I never needed or wanted to take an extended sabbatical from Church. Sure I’ve been through an existential Faith Journey with some rough ups and downs. Yes, there have been plenty of times I come home from Church flustered, annoyed, or unfeeling instead of refreshed and enlivened. Sometimes I feel like an outsider in my ward because I’m more comfortable in uncertainty and a universal tradition.
Taking a “sabbatical” is sometimes presented as a right-of-passage for people who undergo substantial faith reconstruction. During Faith Crisis, people occasionally need an extended break from Church attendance to recenter themselves. The extra space from the community can be a necessity. And I would never fault anyone who needed to step back.
However, I’ve never felt like I needed to take a break. Even during the darkest night of my Faith Journey, I wanted to be in the pews each week with my friends. Looking back on these student wards, it’s clear we were all going through some sort of existential faith crisis. Even if we didn’t know the intimate details of our neighbor’s faith journey, we were all there going through it together. Over time, I got to a place where I was recentered and re-grounded. I could participate in Church on my own terms and negotiate the give-take of communal service.
But then everything changed when the Coronavirus arrived.
Universe Mandated Sabbatical
Apart from a couple of times to teach Elder’s Quorum, my attendance of virtual Church has been virtually nonexistent. If Sunday attendance could be taxing before, virtual Church is even more so. For me, taking more than it gives. I won’t belabor the point, but until I’m vaccinated I don’t think it wise to attend Church in person. So this leaves me in a liminal space, where, because of reality’s circumstances I’m not attending Church. And I won’t be until some undetermined time in the future.
So for the time being, I guess I’m on a sabbatical. But not a chosen sabbatical. This is a sabbatical that reality gave me. Yes, I have done and can continue Home Church. Though it just isn’t the same. Blessing and taking the sacrament is not the reason I go to Church and hasn’t been for a long time. Because of many reasons, I’m not concerned with renewing my covenants because I’m not very concerned about breaking them.
No, I go to Church because of the people. Community, making friends, teaching Sunday School, ward activities, making jokes about the sacrament talk to my neighbor, and sneaking in late are the bread and butter of my Mormon experience. I love it so much. Skipping class to have a conversation with a friend in the hallways or dodging the Bishop who is going to ask you to give a talk next Sunday is the best. It comes as no great surprise that I really miss Church. I miss those weird burlap covered walls. I miss not singing during the hymn. I miss, I miss, I miss.
Revelations of the Night
But it’s ok. While I feel the temporary loss of my traditional spiritual community, I have found myself centered and grounded in the much larger universal Body of Christ. Like I wrote during the summertime, I recognize now more than ever that my membership in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints exists to support my membership in this larger community. This year was a weird experience of losing a community only to slowly have revealed the larger community to which I’ve always belonged.
When you’re camping and the sun sinks below the horizon, the world shrinks. The light from our lanterns and headlamps collapses the world down to what just in front of us. The much larger world still exists but we have been cut off from it. In a similar way, we tend to live our lives only focused on what is in front of our faces. The glow of the familiar and the traditional forms of living life can blind us to all else we are part of.
My experience of 2020 was like turning off the lanterns and headlamps during a dark dark night of camping. At first, the world is dark and full of terror. Mostly imagined terror, but some of it real and pressing. Systemic racism, white supremacy, and a global pandemic still lurk in the night. However, as my body grows accustomed to the night, my natural night vision returns. The larger world flows back into view as looming shadows in the shapes of trees and mountains.
What the darkness truly reveals, though, is the vastness of the universal community Earth, and all of us, abides in. The night reveals our planetary neighbors, sometimes in cosmic alignment with one another. Comets, stars, and galactic super-clusters all become real.
In this way, the darkness of 2020 revealed to me the membership in a vast community that includes and transcends my membership in the institution of the Church. I am able to endure the loss of this smaller community, only by recognizing my spiritual roots have grown deeper and touched the living waters of the Body of Christ.
Someday, hopefully soon, I’ll return. And I’ll do so with a renewed intentionality and messages of a bigger and broader universal community. Even now, light grows on the horizon as vaccines begin to rollout. But until then, I’m content to rest in this mandated sabbatical in the Wilderness. To learn the lessons the wild to teach.
