`Yet Stop I Did'

A profligate city without zoning, Houston is dense with churches and other houses of worship. Some are grandiose shrines to Mammon and resemble shopping malls or sports arenas. Others are storefronts with whitewashed windows. Each, I suppose, gets the job done. In greater Seattle, churches, temples and mosques appear more reticent, unassuming and tucked-away. We spent much of Saturday driving around, house-shopping and park-exploring, and noticed a Hindu temple on a tree-lined street, a suburban-style Roman Catholic church that might have doubled as a ski lodge, and the most modest-looking mosque I have ever seen. All seem integrated into their neighborhoods, like insurance agencies or check-cashing joints. I don’t mean to sound disparaging. Like Philip Larkin in “Church Going,” I feel the tug of worship while remaining unable to partake. Of a church he writes in the final stanza:

“A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognised, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.”

More than 30 years ago I lived above a storefront church on the West Side of Cleveland. The congregants were white Appalachians, quiet people except in worship. Their evening prayer meetings were raucous and sweaty and seemed to skirt the margins of anarchy. The windows were papered on the inside with newsprint taped to the glass, but the sheets always sagged and I would look in, guiltily, to see a large woman with long hair pounding on the upright piano, Jerry Lee Lewis-style. People were singing and stomping, releasing the fury and exultation their normal demeanors never suggested. I felt like a voyeur, entranced and deeply uncomfortable. Larkin again:

“Yet stop I did: in fact I often do,
And always end much at a loss like this,
Wondering what to look for…”

The most attractive, inviting house of worship I noticed on Saturday was a modest, red-brick Catholic church on a slope above a lake. Brick buildings for me imply sturdiness and ease of living. Nearby, in a sprawling public park, were a cricket field and coin-operated dog-washing station. Such is America’s weird inclusiveness. I always find comfort in Leon Wieseltier’s beautiful Kaddish:

“I am glad to be reminded that the rational and the irrational run into each other, that sense may be discovered in nonsense and nonsense in sense. And I am also glad to know that the appeal of a disembodied soul accomplishes nothing. A soul without a body lacks the authority of a soul with a body. We mourn on earth.”