Church

Wendell Berry noted that once upon a time the eyes were considered the window to the soul. Now, making eye contact with a stranger on an American city sidewalk can be construed as a form of aggression.

What does this say about our souls?

The problem here, I suggest, is not urbanization, but privatization. The privatization I'm talking about isn't about the ownership of banks or health care or security forces. The problem may be the privatization of our spiritual lives.

The house where my aunt and uncle lived in Siloam Springs was on an ordinary street, lined with ranch style houses. They were built during an era in which our dwellings were gradually evolving into garages with attached houses.

Front porches were disappearing or being reduced to stoops just large enough for a couple of visitors to stand uncomfortably within, awaiting their welcome into the house. But this neighbor pushed back against the architecture of the day, not by remodeling his house, but by sitting on a lawn chair in his open garage.

It was a defiant act, really, to read his paper and drink a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon there. It at least defied what his home and his neighborhood were trying to have him do. Everything was arranged with its back to the street, the life of the household directed to the backyard, privacy-fenced and accessible only to the invited.

But since front porch culture was gone, he also seemed a little pathetic, out of place, making motions that make no sense in his present environment, like the sad pumping of the useless gills of a landed fish.

The image of the modern spiritual pilgrim is often that of the lone explorer, going it alone deep into the mystery of life. But aren't there too many of us who have struck out on our own, only to find ourselves on an aluminum chair in the garage, looking for the life on the sidewalk that is no longer?

Privatizing the spiritual life comes at a cost. Because if the eyes really are the window to the soul, I can't gain access to my own soul without you. I can't see my own eyes.

So maybe the most faithful concept of church is about making an honest-to-God front porch for the spiritual life. A place where we plop ourselves precisely because there's no telling whom we might encounter there. Or because we do know whom we're going to encounter there: a smattering of those wonderful, annoying, hypocritical, brilliant, loving, petty creatures we call human.

Maybe the soul is better accessed in all those exchanges between selves rather than within the self in isolation. Maybe going to church is simply meant to be deciding to sit for a spell on the porch once a week and see who passes by.

For some of us, somehow, it works. "And that is why," Kathleen Norris says, "when the battles rage, people hold on. They find a sufficient unity, and a rubbed raw but sufficient love, and even the presence of God."

Maybe we don't have to forgo front porch spirituality, even in the day of decks and privacy fences. But it won't help to sit alone in the garage and pretend. We have to be porch sitters, or sidewalk walkers for each other.