I don’t love the grouches yet, but I’m trying

Today after church, I let the girls wander around the sanctuary. We had been at church a long time to attend a new members class, and the girls were getting restless. They love the sanctuary, that large space filled with stained glass and long wooden pews, so I knew they would be happy there while we waited for Az the Husband.

There was a woman at the organ, talking to a small group of adults about organ music. She began to play. My children love the organ music at church, so they whooped and shrieked with glee and ran to the center of the sanctuary, where they began to do clumsy pirouettes.

She immediately stopped playing. She shouted at me, angrily, “Would you PLEASE make them STOP yelling when I am playing!” I flushed, said nothing, and got up to catch them and drag them out of the sanctuary.

The girls did not notice the angry woman yelling at me, and merely complained about being forced to leave. I have made it a habit to take them through the sanctuary after services each Sunday, explaining the stained glass windows, or letting them smell the flowers. I want the church building to be a place that brings them feelings of joy, not the burdensome place of adult rules and disapproval that church so often proved to be when I was a child. There are usually no adults in the sanctuary after services, so it seems a good time to spend there with the girls without ruffling any feathers.

Being part of a congregation is tough business. The elderly resent the young for moving too quickly. The young resent the elderly for moving too slowly. The ladies who clean Fellowship Hall resent anyone who leaves a mess. The mothers who want to keep home every kid with a snotty nose resent the mothers who say “it’s just a cold” and bring their kids to the nursery anyway. Churches are supposed to be communities of love, but scratch the surface and you will find something else.

The organist saw the sanctuary as a place to preserve and sustain the dying art of organ music. I saw it as a place to teach my children that worship can be free and joyful. The organist had the occasional tendency of musicians to see children as an aural untidiness that must be swept up and disposed of before music can be practiced or appreciated. I found myself thinking that organ music was bound to die if children are rebuked for expressing delight in it. Our understandings of what a sanctuary was for were at complete variance.

Christians are supposed to treat one another with grace. We are a confusing jumble of old people worried about being knocked over by a scurrying toddler, hunger-crazed pregnant women (ahem) growling to themselves about the people who block the snack table just to chat, and adolescents who wish the adults would just say something interesting. The church is one of the last places where all these different ages and interests and personalities meet and try to live like a community.

And it only works if we show grace to each other. I am a mommyblogger writing primarily to an audience of mothers, and I don’t have any illusions about whose side you will take in a story about a woman who curled her lip at the presence of children. I am not writing to rile you up or stroke my bruised ego. My point is that my reaction to her – ill-concealed anger, and a good thirty minutes silently spent inventing cutting remarks to humiliate her – was just as graceless as her original anger.

I don’t go to church because I expect to be loved. I go to church to learn to love the irascible people who are called by the name Christian. This is one of the primary ways I worship Jesus. I realize that notion cuts against the grain – our cultural assumption is that we find a perfect, virtuous, loving church first, and then join it. Maybe that’s the right thing to do when we are new to the faith and need lots of nurturing, but at some point, we are supposed to become the spiritual grown-ups who can handle loving the cranks.

One of my disappointments since becoming a mother is realizing how much harder it is to love the cranky when I have spent my entire week nurturing three small, hungry, demanding children. By the time I get to church, I feel like I have nothing left. I arrive at church harried and lugging a twenty-pound baby up and down stairs, trying to rest her on my hip while my pregnant belly is in the way, and herding two other small running children. My reservoirs are dry. Finding those last few drops of kindness to give to the people around me feels impossible.

In one of George MacDonald’s fairy tales, a boy on a quest is told that he must go one whole week without thinking. It seems an impossible task, but he stumbles upon some goblin blacksmiths who put him to work. The pace of the labor is so fast and furious and unrelenting, that he barely has time to blink before the goblins tell him that he has finished a week, and he has not paused to think even once.

I wonder sometimes if the exhaustion of motherhood is my forge, teaching me to love without thinking about it first. With no reserves left and no time to ponder my responses, I’ll only show grace and love if it has become the battle-hardened, fire-tested, prayerful center of my soul.

And sure as anything, dear readers, I am not there yet.