I’m Not Sure I Want to Come Back

Last Christmas Eve, Michael drove to the parish he grew up in and parked where he could see the doors. He kept the engine running. He watched people file in out of the cold, families mostly, coats over good clothes, and when the bells rang for the entrance hymn he put the car in reverse and drove home. He has done some version of this more than once.

He left years ago, the quiet way, over nothing he could name. Lately something in him has turned back toward that building, the way a compass needle swings, and it will not stop pointing. He is closer than he has been in years, and he is not sure he wants to come back. Both are true at once, and it is more common than anyone on either side of the door lets on.

You have met four people in this series. Dan, who stopped believing and finally got honest about it. Ellen, who went to the same parish for almost two years and was never once known. Paul, who kept the rules until he noticed nobody had handed him the reasons. Carol, who prayed into four years of silence. Different wounds, one direction. If you recognized yourself in any of them, some part of you is sitting where Michael sits, engine running, watching the doors.

What holds a person in that parking lot? The people inside usually guess wrong. Three fears, as near as I can tell.

The first is that walking back in means admitting you were wrong to leave. Not to God, exactly. To everyone. To the self that defended the leaving at dinner tables for years. Coming back turns the past into a verdict on your own judgment, and who wants that?

The second is being seen. The usher who remembers you. The question, however kindly meant, of where you have been. Ellen ached to be known and never was; Michael dreads being known, at least at the door. The ache and the dread are cousins.

The third sits underneath, and nobody says it out loud. That you will finally go, and it will feel like nothing. The hymn will be a hymn. The homily will be a homily. You will stand and kneel and walk out unchanged, having spent the last hope you were saving. As long as Michael stays in the car, the possibility stays alive. Walking in risks the one thing that leaving never touched.

Bring the whole series into that parking lot. Job, where we started, doubted at full volume, and when God finally spoke, he rebuked the polite defenders and vindicated the doubter. Unsure is how Job arrived, and God did not send him away. Sirach, the old father from Ellen’s post, called one friend who truly knows you a treasure beyond price. But no one is known without being seen. Being seen is what the treasure costs. Proverbs, the book behind Paul’s rules, spends nine chapters persuading before those rules even begin. It never expected you to move without a reason. And the Psalms, which sat with Carol in the dark, keep a prayer for the person who feels nothing, and call even that a prayer.

Three voices you have not met speak straight to Michael. Ecclesiastes is the honest one: a man who tried everything, felt the hollowness under all of it, and still comes down on the side of the ordinary day, the meal, the work, the person beside you. If Michael walks in and feels nothing, Ecclesiastes felt it first and stayed. The Song of Songs may be the closest: love arrives at the door in the night, the one inside hesitates too long, and the poem aches with the near miss and a search that will not quit. And the Wisdom of Solomon makes the quietest promise of all: the seeking runs both directions. While you sit deciding whether to look for wisdom, she is already on the road looking for you.

Seven books, and not one of them makes certainty the condition for coming back. I looked; it is not there. What is there, page after page, is motion that begins before anyone is ready: a doubter arguing his way toward God, a prayer with nothing left in it, a hand reaching for a door it almost did not open.

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Nobody walks in sure. They walk in anyway.

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I opened this series with numbers, and they read differently from the parking lot. For every 100 people who walk into the Catholic Church, 840 walk out, and former Catholics are roughly one in eight Americans; both figures come from Pew Research Center’s Religious Landscape Study. In the first post they were statistics. Read them from the driver’s seat instead. One in eight means the parking lot is one of the most crowded places in American religion. And not one of the 100 who walk in was required to be sure before crossing.

The 840 are almost never told this. The Church has more than room for its returners. It has a need only they can fill. A convert brings wonder, and the Church runs on it. A returner brings what no convert can: the memory of what leaving cost, and walking proof that the door opens from the outside. Every Michael who walks back in makes the next Michael’s walk shorter.

This series began in the back of my parish church, at the Easter Vigil, watching eight people become Catholic. I keep thinking about five of them. A young man in his twenties who grew up with no religion at all. A woman in her early forties who had never set foot in a church until two years ago. A man in his forties who had been raised Mormon. A young woman preparing for marriage, whose fiancé was already Catholic. An older woman raised Methodist, who had spent her whole life looking for something she could not name, and had finally found it.

Here is what I did not say then. Every one of those five was arriving for the first time. Nobody throws a Vigil for the returner. No candles, no name read out, no applause. You come back on an ordinary Sunday, and the only person who knows what it cost to walk through that door is you. The Methodist woman spent a lifetime looking for something she could not name. Michael already knows its name. He knows the candle smell and the creak of the kneelers and the exact weight of the door. That is what makes it harder. It is also what makes it shorter.

One last piece of honesty. I cannot claim Michael’s parking lot; my road back did not go through a door at all. It went through a page. I never stopped believing. I just stopped going, Christmas and Easter for years while I still called myself Catholic, and I was past forty before anything changed. What changed was seven books in the middle of the Bible that nobody had ever handed me. Somewhere in the slow reading of them, whether I wanted to go back stopped being a question. I go to Mass almost every day now, and I still cannot account for that.

I wrote a book about those seven books. It is called The Original Search Engine. If anything in these posts resonated, the book goes deeper than a blog post can. If nothing did, I am glad you read this far, and I mean that.

Michael is still in the parking lot. I will not end this series by walking him through the door; that is not mine to write, and you would smell the tidiness from a mile away. Maybe next Christmas Eve. Maybe never. Here is what will be true whenever he turns the engine off. The people inside are not sure either. Some of the psalms sung from that lectern were written by people who were not sure. The front door has never been open wider; I meant that as arithmetic in the first post. I mean it now for the man in the car. And the door will be open.

Already answered. Three thousand years ago.

The question is whether you are ready to walk through it.

One more word, in two directions. If these posts kept arriving because someone kept sending them, that person was never trying to fix you, only to say, as gently as they could, that the door is open and you are wanted on the other side. And if you did the sending, you have done the only part that was yours. The walking was never yours to carry. You can set it down.

This is the last post in the series. The seven books are where they have always been, in the middle of a Bible you probably already own, and the book I wrote about them will be there whenever you want to go further. Thank you for reading this far with me.

All seven Wisdom Books are explored across 40 chapters in The Original Search Engine. Learn more at solomongraybooks.com/the-book.

Michael is a figure, the way Job is a figure. See Post 0 for a note on the people in this series.