Why Gather?

The Hope and Promise of the Church

Martha Tatarnic

• Publisher: Church Publishing
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781640653726
• eBook ISBN: 9781640655522
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Church

As the COVID pandemic began to shut down the world, even within the church we found our busy hamster-wheel lives grind to a halt.

In the midst of a global crisis, the author found herself in a crisis of vocation, wondering whether or not there might be something else she could do with her life, other than serve the church. The church as a whole began asking questions of a similar and urgent nature. Why be together in Jesus' name? Does any of what we do as the church in gathering, in proclaiming, in serving, in being together, in not being together, does any of it matter?

CHAPTER 1

Stuck

March 6, 2020

I was out running on March 6, 2020, when Cheryl called.

I was a few miles in, which is important to note, because the thing I always say about running is that the first ten minutes are the worst. In those first ten minutes, I am a prisoner in my own mind. No matter how physically fit, no matter how much I know in my head that I enjoy running, when I first put shoe to pavement, my lungs feel like they are going to explode, my muscles ache and rebel, I am sure I have to pee even though I went just before leaving the house, and all of the miles that I have planned stretch endlessly and impossibly in front of me. If I can stick it out for those first ten minutes, what feels like prison opens into a surprising freedom.

Getting to that freedom takes a major shift in perspective. Every single time I go out, I need to know that my mind is going to take me down every available rabbit hole about why I shouldn’t be there, why I can’t do it, what isn’t working about the conditions in front of me, why this whole enterprise is doomed from the start. Yet somehow what happens after those rabbit holes feels like nothing short of a miracle. It’s not that I go somewhere different, it’s that I land somewhere real. My body gets into enough of a rhythm that my mind lets go of “what if” and “why am I here anyway.” What is actually happening takes over from the mind game of wondering what else I could be doing or what might lie around the corner.

I was nicely into that rhythm on March 6. My plan was to run and then come home and pack, but at that moment I was lost in the mix of shoe on pavement. My “Under Pressure” ringtone interrupted me midstride. When I saw Cheryl’s name on the display, my mood and mind frame shifted abruptly. I knew the news wasn’t good. I could hear the hesitation and worry in her voice. She had tried to engage me a number of times over the previous weeks, and I had refused to listen.

“Martha, we really need to talk.”

In two days, Cheryl and I were supposed to get on a plane to fly to Jerusalem for a ten-day pilgrimage to the Holy Land. COVID-19 had been simmering in the daily news cycle for months. “It’s a nothing burger,” I had quipped to friends and acquaintances, thinking myself clever for not getting caught up in the hype and fearmongering. Many news stories predicting dire illnesses, deadly insects, and various other upheavals have cycled through our collective consciousness and have left us relatively unscathed. I assumed the relentless worry about this virus was going to go much the same way.

But that wasn’t why I was insisting that we fly to Jerusalem. It wasn’t even that I was so totally invested in the opportunity to walk among the same places as Jesus and to see with my own eyes scenes from the Bible stories I had been reading my whole life come into three-dimensional color. I understood, as Cheryl had been trying to tell me, that we could reschedule.

The truth was that I was desperate to get away. I wanted to unplug. I wanted to be immersed in a different world. I wanted to physically and literally leave everything behind and be given permission to be away from my life. I had been running myself ragged. I had published and promoted a book; I had helped lead a massive initiative at our church to open a resource center for the troubled young people in our downtown; I was a full-time working mom in charge of a busy urban parish.

Even that wasn’t really the problem, however. There is a time of life for these pedal-to-the-metal lifestyles; there is a season for that constant state of juggling around which parts of our overflowing plates get the lion’s share of our attention at any given time. The problem was that I didn’t feel like any of it was working anymore.

I’m good at organization and strategically putting ideas into action. But I am even better at following my gut. I govern the biggest decisions of my life by instinct. I can feel the power of an idea as a burning energy in the pit of my stomach, making my whole body tingle. When I get that feeling, I know I need to act.

For the last few months, that gut instinct had been failing me. My entire job had devolved into one never-ending task of conflict management as my supposedly good ideas were causing nothing but misunderstanding and anger. I needed to get on that plane. I needed a break. I needed it now. I knew what Cheryl was going to say. I stopped running. A crushing weight of disappointment settled on my chest before she even had to say the words.

“We can’t go,” she said. “It’s not safe.”

