I'm not special there, and this is the point
Screenwriter Dorothy Fortenberry wrote about why she still goes to Mass despite working in Hollywood, where every day and every interaction feels like a potential interview for your next job:
Constantly feeling that you should be meeting people, impressing people, shocking people (just the right amount) is a strange way to live your life. And one of the reasons that I go to church is that church is the opposite of that.
I do not impress anyone at church. I do not say anything surprising or charming, because the things I say are rote responses that someone else decided on centuries ago. I am not special at church, and this is the point. Because (according to the ridiculous, generous, imperfectly applied rules of my religion) we are all equally beloved children of God. We are all exactly the same amount of special. The things that I feel proud of can’t help me here, and the things that I feel embarrassed by are beside the point. I’m a person but, for 60 minutes, I’m not a personality.
It’s a wonderful article, more than worth reading in full. But I loved the line, “the things that I feel proud of can’t help me here, and the things that I feel embarrassed about are beside the point.”
Those opposing tugs of shame and pride both grab ahold of me every time I think about faith or God or church. I think about the things I have done which horrify and humiliate me and I think I have no place within this space where we sing about being good and living upright lives. All the weak-willed ways I am stuck in my own self-indulgence sit before me on display like the page numbers of that Sunday’s hymns.
And then I look around me and, I can’t help it, I think well I’m better than that person. I observe their quirks and judge their ostentatious clothes or their inability to even moderately dress up and roll my eyes at the terrible homily and stew over how I could possibly be throwing in my hat with this lot. They probably don’t even want me here either. Screw them.
But sometimes, somehow, those dueling tugs ease up and a sense of quiet rolls in like a fog. Who I am, in what I have done or how I fit in stops carrying so much weight. I suppose those are the only times I ever get the feeling God actually likes me. When what I have done ceases to matter and I allow myself to just be there for a while.
If only for a few minutes a week.