Roseyland

I did something a little out of the ordinary for me today. I went to church. If you have read this post (or you visited Colonial quad 6 from 1997 to 1998), you know that my views on religion/god are not exactly conventional. I do think that there is symbolic value to religion though, and I definitely have a spiritual side. To me spirituality is more about questions like “Why does anything exist?” or “Why is the universe so finely tuned for life?”, rather than “What does this Bible verse mean?” or my least favorite of all “What would Jesus do?”.

Anyways, back to the point of this post, I went to church today. I went to The Gathering, which is a newer United Methodist church on McCausland Avenue. I was familiar with both of the pastors of this church from a young adults group I went to a few years ago, and I’ve been meaning to check out The Gathering for awhile now. Today I finally got around to it. I was a little uncomfortable at first, because let’s face it a 30 year old guy showing up at church by himself is a little odd. Nobody seemed to care though, so that’s good. There were five things I really liked about the gathering:

1. No pews and comfortable chairs. Seriously, I really liked the chairs.
2. Free coffee. Unfortunately, I came in the wrong door and didn’t see the coffee until I left.
3. The exposed brick wall. In the sanctuary the front (or is it the back) wall has the brick exposed. You can see it in the picture in this post. I’m sure it has a deep symbolic meaning, but I don’t care about that, I just think it looks cool.
4. The Neighborhood. I like the neighborhood The Gathering is in. It is fairly close to me and has lots of good restaurants like Olympia and Chuy’s.
5. Communion with real wine. I was in the wrong line for the real wine, but I still liked the fact that it was there.

The only thing I didn’t like was that for one prayer everybody held the hands of the people on either side of them. I’m not a big fan of praying and holding hands, mostly I’m not a big fan of holding hands. That’s my own hang up though, and it only lasted for about 15 seconds, so I can get over it.

I’m going to try and become more involved with The Gathering. My chances of sticking with it are probably about 50-50, but I figure I can at least make to church once a month or so. It is a nice way to start the day. The Gathering also has a lot of small groups. One of them is a skeptics group, which I think would be right up my alley. I always feel a little weird at those things, because I know I’m probably the least religious guy in the room, which makes me a little reluctant to share my true thoughts. That being said, the Gathering seems to be a fairly open mined environment and I’m pretty sure nobody there is going to try and “convert” me. If nothing else, it will be a new adventure, and that’s always fun.