2007 Heather Campbell Personal Essay Contest Co-Winner
Keeping Attendance
A stealth snowfall has coated the world overnight and muted the usual traffic noises, allowing us to sleep in a bit too late on a Sunday morning. My three sons bring news of the snow as they pile into our bed and climb over us to open the blinds. We are all surprised by the brightness, the beauty. My family loves snow. At least we did before one of us broke her foot the day after Thanksgiving and became a crutch-wielding gimp. For me, it is not a Winter Wonderland out there—it is one giant, slippery, bum-magnet and I feel safe only in my bed where I am less likely to break myself again. But it is a Sunday and we have to go to church. I need to be there. I am not positive about this, but I think God keeps attendance.
We are running late. Perhaps running is a poor choice of words; nonetheless, we are doing our typical, frantic “Grab some socks, any socks, we’ll tie your shoes when we get there” and “Get into the car right now or we’ll leave you behind!” pre-church preparations. It’s a Sunday ritual. Somehow, despite our good intentions, we manage to find ourselves in panic mode on a weekly basis, this day even more so. I hobble my way out the door, leaning on one crutch and herding kids into the van with the other.
I comb as many heads of hair as I can reach from the front seat while my husband Ken drives slowly over the powdered roads. I won’t exaggerate this part—the treacherous drive, the over-the-river-and-through-the woods imagery, the sense of pilgrimage—since we live a full two blocks from our church building. But it does take maybe three minutes longer than usual to get here. We arrive, pausing to direct a few Christian thoughts at the people who have taken advantage of the snow-covered parking lot to usurp the handicapped spots. Ken drops me and the boys off near the side door and keeps the baby with him while he parks the van.
I have often wondered what non-Mormons think of the way our chapels are attached to gymnasiums. Do the basketball hoops suspended from the ceilings serve a liturgical function (something along the lines of Mayan ceremonial ball courts, only not so fatal)? Is there a system of rank that determines which members of the congregation sit in the chapel on soft benches and which are relegated to the metal folding chairs in the gym? And here’s the question I ask myself every week when we arrive late and find our place among the gym-squatters: does God also keep track of tardies?
On this morning, the kids stomp their shoes off in the hall and we come in through the very back of the gym, trying to discreetly cross the floor without drawing attention to our lateness. The ward is singing the sacrament hymn—the last chorus; we are very late indeed. As the organist sustains the final chord, I discover for myself why, if Mayans had lived in a snowy climate, they would have certainly avoided the use of highly varnished wood floors for their ball courts: they are slippery when wet.
I hit a pool of melted snow. My crutches slide out in opposite directions, clattering loudly across the wood floor. I fall to my knees—not an inappropriate pose if I were, say, lighting a prayer candle near a reliquary in a Gothic cathedral, but a bit dramatic for a crowded Mormon meetinghouse. A hundred and fifty heads, including that of the organist, turn to see what all the noise is about. They are my friends, my brothers and sisters, and their concern and sympathy flow back at me like a tidal wave, but I am still humiliated. Humbled. I give them all a timid smile from my penitent position. So much for discreet.
I turn down many kind offers of assistance, crawl over to the nearest row of free chairs, and motion for my kids to join me. They bring my crutches from both sides of the room. We are barely settled after the sacrament when a feud breaks out over the crayons. Then the boys begin to squirm and complain about being bored. I am surrounded by trout on a boat deck. There is much arching and flopping—from chairs to floor to my knees to the floor again. I catch only a few phrases of a talk that, to be honest, holds no interest for me.
I have no choice but to ask myself a terrible question. It strikes me not with urgency but in a seeping flush of frustration and resignation. Why am I here? I do not ask because of a crisis of faith, or even because I feel picked on and impaired and am wishing for sackcloth and ashes to make my persecution complete. I mean, generally speaking, what is the point of our weekly attendance, our weekly battle? I am not at the verge of exiting the church (slowly, very slowly), and leaving my membership records at the door, never to return. I simply have what I feel to be a highly practical proposal: If my home is a temple, can we please, please just worship from there?