“Is It Because of That Coronavirus Thing?”

I understood I would be stuck at home, but I didn’t understand much else. I was shocked when, later that day, the schools announced, just before our kids came home for spring break, that they would remain on break for two weeks beyond their scheduled time off. I wildly tried to fill up my suddenly empty week with overnights in Toronto and fun plans for Cheryl’s birthday, which we were supposed to have celebrated in the Holy Land.

Others were slow to understand too. My Mom and I discussed the school closures: “Maybe if everybody just stays home for a few weeks, then we can put this behind us,” we commented naively. We had a packed party at the church that night, a farewell reception for Michael, a friend and colleague at the church leaving for another position. We had no idea that this would be the last such gathering for the foreseeable future. We breathed each other’s air and smudged our germs all over plates, glasses, and smooth surfaces with abandon. When I shared the news with a few people at the party asking about my canceled trip, they expressed mild surprise that we weren’t going.

“Is it because of that coronavirus thing?” they asked.

From that evening onward, plans fell through one by one, and the world began the domino effect of shutdown. Even trips to Toronto became unsafe. Restaurants, shopping centers, theaters, public spaces of all kinds, became spookily empty. By the following weekend, just eight days later, we received the dictum to close our churches to in-person worship.

There was much hand-wringing about this most of all, but we comforted ourselves with happy thoughts about how good it would be when we could be together again and have a big party after the service to celebrate getting through a tough patch. Duchesses Kate and Meghan were pictured gloveless and shaking hands with their adoring public after a royal event around this time, and they were framed as brave and compassionate—like Diana before them, hugging AIDS patients—because the threat of illness wasn’t standing in the way of their willingness to be close to their people.

“I feel so guilty,” people said to me over the phone and by email, which became the only ways we had to connect. Our church is full of people who devote their lives to service, to their care for others, to being in the thick of the community’s need.

“People are dying. Frontline workers are risking their lives. And I’m just stuck at home.”

Our church’s daily breakfast program had to move to a takeout model, closing the in-person dining that was so much a feature of the compassion we were seeking to offer people—not just food, but a warm and safe place to sit and to be fed.

“We’re acting on fear,” was the lament. “We’re not acting out of love for God’s people.”

As the first few days of shutdown turned into the first few weeks of the global pandemic, our collective understanding shifted. Masks, physical distance, closed doors, and stay-at-home orders all became not just regular features of our lives, but also the new signs of how we cared. Slowly, we started to realize our changed state of affairs was not going to be over in a few weeks or even a few months.

Is This a Prison or a Path to Freedom?

“Do you actually enjoy running, Mommy?” my daughter, Cecilia, has asked on more than one occasion, wrinkling their nose in disbelief. Although I talk a lot about how much I love running, I understand their skepticism. At their age, I also would have been horrified by the thought of doing this for any reason other than being forced to in gym class. But the thing that I have come to love about running is the same thing that I have loved about being a musician, and it’s the same thing that I recognize as being essential to the spiritual life as well. When you’re practicing scales or kneeling in prayer or engaging in any sort of discipline that requires a lot of showing up and going through the motions, there is the opportunity to get so hemmed in by the specific boundaries of what that discipline requires that a new sort of freedom opens up. Instant gratification is easy to come by, but a lot of what makes life worth living requires a measure of patience and openness to stick it out past beginnings that aren’t comfortable or fun.

This is at the heart of the spiritual tradition of the wilderness. What looks like the wild and wandering circumstances that never would have been our choosing is actually terrain that is ripe for finding out who we really are. Jesus threw himself into the rigorous discipline of a forty-day wilderness period after his baptism and prior to beginning his public ministry. I wonder if he knew, though, that this wilderness was leading somewhere. I wonder if he felt like he chose the wilderness or if it found him.

More than that, I wonder what sort of wilderness he experienced prior to that forty-day fast. He was thirty years old, we understand, when he began his public ministry. This man who had so much ballyhoo about him when he was born was, by first-century standards, practically an old man by the time anything began to happen for him. Did he feel stuck? Did he wonder what he was doing or where he was going? Did he wish that something would happen? Did he fear that this something might not be what he wanted? In those thirty years leading up to when it all got started, did he know that being stuck was also part of it? That he had to have those quiet, unremarkable years in order to be clear enough about who he was that he could offer himself for the world?

