Kevin Sessums has a beautiful mediation on the many forms that church can take. He took his godson Kennedy, who recently came out, to the musical Godspell:
When Kennedy walked me to the subway afterward he said, "I saw a production of this once and hated it so wasn't really sure I wanted to see this. But I was really moved by this tonight. And I'm an atheist." That literally stopped me in my tracks. Had he just come out of another kind of closet to me? I gave him a hug. "Are you still an atheist?" I asked. "Yes," he said. "But I was moved." On the subway ride home I hummed one of the songs from the show – Day by Day, which is a how I've come to live my life – and thought about Kennedy's honesty as well as his sweetness and goodness, especially compared to the spiritual rancidness that passes for religion that has accompanied the rise of the political right and has caused so many young men like Kennedy to stake their own claim to goodness in less bigoted ground. If that means they have to also claim to be atheists, so be it. But we all need to believe in something. Last night I believed in a godfather living day-by-day sitting with his atheist godson who was born again when he was 18 sitting in a communal setting watching a musical called Godspell and being moved to tears. That might not be everyone's idea of church, but it is mine.
The Dish 