Staying Home

Staying at Home

Annarose Steinke

Some keep the Sabbath going to Church — I keep it, staying at Home — With a Bobolink for a Chorister — And an Orchard, for a Dome — —Emily Dickinson1

I’ve lived in four different states and at least twice as many apartments since heading off to college in the year 2000. With each move, finding the local Catholic church was always at the top of my essential to-do’s, right up there with forwarding the mail and setting up the Comcast installation. In college, Sunday night Mass was a welcome refuge from Calculus 101 and dorm socials alike, a designated hour during which I knew precisely what to expect and what was expected of me. When I moved to Virginia for my first teaching job, I waited patiently on cobblestone steps at the end of a long line of men, all of them bearded and suspender-clad a good decade before the ironic vintage trend had taken off. Once I reached the vestibule, and a young woman in a floor-length dress with long sleeves gestured magnanimously toward an end table with a stack of lace doilies, I promptly turned around

before I could notice any reactions to my knee-length jean skirt and hot pink tank top and never returned again. Two years later in New Mexico, I was immersed in a parish with a vibrant young adult group. We helped the local Franciscan friars bring meals to those waiting outside the homeless “For the first time in my lifetime of church-going, I had bona fide church friends, people other than blood relatives to scan the pews for in those frantic seconds before the organist struck the first chord of the processional, who noticed if I was missing on a given Sunday, who noticed me...”

shelter downtown, shared our potlucks with a pastor who knew each of our names, and (a phenomenon I’d once regarded as exclusive to Protestants) prayed with and for each other joyously, jokingly, openly, intimately. For the first time in my lifetime of church-going, I had bona fide church friends—people other than blood relatives to scan the pews for in those frantic seconds before the organist struck the first chord of the processional—who noticed if I was missing on a given Sunday, who noticed me, and not my potential for marriage or motherhood (the only secular milestones, I’d long understood, for which I’d be acknowledged after receiving the sacrament of Confirmation as a teenager).

As to be expected with a bunch of 20-somethings, the group dissolved when we all started moving to different parts of the country for jobs and partners. Now married myself and moving to central Nebraska, I had zero expectations for finding anything close to this kind of parish community and I was right. But I did find the church, a building just completed in 2011 and boasting a magnificent gold baptismal font bearing an uncanny resemblance to the lavish hot tubs once featured on MTV’s Cribs. That it was exactly halfway between our townhouse and the main grocery chain increased my attendance slightly from my Virginia days even if it was nowhere near what it was in New Mexico. And for me, regular attendance has never been the point. What that building meant to me varied: sometimes my whole life, other times a distant yet solid anchor, but always a place where, if

I ever felt like that anxious 18-year-old away from home for the first time, I would always know the answers.

There are a few terms for what kind of Catholic I am: cafeteria, lapsed, or (for the four “big days” of Christmas, Ash Wednesday, Palm Sunday, and Easter) CAPE. Yet these all imply a level of ease and comfort I’ve never felt, with ready explanations for choices that seem sporadic and irrational even to friends with similar ambivalent relationships to their childhood churches. I might go every Sunday in January, then fall off as Lent approaches; sometimes I’ll attend a Good Friday service and skip Easter entirely. Although my husband and I had been living together for two years when we got engaged, and he was my sole nurse when I was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma just six months before our wedding, there was no question we’d complete the pre-Cana course no matter how alienated we felt from the workbook’s blithe fill-in-the-blanks (“We expect our first child to be born in the year ___”), or that we’d get married in the church where my parents took their vows 35 years prior. There are dozens of reasons to leave and I’d be in good company with thousands of other once-devout Catholics in the 21st century. And yet, even in the aftermath of another homily stale with sanctimony, when I’ve felt most angered by the neglect that feels at best oblivious and at worst callous to real human need, something brings me back, whether the following week or several months later. That something might be anything: hearing a Gospel verse that takes me to the exact dress and shoes I was wearing when I’d heard it for the first time at five years old, a whiff of incense that both grounds me and transports me, the spectacular prairie sunset that hits at just the right moment when exiting the 4:30 Vigil on an otherwise mundane November evening. I’ve never related to Emily

Dickinson’s universally beloved “Some keep the Sabbath going to Church.” I’m suspicious of how smoothly the bobolink and orchard slide into the roles of chorister and dome, the altar of the outdoors instantly replacing its indoor prototype “I wish I knew, as Dickinson did, as though this were exactly how it was always meant to be. how to articulate and actualize exactly what I need for spiritual Or maybe I’m more envious than suspect. I wish I knew, as Dickinson did, how to articulate sustenance.” and actualize exactly what I need for spiritual sustenance. I wish I felt completely at home during the various Episcopal services my husband and I have tried over the years. I wish I felt at home, anywhere, within or without the four walls of an institution that has repeatedly let me know, in ways big and small, that I am not fully welcome. When the COVID-19 pandemic struck, I’d only just started returning to the Saturday Vigil, not sure how long this streak would last. It was a relief at the end of a long week where I was solely in charge of my routine— what I’d be doing with my students, what vegetables I’d pick up for tomorrow’s stir fry—to have some hint of surprise. Those more lapsed than I will tell you that Mass is “always the same,” but it’s really not. The hymn

selection is always a surprise; the readings and responsorials may surprise you too, even if you vaguely recall them from the year before. I would have liked for that last homily, perhaps, to have been about something other than Shakira’s performance at the 2020 Super Bowl and her audacity to have, at 42-years-old, not a husband but a boyfriend. (Admittedly, the English professor in me was begrudgingly impressed with how seamlessly the deacon managed to connect Shakira to Matthew 3:14, the baptism of Jesus.) Nevertheless, missing Mass due to stay-at-home orders was merely one of many smaller disappointments and inconveniences, no different from the other times I’d retreated from weekly attendance.