I might willingly go out and subject myself to the relentless pavement pounding, to the boredom, to the numbing repetition of long-distance running, and I might know that this is going to allow me—body, mind, and spirit—to become centered in ways that are refreshing and transformative and freeing. That doesn’t mean that I don’t often wonder what I’m doing out there or wish I were somewhere else. It also doesn’t mean that when I have felt stuck, bored, anxious, depleted, and frantic about other circumstances in my life, circumstances not of my choosing, that I have been able to keep track in those times that something good and necessary might actually be unfolding too.

I happened to feel stuck at the same time that most of the world was literally stuck. Most of us had our experiences of panic to sort through as our minds went down the rabbit holes of doubt and distress in which we can so easily dwell when it looks like miles of unchosen terrain are stretching out relentlessly in front of us. The pain and suffering, the loss and fear of COVID was real and significant. It claimed millions of lives and livelihoods and it has left permanent marks on our souls. The cost of lockdown isolation on us spiritually and mentally is a cost that we will be grappling with for years to come. These are stark and difficult truths and not to be minimized.

Also, there was a potential gift in the sudden enforced discipline of having nowhere to go than to be exactly where we were. In churchier (or more Hollywood) language, we talk about apocalypse. Apocalypse isn’t actually that fancy of a concept, even if it is a big word. It means a revealing. It is the pulling back of the curtain to unveil what has been true and real all along. Christians would begin talking about apocalypse a lot in the 2020 pandemic. We were inspired in part by the pictures from around the world of those busiest of public spaces suddenly looking like postapocalyptic ghost towns. But our faith also gave us language for accessing the spiritual invitation that might be on offer too. When you can’t go anywhere, you can figure out who you really are. Hard truths were being revealed to us at a staggering rate: truths about who and what really matter, who and what hasn’t mattered enough, who and what we want to matter more going forward.

Running gave me a new metaphor: ultrarealism, which is a technique long-distance runners use for mental fitness. It is the practice of seeing, accepting, and embracing the actual circumstances in which you find yourself.¹ It is about responding to the moment in front of you rather than the moment you worry might be coming or which circumstances you wished were different. When people talk about positive thinking, I instantly lose interest. Ultrarealism, however, isn’t about training the mind to squeeze reality through the frames of any sort of rose-colored glasses. It’s about getting real.

At the beginning of March 2020, it had been a few years since I had trained for any longer distance running races, and I had never heard of ultrarealism. I ended up clocking a lot of miles that year. Ultrarealism became important to me as a runner, but it became even more important to me in the wilderness in front of me as a priest and in front of us as a church. There were some things ahead for me to better understand. There was a pile of acceptance that had to be hard-earned. Figuring out any sort of embrace, joy, choice was still countless miles away. I didn’t know it, but the church I wanted to fly away from was going to be key in my understanding of what was actually most real—not just for me, but for all of us.

Nowhere to Go

When Cheryl called on March 6, I was hell-bent on getting on that plane to Jerusalem because it felt like my life was coming apart at the seams. I didn’t want to admit to anyone, least of all myself, why leaving it behind felt like the only solution. Instead, I had to stay put and figure some things out. I began considering that key components of my life might be up for negotiation. It was like I was at the bargaining table of life, with myself—and maybe God—the only one sitting across from me. I was putting stuff on that table that hadn’t felt up for grabs for a long time.

The last time I had considered running from my calling to be a priest had been in the final months of seminary, with parish ministry and ordination right around the corner. My temptation then had been to stay in the academic world, where at least I had a whisper of a clue of what I was doing. A number of friends and professors encouraged me to join them in the writing, research, and teaching sphere.

I would have liked such a clear alternative at this juncture. With nowhere to go, no plane to catch, no getaway car, I was stuck. And in being stuck, I considered whether God was still calling me to be a priest or whether there might be something else I could do with my life. The burnout that had been creeping ever closer to my heart and soul didn’t get any better with COVID. The question of whether I still had a way forward in leadership in the church was my constant companion—not just when our trip got canceled but for all of the coming year.

On March 8, Cheryl and I were supposed to fly to Jerusalem. We ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I Everything Is on the Table
• Part II Not Another Hypothetical Version of What the Church Could Be
• Part III Acceptance—How the Community of Faith Reveals the Power of God
• Part IV The Gathered Church: Embracing Who We Really Are
• Acknowledgments