Reading · Accidental Alchemy with Sumaya Abuhaidar

Sometime in 2024, I went to church for the first time in almost three decades.

The last time was in 1998.

That was the year that Jason spent Christmas with my family for the first time and my mom got a wild hair about going to a Christmas Eve service to hear the carols. None of us had set foot in a church in as long as we could remember, but Jason didn’t realize this. He was the last to slide into the pew, at the back of the church, where we all hoped we wouldn’t be noticed. When it was time for communion, poor Jason got up and got in line. He got a ways down the aisle before he thought to look back. Which is when he realized none of us, including me, had stood up or joined the line making its way to the front of the church. I will never forget the look of panic on his face, like a WTF and oh-my-god, and a why-are-you-just-sitting there and a what-have-I-done look all wrapped into one.

My family didn’t do communion. And other than my mom getting that one wild hair about that one Christmas Eve service, we didn’t do church either.

So it went down in our family’s lore that the only person who took communion that Christmas was my Jewish boyfriend.

So why did I go to church in 2024?

Because I was curious, and I’d been invited by one of the sweet elderly ladies I volunteer with on Wednesdays. And also because a big part of my grand adventure was a newfound experience of the divine in my life, and I really wanted to be around other people who know how that feels.

And I really felt like singing.

A part of me was terrified. I’d built a whole identity out of being too smart, too educated, too intellectual for church or God or Jesus. Too much of a know-it-all for that “religion thing.” Just setting foot in a church felt scary to that part of me.

But I’m different now. It’s hard to feel “too good” for anything whatsoever after being kicked in the teeth and sent to my knees in a puddle of desperation.

So I went.

It was different from what I expected.

It was a beautiful modern building filled with light. The room where the service was held was more like an auditorium than a church. There was a church band whose whole job was just to play music for the services—a “worship band,” it’s called. And there were QR codes on the back of every seat that accessed all kinds of information about the church and its community.

QR codes? Really?

This was a far cry from that dark, incense-and Greek-word-filled church in our village in Lebanon. Definitely no worship band or QR codes there. And also a far cry from the uptight, proper Episcopal church we went to that memorable Christmas when Jason was the only one to take communion.

The service kicked off with singing. The lyrics came up on a big screen behind the band, which made it easy to sing along. I felt the beautiful vibration of hundreds of people singing all around me, and I felt my own voice joining in that river of sound. And I loved it.

I was in awe of the naked fervor of the lead vocalist, publicly pouring out her faith and her joy as she threw her arms up in the air, stomped her feet, and praised her God. Praised her Jesus. This was a Baptist church, so there was all sorts of unfettered joy and vocalization going on. Which I also loved. It felt free in a way I wasn’t used to.

But I have to be honest that I bristled at every masculine pronoun and name.

He. Lord. Father. Him.

God.

I cringed and felt that familiar contraction at the center of my chest. I hurriedly swapped words in my head.

She. Mother. Her. They.

Bella. Great Mystery.

I even sang the word “mother” out loud once instead of the word “father.” My little rebellion.

But I wanted to do all that translating because the truth is that I was deeply moved, and I didn’t want to shut myself off from the grace flowing freely through that room, through that community.

So I translated, and I felt the love.

All that before the sermon even began.

The sermon had me in tears within minutes.

The pastor is an inspired, progressive, youngish man. He’s articulate and smart, open-hearted and willing to be vulnerable.

His sermon was all about courage. He told his story of being a young man in seminary, sitting in a church full of people, all silent and waiting for someone to be moved to walk up to the pulpit and speak. He never thought it would be him.

Until a voice inside him said, “Get up. Walk up that aisle. Speak.”

He was terrified and didn’t want to do it. His palms were sweaty, and his heart raced. He pleaded with the voice to leave him alone, but it wouldn’t. Somehow, he found the courage to walk up that long, long aisle, in a quiet so deep you could hear every breath, with hundreds of people staring at him. He got up to the pulpit, and he surprised himself by knowing just what he wanted to say.

And he said it.

Shit. He was speaking to me.

She was speaking to me.

This was about my sweaty palms and my racing heartbeat at the thought of publicly sharing my experience. The thought of owning up to what I know.

Because doing so will tear down that arrogant, intellectual persona I so carefully created to protect myself from judgment, from hurt. Ripping it off and standing naked in front of this judgy world doesn’t just make my palms sweat. It makes my entire body break into rivers of sweat.

So here was this pastor, moved to tears by the memory of his own experience of that very same fear and finding the courage to get up off his chair and say yes to what wanted to be said through him.

There was nowhere for me to go, dear one. I couldn’t wiggle out of this one. I couldn’t let myself slink back into my safe armor. I would have to be brave, invite in that river of sweat, and follow it right to the hard thing: standing up and saying what wants to be said through me.

Dear one, I can only imagine at this point that you might be thinking that I’ve had a religious conversion of some kind and that I’m going to share with you that I’m all in on Jesus, the Bible, and Christianity.

But no. That’s not it.

I have great respect—maybe even reverence—for Jesus and for the message of unconditional love at the very heart of Christianity. And I have great respect for the place religion plays in the human story and for people who choose the path offered by any one religion. I might even be a little envious.

The whole reason I went to church is that dabbling in my “spiritual but not religious” bubble is too easy, too safe. I yearn for community and connection, for accountability of the kind that only comes with having a lineage, a book, a path, and a community, so you’re not just making things up as you go.

I also wanted to be uncomfortable. I wanted to come face to face with the moving and the beautiful right there in the very institutions, and in the very communities, that have left me cold most of my life.

And that is exactly what I found.

I was moved and humbled.

But going all in on any one religion, or on religion at all, is not my path. In some ways, I wish it were. It would be neater somehow. Easier.

But that neatness, that ease, is not for me. My path is messier and wilder.

That said, what is it that I want to muster up the courage to say?

That, dear one, will have to wait until the next chapter. But as we part for now, I’ll leave you with this:

Every time I’ve been lucky enough to get a little peek, an unexpected window, into the underlying fabric of the cosmos, I have a greater and greater suspicion that the Great Mystery—i.e. God—has been corralled into far too tame a shape, far too tame a box by both the world’s major religions and by non-religious spiritual teachings.

And that all the corralling has been altogether too human-focused. And too masculine.

Every wondrous window fuels my sense that the Great Mystery at the heart of everything is wilder—much, much wilder—than our collective imagination has allowed for. At least in the Western world.

I hope, and pray—because, yes, I am now a pray-er—that we are collectively ready to re-orient to ourselves and our world in a new way. Ready to reclaim the wild-ness that has been suppressed, oppressed, and shamed out of us for millennia.

Stay with me, dear one. I can hardly wait to share more with you in my next chapter. I’m pretty sure it’ll be a wild ride 😊.