‘Do I HAVE to go to church to be a good person?’

Someone recently asked me about whether or not one had to pray in a church setting in order to be a good person, as opposed, for example, to private prayer in one’s own home.

My response was that the answer to this question would depend on the church to which the person one is asking belongs.  In retrospect, this was not the best choice of words; by this I was simply referring to the bare fact that different churches will furnish different answers to the inquiry in question.

As a Catholic I do, of course, believe in the vital importance of regular, formal, public worship — an observance which nourishes, and is nourished by, private prayer and devotion.

But why, we may ask, is this so important?  Why does worshiping God in church, with other people, under the leadership of a consecrated celebrant, make such a difference?

The short and sweet

The short answer is, “It’s the Law.”  Specifically, it’s the Third Commandment:

Remember to keep holy the sabbath day.  Six days you may labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is the sabbath of the LORD, your God. No work may be done then either by you, or your son or daughter, or your male or female slave, or your beast, or by the alien who lives with you.  In six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them; but on the seventh day he rested. That is why the LORD has blessed the sabbath day and made it holy.

[Ex. 20: 8-11]

More broadly, this does refer to the overall observance of the solemnity of the Sabbath as a day of rest, prayer, and charity.  But at the center of this, and essential to it, is the observance of public worship — of public memory, if you will (recall that the Third Commandment is presented, in the Book of Exodus, to a people to whom God recalls the wonders He worked on their behalf, as well as His graciousness in delivering them from slavery and making of them a people uniquely His own).

Notice the wording of the text.  We find here a reference to the creation account of Genesis 1, and therefore also to the divine interpretation of creation’s meaning and purpose.

To make a long story short, the narrative account of visible creation slowly, and by degrees, builds up to the creation of humankind (on the Sixth Day), who are supposed to lead creation into God’s Sabbath Rest (the Seventh Day).

All things considered, we see the Third Commandment as part and parcel of what may rightfully be called a law of freedom, a law sweet to the ears and heart.

“Body” of proof

Another way of talking about the creation account (in terms of the aforementioned understanding) is this:

We live in a world of bodies.  Truly magnificent and majestic ones can be found on the levels of inanimate and vegetative matter: Sky, mountain, ocean, plain, redwood, etc.

But none of these bodies have any awareness, either of themselves or of anything else.

From these creation moves into the animal kingdom, which features bodies that do possess the gift of awareness — that is, sensory awareness.  An animal is privy to various sensations and able to act according to in-built instincts.

At the same time, the animal has no self-consciousness.  The various parts of the animal’s body operate together with its bodily processes and instincts; but there is no personal subject, no “I,” to tie them all together.

What is lacking in animals is provided for in humanity.

In the human being we have a self-conscious, thinking body that is very much aware of itself as a subject, possessing a spiritual soul binding together all the various parts and processes into one human person.

If I look at myself, and then compare myself with any sort of non-human animal, I will readily see that this is the case.

But though I am a thinking body, my various parts, considered singly, are not.

My pinky finger doesn’t think, nor does it possess self-consciousness.  Nor does my wrist. Nor do my kneecaps.  Nor my nose.  Nor my heart.  Nor my lungs.  And so on, and so forth.

My various parts have consciousness only insofar as they are part of the body, which is self-conscious by virtue of being an ensouled body.

Okay — now go a step further.  Imagine a body with thinking members.  Imagine a body in which each member is self-conscious, unique, and irreducible to any interchangeability with other parts, and yet at the same time has its identity and life as part of the Body.

And leading this body is an exalted Head — supreme above all and eminent in all the Body’s members — Who presents the Body whole, holy and, ultimately, perfect to God the Father.  This Head thus succeeds marvelously in accomplishing the Sabbath Rest to which all creation is journeying.

Here we have nothing other than the doctrine St. Paul gives us in 1 Cor. 12: 12 — namely, that of the Body of Christ.

A part of the body or apart from the body?

Let’s go back to the human body a moment.

What happens when you cut off one of your members — say, your left hand?  Simple: It loses not only all feeling, but all life.

Seventeenth-century French philosopher Blaise Pascal put the matter this way:

To be a member is to have no life, being, or movement except through the spirit of the body and for the body.  The member which is cut off, no longer seeing the body to which it belongs, has only a withering and moribund being left.  Yet it thinks itself to be a whole, and seeing no body on which it depends, it thinks it depends only on itself and wants to make itself its own center and body.  But having no principle of life in itself, it only becomes lost and bewildered at the uncertainty of its existence, quite aware that it is not a body, yet not seeing that it is a member of a body.

(Pascal, pg. 90-91)

If my left hand were a conscious entity, it would do both itself and the body-self as a whole a great disservice were it to sever itself from its place at the end of my arm.

So it is with the Body of Christ, of which all human beings are either real or potential members (all human beings are called to be part of that Body; indeed, that’s why we were created in the first place).

Okay — if you’ve borne with me this long, I thank you wholeheartedly.  At this point it may be helpful to return to our original question: Can one be a good person without going to church?

In theory, yes.  I know a number of wonderful people who do not attend church regularly, if at all.  But if we want to achieve our destiny as individuals and as a species, if we want our lives to take on an eternal value that transcends this finite life, we will not fail to come to the Living Waters that flow from the pierced Heart of Christ, so to join ourselves to the divine Head and, therefore, to the Body.

To borrow a couple lines from Whittier, the great American Quaker poet:

He findeth not who seeks his own,
The soul is lost that’s saved alone.
(Pg. 1035)

Regular, public worship is the privileged expression of belonging to the Body of Christ.  From this — and, more emphatically, from the Eucharist that is its center, source, and summit — has flowed the overwhelming charity of the Church’s great saints and world-changers over the centuries.

Thanks for reading!

Acknowledgements

By Matthias Feige – private CD-ROM, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1336036

By Jekuthiel Sofer – en:Image:Decalogue parchment by Jekuthiel Sofer 1768.jpg, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=327460

By Lorenzo Lippi – The Yorck Project (2002) 10.000 Meisterwerke der Malerei (DVD-ROM), distributed by DIRECTMEDIA Publishing GmbH. ISBN: 3936122202., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=153925

By Nicolas Poussin – Web Gallery of Art: Image Info about artwork, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15397136

Pascal, Blaise.  Pensées and Other Writings.  Trans. Honor Levi.  Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.

Whittier, J.G.  “The Meeting.”  The Literature of the United States.  Ed. Walter Blair, et. al.  Vol. 1.  Third ed.  Glenview, IL: Scott, Foresman, 1966.