So I went to church...

On my struggles to believe.

On Saturday night, my wife turned to me and said: “Let’s go to church tomorrow. Can you find some mass times?”

As you might guess from that conversation, we are not regular church-goers. We were both raised Catholic. We have both lapsed — due, in large part to the priest sex abuse scandal and the fact that the Catholic mass is, well, utterly boring and irrelevant to our lived lives. (I know many people will disagree! To each his own!)

But, we both believe in the basic goodness of a church community. And of exposing our boys to the idea that there is something greater than us at work in the world.

So, I looked up mass times. And we decided on a trip to McLean Bible Church on Sunday.

For people who don’t live in this area and don’t know McLean Bible, it is NOTHING like a church you are probably thinking of.

For starters, it is MASSIVE — the room where the services are held probably fits a few thousand people. I am sure there are plenty of churches that are bigger. But I’ve never been in one.

It is also evangelical. Or at least my idea — New England Catholic — of evangelical. The mass consisted of three modern religious songs — played by a five-person band on stage — and then a 45-minute (or so) sermon. There is communion but not doled out by a priest. It’s a wafer and wine that come in a handy-dandy little packet that you pick up as you walk in.

It’s all very modern and impressive. And nothing like the Catholic churches of my youth (and adulthood).

Two things happened when I was there that I wanted to mention:

1. The sermon was on work. And specifically how to flourish at work. (You can watch the whole sermon here.) I took this to be a sign (of sorts) given that I have spent the last 16 months thinking deeply about what sort of work I want to do and what work means in my life. I think it touched all four of us — in different ways. Work can be a gift, if you remember why you are doing it and who you are doing it for.

2. I hadn’t thought a ton about my father-in-law’s funeral of late. It was a brutal time for my family and, well, it’s not something that I really want to linger on too much.

But, as I sat at McLean Bible, I remembered something very specific from the day we buried my father-in-law. The preacher from his church was speaking. And he was talking about Ken’s deep faith and personal relationship with Jesus. He said that one way to honor Ken was to try to find that same faith and relationship in our own lives.

I hadn’t thought much about that moment in the year and a half since Ken died. But it hit me like a bolt of lightning as I sat there listening to the music. And I realized that I had done nothing — not really — to try to make good on how the preacher asked me to remember and honor my father in law.

The truth is that I am, if we are putting a label on it, a skeptic. I’d like to believe that we go to Heaven. I truly would. But I don’t have any hard proof that it’s Heaven that awaits rather than just the deletion of consciousness.

And it’s the proof thing that’s always tripped me up. A few years back, at a Christian family camp we attended — with and at the urging of my father-in-law — I had a series of conversations about faith with the pastor who ran the camp. (He was an amazing guy.)

All of my questions boiled down to the same thing: How can I bridge the gap between what I know (aka conscious life) and what I really do want to believe (that life on earth isn’t the end)?

Did he have proof? Had he ever hear God or Jesus or Allah or any deity talking to him directly?

His answer was simple: There is no “proof” per se. He had never heard Jesus’ voice speaking to him. He told me you just have to have faith. Which, of course, comports with the Bible’s broad message. If you are waiting for God to come down and say “Hey Chris, that thing you asked for, I just did it,” you are going to be waiting a long while. Because that’s not how God works. It’s not on your schedule or your timetable; it’s on an eternal one.

This may or may not be totally right by religious scholar standards. I went to Sunday school and got my first Communion and all that. But after that — well not much. I have never read the Bible all the way through. I don’t spend a bunch of time thinking about God and religion on a daily basis.

Which, I guess, is sort of the point. If you believe, the sense of the divine — I think — is woven through your everyday existence. People pray about almost everything and it helps them (or at least they feel it does!).

I wish — deeply — that was me. It is not. At least currently.

What I do NOT want is to be one of those people who, if I get diagnosed with some terrible disease or something else bad happens in my life, I suddenly become religious.

Because, to me, that would feel fake. I spent all these years as a skeptic — not a non-believer but a skeptic — and then to have what amounts to a death-bed conversion? Meh.

(Sidebar: I totally get and believe that this happens! That tragedy or near-death experiences and the like do occasion genuine religious experiences and awakenings.)

And so, well, I don’t know. I have resisted writing about my religious journey because it doesn’t feel all that much like a journey. It feels like I have been stuck in one spot for a while now.

Can I get unstuck? I wish I knew. That’s the hard thing about faith — there’s not a blueprint for how to, er, get it.

I wanted to share this with you all because I consider you a part of my journey — in journalism, in parenting and in life. And I thought it might help someone else who is in my same spot or some place similar to it.

Thanks for reading. And if you have ideas on faith — whether it’s books to read, podcasts to listen to it or, well, something else — I would welcome them. You can put those thoughts in the comments section. Or, if you prefer, send me an email at cillizzac@gmail.com.