fc188 The Joy of Sitting in Empty Churches

If you walk into a church right now, you are almost guaranteed to see other people. It’s the busiest time of the year for churches — even the normally empty ones are full. But full churches are what I usually avoid.

My favorite thing to do is find an empty church and sit. Since I’m a single mother of two, it’s not hard to see why I’d be looking for a little peace and quiet. But there’s more to it than that, and it’s not always easy to explain. I’m after a certain kind of silence.

I first discovered this kind of quiet some years back, when I’d gone to Italy for what seemed to be no reason at all. Without any sort of plan, I decided to go inside every church I came across, no exceptions. No church too small, no marble too lurid, would stop me.

The poet Philip Larkin wrote in his “Church Going” in 1954 that when he stepped inside a church, he did so with the hope of avoiding anything that might be “going on.” This became my goal as well. To find what is left after the services, the people, the Sunday clothes and the pageantry — something big and empty and acoustically live — as Larkin describes it, a “tense, musty, unignorable” silence.

I first went into these churches determined in a sense of rebellion. I’d been a teen atheist in Catholic high school, and I’d joined the church choir out of sheer boredom. Now I go to church for real: once a week in the usual way, but still more often alone. At these times, I go insistent on the not. I bring no opinions, nothing certain; just me and the arc of the ceiling. And I go with a promise to myself: The moment it feels fake, I’m out the door.

Nothing will spoil the effect of this like going in search of an “experience,” or purposely setting out to pray. It’s a strange game of church-seeking and -sitting that I play — searching by not searching, hoping to catch something slanting in from the side, crabwise, or not at all.

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Ms. Gray’s 14-year-old son, Colt, is being charged as an adult for murder in the deadliest school shooting in Georgia’s history. He is accused of bringing an AR-15-style rifle to Apalachee High School in Winder, Ga., earlier this month, killing four — two students and two math teachers — and injuring at least nine.

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