Church On Time

It's almost Easter, and my personal miracle is this: I have been to church twice in the past two weeks.

It has been years since I've entered a place of worship, and these past two times were not the solitary, self-directed kind. I have been invited to show up, and it has been lovely.

Those who know me and my esoteric spiritual past might be smiling right now. Wait. Hear me out.

This morning, I woke early and drove across state lines to get there on time. I was late, of course. And yet, the moment I walked in, something settled. It felt like coming home. To sit in a room full of human beings who have chosen to gather for no other reason than to lift their gaze beyond the horizon of their ordinary days.

I will not pretend to be a simple believer. I have sat beneath the Sistine Chapel more than once. I have slipped off my shoes inside Buddhist temples in Thailand and Japan. I have stood on the churchless plain of the African savanna and felt something vast and wordless move through me. I have drunk ayahuasca more times than is polite to admit in certain company. So when scripture is read, my right brain begins its quiet interrogation — fact-checking, cross-referencing. A useless pursuit, I know. And yet, when I let it rest, when I stop auditing and simply feel the room, what I encounter is so sweet, so tender in its human vulnerability, that somewhere between the singing and the sitting and the rising and the sitting back down, it no longer matters whether any of it is historically accurate. In a quantum sense, what is here is all there is. And what is here is quite enough.

I should also say: I am not doing this alone.

I have been invited to show up to church on time, but also to show up for what I want, and to trust that these wants can be folded into a tiny love note. Tucked into the shirt pocket of someone who will actually read it. That is vulnerable business. I will tell you this without hesitation.

Showing up has been a whole thing for me lately. The stakes feel enormous, and simultaneously nothing at all, because at this point in my life, I understand something I didn't always: survivability, barring illness, is more or less guaranteed. Happiness, belonging, the quiet fullness of a life well-lived and shared, those are another story entirely.

I've been talking about this to the one who invited me to attend church. The difference between wanting and needing. The understanding that once need has had a chance to settle, to stop pulling at you like a current, what remains is something quieter, a simmering longing for what could be. Not desperate. Not urgent. Just real. Like cleaning a record that had gone dusty and forgotten, setting the needle back down, and letting the music fill the room again.

I find myself moved by the people who choose to do this. Who tries when they don't have to. Who show up because they want to. It requires courage to be vulnerable.

The physical heart is a muscle that grows stronger with use, but our mystical hearts, the ones that carry what cannot be weighed or measured, grow stronger as we give them more chances to love. To say so out loud. To ourselves and to others. Because love expressed toward another is the very act of expanding. We only become more ourselves as we open toward more.

This brings tears to my eyes. I think of all the times I pulled back from loving more, and I was the only one who lost anything.

Love is patient, love is kind. And love can be the chance we quietly give ourselves when we realize our needs have been heard, and what remains is simply the wanting. To love more. And perhaps, in return, to be loved.

There is something in the air. This is not where I thought this post was going.

Maybe it's the cherry blossoms. They are showering down their extravagance right now, indifferent to whoever walks beneath them. The days are longer. The birds wake me before my alarm does — offering their song as tribute to another morning, another gift, another bewildering chance to be here in this world.

And so, after many years away, I have been to church.

I am trying to open myself to this season: Easter, spring, rebirth, the particular hope that comes when the light returns. More sunshine. More warmth. More love for me, and I mean this, I truly mean it, more love for you, too.