We were making such good time, cutting our path, lickety-split, across West Texas, that I almost missed it.
The church was perched about a quarter of a mile off the highway we were traveling along.
Since my son, David, was doing the driving, I could peer out the passenger window, studying the sights along the way.
I noticed the cemetery first and then the church on the cemetery’s property.
The building appeared to me like porcelain, spotless as far as I could tell, with its sugary whiteness glistening back at me, surreal, as if it had been placed there from nowhere.
“How could it be so perfect?” I thought.
Then, I glimpsed the inside of the church.
The open doors and windows revealed only the shell of a church, not a real one.
“Ahh, I get it,” I said to David.
“It’s a church building they’ve constructed for people who want to use it for a memorial service at the cemetery, maybe when the weather is bad or if the family wants to be inside before they go to the graveside.”
No wonder it looked too clean to be real: it wasn’t.
Had we more time, I would have had David turn the car around and head back for a closer examination.
But I knew what I would have found: only the husk of a church building with hollowness inside.
My kind of church isn’t so clean that it glimmers back at me with a scratch free surface that makes me squint.
Give me a church with a little dirt on the front porch, maybe from where the kids tracked it up; or a church with a brick missing under a chipped stained glass window because it’s weathered the storms of life; or a church where someone’s old pick-up truck is sitting out front, parked there by a guy who shows up at odd times but knows he can stay and pray and ponder.
A real church is all those things because the church is people, and in the words of Detective Frank Keller (Al Pacino) in the film Sea of Love, “People are work.”
Yes, they are indeed.
I know, because I’m one of them.
I am a work in progress, battered and bruised from the wear and tear of life, but intact nonetheless, and moving forward. And if you are rigorously honest, you will see that in yourself, too, not just in “those people,” you know, the ones who don’t have it all together. You may pretend to be pure as the driven snow, but you know better, don’t you? You feel it when you’re sitting alone in your easy chair, when it’s just you staring at the TV, or wall, or out the window. And you get it, yes you do, deep down inside: you don’t have it all together either, even though might you hope you appear like you do.
You need grace, and so do I.
I like the marred churches because they welcome the likes of us, the ones who have messed up and fallen down. Those churches are the rare ones, the ones that know they are flawed, ones where you don’t have to pretend. And instead of wearing your false mask that hides your true self, you can be who you are on your journey to becoming who God is building you to be.
Sadly, too many people grow so accustomed to their false self that they know no other. Like that church in the cemetery, they risk becoming hollow inside. Their kind of church is one where they can rule, feeling smug in their delusion that they are a “cut above,” carefully planting aspersions upon the “down and out,” finally kicking them on down the road, back where they “belong.”
In his book, The Ragamuffin Gospel, Brennan Manning recounts the story of the publicsinner who was excommunicated and forbidden entry to the church. He took his woes to God. “They won’t let me in, Lord, because I am a sinner,” he whined.
“What are you complaining about?” said God. “They won’t let Me in either.”
I suppose there’s a reason why that church along the highway is situated in the heart of a cemetery, where the dead are buried, instead of standing in a public place, among the living, where life is messy and dirty and broken.
But then, I don’t need to tell you that, do I?