There are probably a dozen good answers to this question, none of which I want to hear at the time. Sometimes the truth is too plain and not nearly convincing enough. But in the months that have passed since that morning, my strained relationship with sacrament meeting has mended itself along with the fracture in my foot. I cannot explain the details behind either of these recoveries. They happened both gradually and inevitably. All I can say is that if the day is a Sunday, we go to church. Simple as that. One might even say we go "faithfully," since it takes a leap of faith to believe that the labors of preparation and attendance are worth it.
I also wish I could announce that we have turned some kind of corner and now arrive early enough to file reverently into our padded pew in the chapel. But no. We are still consistently late. We’ll keep working on it. In the meantime, I have discovered certain advantages to sitting in the gym. We can shift the rows around for extra leg room. When the baby cries, we have more exits to choose from. And the boys have discovered that their magnets stick to the backs of the metal folding chairs.
I can say that I will defend my need to attend church to anyone who calls it into question, whether that person is also me, or someone I do not know so well. The former governor of Minnesota, Jesse Ventura, recently called organized religion a "crutch for the weak-minded." Having some degree of familiarity with the metaphor, I beg to differ. A crutch is something to lean on, something to help us walk if we are injured or disabled. What is my religion? My religion is the outward expression of my inner beliefs: my participation in an ancient institution, my observance of certain ceremonies and practices, and, yes, my church attendance. My religion does more than support me. It transports me. A crutch can compensate for my weaknesses, but it cannot make me a stronger person. A crutch can temporarily prop me up, but it cannot move me to carry someone else’s burden. A crutch can help me when I am hurt, but it can never make me well. These are things my religion does for me.
And in return, my religion requires sacrifice. God expects me to set aside my time, to tithe my income, to give up worldliness, to pull my family out of bed on a snowy morning and take them to a place where we not only worship with song and prayer, but we also worship with our physical presence. Joseph Smith said that “a religion that does not require the sacrifice of all things never has the power sufficient to produce the faith necessary unto life and salvation.” I have written this quote into the blank pages at the back of my quadruple combination. I will use it along with the following argument if ever I meet Mr. Ventura. “Religion is far more than a crutch,” I will say. “How long would I put up with a crutch that made my life more difficult rather than easier, a crutch that I could sometimes lean on but mostly had to maintain, and make payments on, and lug around with me everywhere I went?”
When I broke my foot, I had been walking down the concrete steps from my kitchen into my garage. The doctor said that, as I tripped and caught myself, I twisted the tendon in my foot in such a way that it pulled on the fifth metatarsal bone and snapped it in two places. "It was a smart break," she told me. Ligaments and tendons—the things that connect bone to bone and bone to muscle—are much stronger than the bones themselves. They also take much longer to heal, and a tear in a ligament or tendon would have required surgery to repair. As it turned out, I wore a cast for six weeks and stayed off my foot to let it heal. During this time, I learned about the generosity of friends, family, and strangers. I learned a few painful lessons about humility. I also learned that I was stronger than I thought. My testimony was stronger than I thought. For once, I had an ironclad excuse to stay home from church but I went anyway.
The words “ligament” and “religion” stem from the same Latin root: religare, “to bind fast.” I mention this because I can see how some might view my religion as a thing that limits or constrains me. But I know differently. I think of Abraham binding his son Isaac to the altar and equate his gesture with the sacrifices we make for our faith. What is bound on earth is bound in heaven. What we do here matters to God. And God obliges us—demands even—that we live a life based on principles of right and wrong, that we attend worship services and willingly entwine our consciences with moral imperatives. These things are not easy. I stumble. I fall short. I show up late. I do my best. I trust that God cares about me enough to watch over me and keep an accounting of all my efforts. And the fracture—the separation between what I am and what I want to become—I believe that God will bind that as well.
Next to Julie's bed you'll find an eclectic, waist-high stack of books, all of which she insists she’s “right in the middle of” reading. She is also currently in the middle of her seventeenth year of marriage, her fourteenth year of teaching humanities at BYU and her thirteenth year of motherhood. She writes about art and parenting at mentaltesserae.blogspot.com.
