Our relationship, God's and mine, was civil, I would say, if not always
cordial. If I had had some way of talking about it, I would not have said,
during all that time, that I had any sort of spiritual life at all. In church
I felt like a hypocrite, surrounded by people who knew something I didn't
as I pretended to know it, too.
'It never occurred to me that one might go to church not because one believed
in God but precisely because one didn't, that in 'going through the motions'
one might not be performing empty gestures but preparing a space into which
belief could flood if it were going to (though it might not, ever). '
Talking about her writing habits, Flannery O'Connor said that she was careful
to be at her desk every morning so that, if an idea came along, we'd be
there to receive it. I now go to Mass in much the same spirit, but for a
long time I thought belief was something you had to bring with you, the
way a diligent student totes her textbook and completed assignment to class.
Nancy Mairs in 'Ordinary Times' Back
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