weren't great music, I guess. No one danced or jumped around as we sang them. But the words provided comfort.

But I couldn't stay in the Catholic church for a couple of reasons. First, puberty hit, and since the priesthood requires celibacy, my goal of becoming a priest went out the window with the first major shot of testosterone. Maybe that's shallow of me, but I can't help it: women are hot!

Second, college arrived. Since I couldn't become a priest anymore, I guess I gravitated toward the closest things: I became an education major--Teachers weren't priests, but they did share a lot of similarities to priests. I also used every elective I had in college taking philosophy courses, especially Philosophy of Religion courses. In fact, the university I attended started offering a philosophy minor my junior year, and the new chair of the philosophy department--from whom I had taken three courses and gotten to know pretty well--came to me and all but begged me to minor in philosophy. "You're only six hours away," he told me. "Please do it for my sake." (Consequently, I did--for his sake--take an additional course, adding 3 more hours to an already overloaded schedule, but I ended up auditing it and never finished the minor).

And what I learned from all of those religious philosophy courses was the history of the Catholic and Christian church, and how different the Catholic Church teachings were from what was written in the Bible. I learned about Martin Luther and the Reformation and the causes of the splintering of the Christian community (which consequently, didn't begin with Luther, not by a long shot), and by the time I was finished with it, I knew I couldn't be a Catholic anymore. I still believed in God, but I wasn't Catholic.

So I ended up in various "contemporary" Christian churches. And as an Old School Catholic, I was in for a shock. The concepts of "church" and "coffee bar" never used to have any connection in my mind, but then--in the mid '90's--every church my wife and I attended started having these Starbucks-like coffee bars in them, complete with neon lights and catchy coffee store names like "My Father's Java" or "Holy Grounds" or "Take This Cup Cafe." And the music featured not pipe organs, but live bands with electric guitars and drum sets and miked singers, many of whom kept their eyes closed and their hands up the entire time they were singing. And the audience members applauded and shouted "Yes!" or "Amen!" and held their hands up like they had a question or something.An acquaintance of mine who visited one of these churches we attended once--and who apparently felt about it the same way that I did--afterwards described the service as "one clown short of a circus."

I had a terrible time connecting. This wasn't church for me. I needed meditation and contemplation. This was noise. When I said this to friends at the church, I was told, "Those things are important, and you SHOULD do them. But you should be doing them at home. Church is a place for celebrating, for inviting God in with a loud voice! It's about living WORSHIP!"

I'd look at them warily and say, "Maybe I just worship in a different way, then. Besides, we never read the Bible in church, and none of these songs really reference scripture! They just say 'Be Glorified!' over and over again. It's like a cultish chant!"

These friends would say, "If you want to read the Bible you should be in a Small Group. We have a Bible study at my house on Wednesday evenings. Why don't you come?"

So my wife and I did. But my Catholic upbringing always got in the way. We'd go to these Bible studies and we'd read a Bible verse and people would say something that would get under my skin, something like, "I read this Bible verse, and it really speaks to me. It really speaks to who I am now. I hear God telling me that I need to look at my life, I need to live each day for Him. I tell you, I've never heard God speaking to me in quite this way about this. I'm amazed that every time I read the Bible, even a verse like this that I've read a dozen times before, I hear something new."

And everyone would congratulate that person so that I knew everyone was in agreement with this person's method, but I'd think, "Maybe if you're hearing something different every time you read the same verse, maybe you're not getting anything OUT of the Bible verse at all! Maybe it's you who's putting your feelings INTO the Bible!" That, of course, would have been a no no for a Catholic. We weren't allowed an interpretation of the Bible. It didn't mean whatever "our heart spoke it" to mean. A Bible verse meant what the Catholic church SAID it meant. And though I no longer believed the Catholic Church to have an all-knowing monopoly on the Truth, I still resisted this idea of people reading the Bible and coming up with these overly personal interpretations.

So I struggled. But I did finally find a church where I felt some sense of community. Part of it was me just DECIDING that I was going to feel differently about the church. I decided to quit saying I was a Catholic visiting the church and start saying it was MY church. I got baptized via full water immersion, which ain't how the Catholics do it. I started volunteering in activities at the church. I even went to a Bible study or two and TRIED to not be confrontational in them. And I really felt like the church was becoming a home again.

But then, through no fault of mine or my wife's, that church just fell apart. The minister resigned in some sort of scandal that was hush hushed and never really brought to light, and though the church continued, the new minister was VERY different, much more politically and religiously conservative, and it wasn't the same. Most of the people we knew well drifted, one or two at a time, away from the church.  Eventually even the name of the church changed, and though it's still in the same building today, there's hardly a comparison.

After that, we drifted from church to church. We've attended several churches, some for more than a year, but we've never really felt connected again. And I've become discouraged. More than that, the more that I look at history, the more I think that churches have done more damage to this world than good. The bickering and battles and bloodshed that have been borne from religious differences are so much more destructive than any religious-sponsored soup kitchen or mission trip is good. And I just don't see the point any more.

So maybe THAT's why the news about the Good Shepherd church shook me so much. Because it's just a visible symbol of what's inside of me. And because--desacrilizing ceremony or not--it stopped being anything but a building for me a long time ago.