A City of Interchanges

When I came to the city of interchanges
where highways braided like arguments
no one could finish,
I carried a portable weather system:
low pressure of memory,
scattered storms of belief.

The air was damp with industry.
Glass towers rehearsed their ambition.
I had no such architecture.

I entered a church
not in triumph
but as one tests a bridge
after the collapse of others.

No trumpets.
Only a door,
a bulletin,
the faint grammar of prayer.

It is an odd thing
to discover that decency
can feel like a miracle.

Not perfection.
The pews were occupied by ordinary mammals
with their private appetites and small vanities.
Some of them, it must be admitted,
were real jerks.
Sanctity does not cauterize temperament.

And yet.

No one demanded
a notarized statement of certainty.
No one frisked my mind
for prohibited questions.
I could kneel intact,
doubt included,
as carry on baggage.

In other rooms I had learned
the choreography of conviction,
how to nod at the correct tempo,
how to speak in declarative sentences
about metaphysics
as though I had personally audited heaven.

Here the sentences were older than I was.
They had survived plague, empire,
the invention of electricity.
They asked less of my performance
and more of my presence.

Scripture was read.
Tradition was invoked.
Reason was not exiled.
Experience was not treated
as a contagious disease.

This balance
was not advertised as genius.
It was simply assumed
that the mind and the soul
were not natural enemies.

The liturgy moved
with the patience of a river
that has worn down stone
without announcing its strategy.

Ancient words,
yet not embalmed.
They breathed.
They carried both dust and oxygen.

I recognized the dialect.
Beauty was not ornamental.
It was structural.
Music was not a prelude to relevance.
It was relevance.

Bread was lifted.
Wine was poured.
Ordinary elements
risked a larger claim.

One could parse it sacramentally
or poetically.
Either way,
the gesture insisted
that the material world
was not a mistake.

I had come from certainties
that shattered on impact.
Here, uncertainty
was not a capital crime.

Questions were permitted
to sit in the nave
without being escorted out
for theological loitering.

This is not to say
that everyone was kind.
There were committees.
There were turf wars.
There were emails
composed in tones
not found in the Gospels.

But the structure itself
resisted absolutism.
Authority was dispersed,
argued over,
prayed about.

No single ego
could plausibly claim
custody of the Infinite.

I had expected
to be measured.
Instead, I was welcomed.

Welcome is a theological word.
It implies that belonging
is not earned
by the velocity of one’s assent.

In a season
when my interior scaffolding
had given way,
this community
did not demand reconstruction
on their timeline.

They held the beams.
They passed the nails.
They did not ask for proof
that the building would stand.

Christ, if one reads carefully,
did not specialize in the flawless.
He seemed drawn to those
whose lives had been footnoted
by failure.

In this parish
I saw no halo factory.
I saw attempts.
I saw apologies.
I saw casseroles delivered
to doorsteps of grief.

I saw disagreement
that did not end
in annihilation.

In a century addicted
to purity tests,
that felt subversive.

I do not claim
that my faith has stabilized
into a geometric figure.
It wavers.
It interrogates itself.
It sometimes sits in the back pew
and withholds comment.

But I return.

Not because I have solved God.
Because I have not been required to.

The Eucharist
is less a declaration
than a rehearsal of return.
You bring your fractures.
You receive something
you cannot fully explain.

Participation precedes clarity.
Belonging precedes comprehension.

In a city of interchanges
where everything moves
and little rests,
I found a room
that did not flinch
at ambiguity.

It was not perfect.
It was human.

And perhaps that is the point.

For in a world
that confuses certainty with strength,
a community that makes room
for doubt,
for beauty,
for decency,
for the slow work of being
less cruel than yesterday,

may be as close
to Christlikeness
as we are likely to get.

I arrived displaced.
I was not interrogated.
I was not corrected into silence.

I was welcomed.

And for a man
who had mistaken survival
for faith,
that was refuge enough.