Why Do We Avoid Going to Church?
Orthodoxy is like a great mansion with innumerable rooms, all full of priceless treasures. We open a new door now and then, and we discover new beauties of which we had never dreamed. Again, it is like a house with rooms within rooms, and the more inner the room is, the larger and more beautiful. This divine and saving faith, which is not merely a system of belief but rather the actual encounter with the divine energies of the Triune God, is inexhaustible, and, moreover, God wants us always to have more of it. As the Prophet David sings,
Thou hast made known to me the ways of life,
Thou wilt fill me with gladness with Thy countenance;
delights are in Thy right hand forever. - Psalm 15
To acquire these treasures, however, we have to open the doors. In real terms, this means, of course, going to divine services, prayer, spiritual reading, and the struggle for virtue through fasting, forgiveness, acts of mercy, and self-correction. Curiously, these activities, whose results are so sweet, are repugnant to us frequently, and we shun them. Why is this? One would think that modern man, especially, so worn out in soul through rushing about all the time and being burdened with many vain activities, would rather welcome a break. Yet, it is quite the opposite.
Let us take the example of going to divine services. One wonders why so few people go to Vespers, Orthros, and the weekday Divine Liturgies, and why most come late to the Divine Liturgy on Sundays. Yes, of course, there are our jobs. Nevertheless, most people do not work at night, and those who do could come to services during the day. We find time during the week for lengthy shopping trips, eating out, and other, even less necessary outings, but not for going to God’s House for divine worship.
I submit that this is because going to church is not too hard, but too easy. Yes, too easy! All we have to do is stand there and take it in, and the Lord gives us happiness infinitely higher than anything does in this world. ‘Surely,’ the ego says, ‘I am getting off too easy; I should, instead, be out there fighting for happiness, making it happen!’ This nasty little voice says that it is better to work all day in the sun for a pittance than to recline at a banquet to be had for the asking. This comes from our fundamental disease, which is pride.
Since the time of the transgression of our forefather, despite the weakening of our spiritual and moral powers, we are wont to think very highly of ourselves. Although our daily experience very effectively proves to us the falseness of this opinion of ourselves, in our incomprehensible self-deception we do not cease to believe that we are something, and something not unimportant. Yet this spiritual disease of ours, so hard to perceive and acknowledge, is more abhorrent to God than all else in us, as being the first offspring of our self-hood and self-love, and the source, root, and cause of all passions and of all our downfalls and wrong-doing. It closes the very door of our mind or spirit, through which alone Divine grace can enter, and gives this grace no way to come and dwell in a man.
(- from Chapter Two of Unseen Warfare, by S. Nikodimos of the Holy Mountain and Bishop Theophan the Recluse)
Our hearts have the dumb and nearly unshakeable conviction that we are the source of our own existence, that we are, well, God. Therefore, the little temporary happinesses we devise for ourselves seem terribly wonderful, and the real happiness God wants to give us seems negligible, because it was not our own idea.
This reminds me of a story a college friend once told me. He had grown up in rural Arkansas. There he knew a widower who had never prepared meals for his children, but simply bought them baloney, ‘Wonder Bread’, and mayonnaise. From this, they had made themselves sandwiches three times a day for many years, until they left home. When my friend tried to introduce one of these grown children to real food, she rebelled and insisted on continuing her diet of baloney sandwiches. Deep down she really did not like it, but she was used to it.
We are used to a daily diet of spiritual baloney sandwich, as well, when instead we could have filet mignon. Evenings of shopping, TV, or chit-chat seem somehow infinitely preferable to the beauty of icons, the fragrance of incense, the healing balm of the psalms, and the inspired hymnody of the saints. Our pride tells us that the puny inventions of a finite intellect dominated by the passions are more desirable than the fruits of the Divine Wisdom. We know, rationally, that this is outrageously absurd, but we insist on it nonetheless.
I propose that you rationally accept that going to Church really is better than doing most anything else, and that on this assumption you just come whether you feel like it or not. Of course, you cannot do this strictly under your own steam – human effort is needed but by no means sufficient. Ask the Lord sincerely to give you a love for the divine worship of the Church. This is our main nourishment in life, and we need to ask God seriously to awaken in us an appetite for it.