Still, I tried. I dressed exactly as I would for any other Easter morning, makeup and all, as I searched for the recording that the parish had uploaded on their newly created YouTube channel. It felt excessive to stand up, kneel, and respond as prompted, but strangely disrespectful just to sit. I took small, discreet sips of coffee during the readings, but waited for the slightly longer pause between the second reading and the Gospel to finish the late bites of my banana muffin. By the offertory, however, my bare feet were tucked beneath me on the couch and I was already looking toward the kitchen counter just a few feet away, wondering if it would be ok to pause at Communion and start chopping the leeks for our brunch quiche. (I could still hear Sister Mary Joel admonishing my second grade Communion class never to be like “those people” who put their coats on during the offertory and sneak out the door as soon as they get their Hosts.) The whole experience felt at once both restrictive and empty, and I soon realized this was one activity I could never duplicate on screen.

With few other ways to mark the time, I started craving something more—not exactly Mass per se, but some way to break the seemingly endless stretches of Zoom hangouts and emails. I texted my mother, who has a Master’s in theology and copious notes for improving every mediocre homily she’s had to endure since 1975 if only the Vatican would get its act together and let women into the priesthood and diaconate already. Prefacing every drive to Christmas Midnight Mass with the disclaimer, “If I get aggravated, we’re leaving,” she’s the only

person who fully understands my own not-quite-lapsedness. She suggested some podcasts and websites, and soon I had created a new Sunday afternoon routine of folding laundry while listening to an episode of Turning to the Mystics. I subscribed to Richard Rohr’s daily emails from the Center for Action and Contemplation and started my mornings with these before opening my work emails. I joined an Advent e-retreat hosted by an online Benedictine community, with reflections and discussion questions to ponder each week; it was a real gift to be a student myself in the midst of moderating my own students’ discussion posts. I began making my own small rituals: specific mugs for certain days of the week, animals I expected to see at different times of the day on my long runs. The deer who stopped to stare just before bounding back into the woods at 6am were part of a select few who got to see my smile live and in-person. Between 2 and 3pm I shared the trails with a red-tailed hawk who also preferred this quieter time of day between lunchtime dog walks and school dismissals. I got so used to seeing him soaring low, scanning the fields for mice and chipmunks, that one day when I looked up and he wasn’t there I called out “Where are you?” before I was aware of what I was doing.

As Christmas Eve approached, and we decided that traveling to our families was not a risk

“I’m not sure that I feel completely at home in my still-evolving spirituality. But I am growing more confident with improvising, more assured that I don’t need to wait on someone else’s steps to be granted admission on someone else’s terms.”

worth taking, I made plans to attend services —this time in a way that would honor the space we were in. That afternoon, my husband and I tuned into Lessons and Carols with the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, attentive to the celebration but letting our feet drift where they may onto the floor, couch, or coffee table and sipping freely from our festive cocktails of cranberry juice and seltzer. At 10:45pm, I brewed a cup of chamomile tea, changed into pajamas, and searched for the YouTube channel of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral. The cat, who by then had developed a fondness for Zoom yoga and now expected a class any time I opened my laptop, leapt up to join me on the couch and purred contentedly as she settled against my thigh. The processional began and I kept one eye on the comments as viewers from around the world shared greetings and blessings, with not a small amount of disdain at the accommodations made for the televised broadcast: “What’s with the sports announcer? This is Mass, not a football game.” My mother, while too far to whisper her usual running commentary this year, made sure to text it: “Notice the complete lack of women in the procession.” I was comforted knowing that so many others felt compelled to do this—whatever “this” was. Feeling strongly that I was here, even if not there, I lasted much longer than the cat, who, miffed that no one was inviting her to take some cleansing breaths or stretch into savasana, leapt pointedly from the couch to her own bed in the middle of the Gloria. A little after midnight, just when the cantor reached the highest notes of “O Holy Night” and my eyelids started to droop, I closed my laptop and slipped up the stairs. I fell asleep with a sort of peace I’d not felt in a long time, that I did not think was possible to attain without physically being inside a church. Now approaching the second holiday season in the pandemic, I have no idea what will happen this Christmas Eve. My parents have not been back to Mass since March 2020, as much for their disgust at the sexual abuse scandals still being unearthed from just about every diocese across the United States as for health and safety concerns. As for me, I can’t yet say whether this break from church will be the break. Every so often, while doing the dishes or driving home from work, a verse of “Be Not Afraid” or another cherished alto-friendly hymn will pop into my head and I’ll start singing, envisioning a someday when I’ll return but not so anxious about when or if that “someday” will materialize. I’ve kept many of my quarantine rituals while resuming my normal schedule, but I wouldn’t call them a replacement for church; doing so would simplify and diminish their own unique gifts that evade categorizing. Claiming my home as a vital and valid space for my spirituality to flourish, I recently upgraded my Advent candle holder made of sparse wire to one of wood fashioned in the shape of the Jerusalem cross and inlaid with brass grommets. At 40 dollars plus shipping—the most I’ve ever spent on a strictly religious article—I felt bold and extravagant as I hit “purchase” on the Etsy page.

I’m not sure that I feel completely at home in my still-evolving spirituality. But I am growing more confident with improvising, more assured that I don’t need to wait on someone else’s steps to be granted admission on someone else’s terms. Rather than a place to rest in plain answers, my home is slowly becoming a space for seeking more intricate questions. On the other hand, I wouldn’t mind another glimpse of that epic gold baptismal font.