Go to Church Anyway

Why the Church is not a refuge for the perfect but a hospital for the broken, and what Lourdes taught me about unity, pilgrimage and communion in love.

I love that image (above) which says, go to church anyway. There is something disarmingly honest about it. It acknowledges our weakness. It acknowledges our confusion. It acknowledges our failure. It does not pretend that the doors of the Church are for the polished and the perfected. It recognises what the Gospel itself proclaims, that Christ came not for the righteous but for sinners, not for the healthy but for the sick (Mark 2:17).

The Church is often described as a hospital and that metaphor only works if we remember why people go to hospital. They do not go because they are well. They go because they need healing. They go because something is wrong. They go because they cannot mend themselves. In that sense, the invitation to go to church anyway is profoundly Catholic. It is not an invitation to complacency. It is an invitation to grace.

I love the Catholic Church. I love the richness of her teaching, the depth of her history, the unbroken connection with the Lord Jesus Himself that we benefit from through the Holy Mass. There is nothing on earth like the Mass. It is beauty and transcendence, sacrifice and communion, heaven touching earth. Yet one of the core instincts of a true Christian should not be elitism but sharing. We do not guard this treasure as if it were only for those who have gone through the proper discipline and who have made the proper commitment. Instead we desire to share this heaven we have found with other because it was given to us freely.

We do not invite others to make them feel small, to remind them that compared to us they are worthless sinners or too broken ever to be redeemed (indeed the idea is abhorrent!) We invite them because we love them. We invite them because we know what it is to have been freed from the chains of sin and death. We invite them as one beggar showing another beggar where he found a scrap of bread. This should be evident in the tone we use. The motive we have. If there is pride in it, it ceases to be Christian. We offer what we have received. Not as judges, but as fellow pilgrims.