Andrew Sullivan

In America, politics has become a form of religion

[Getty Images] 
issue 03 April 2021

When I finally head back to church this weekend, after a year of Covid-avoidance, it is going to feel a little strange. These past 12 months constitute the longest stretch of time I’ve been away since I was born. And I’m not going to lie, part of me liked the sudden plague-long dispensation. I’ve become used to the lazy, empty, gently unfolding Sundays. They’ve grown on me. I could live like this, it occurs to me — as so many others do, all the time.

So why go back? When I ask myself what exactly I’ve missed, I realise it isn’t a weekly revelation. I don’t expect to feel something profound every time I go to Mass — because most of the time I don’t, and rarely have. The one thing Catholicism teaches the bored and distracted churchgoer is that your own mood doesn’t really matter. The consecration will happen regardless. Your inspiration is not the point. And what makes this all cohere somehow is physical ritual — and that, I realise, is what I really miss. I miss the silent genuflection; the chanting in unison with others; the standing up and kneeling down and standing up again. I miss the messy democracy of the communion line, and the faces I recognise from decades in my parish, and the faces I don’t. I miss enacting something ineffable with my body, using words I never chose myself, and use only in this space. I miss the irrational, collective order of it all. And beneath all this, only poking above ground every now and again, I miss the weekly reminder of what I deeply believe within the folds of my consciousness: the command of universal love; the fact of life after death; the radical truth of experiential mystery.

I couldn’t say exactly how this counter-rational aspect of my life affects the rest of me, but it definitely stabilises things.

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