"Any Given Sunday"
Part One In a Series I'll be Writing for my Greenwich Journal Column
One thing my wife and I noticed when we moved to the rural town of Greenwich, NY was the amount of churches in the village and surrounding areas. These pretty old buildings add a certain idyllic charm, much more so than the marijuana dispensaries which seem to be opening up all over Washington County. But like with the head shops, I can’t avoid asking the question: In a village of about 1700 people, how many of these places do we need, and how do these businesses/congregations keep afloat? They must be providing something necessary for the community. I was determined to find out what exactly that was, by exploring these spaces… the churches that is, not the dispensaries… I’ve already made the rounds of all of those. Anyway, here you go:
“Any Given Sunday”
“Mom, do certain rocks have magical powers?”
I was eavesdropping on another one of the brilliant question-and-answer sessions between my inquisitive seven-year-old daughter and my wife that occur on a daily basis as of late.
“What, kiddo?”
“Some rocks, do they light up like shiny gems and have magic powers?”
“No honey…”
I sat pretending to do the Sunday crossword on my phone. There’s a trick to informing a kid of a scientific reality while attempting to preserve their childhood innocence. A brief moment of dead air passed before my wife said, “But some people a long time ago probably believed there were certain stones that had magic given to them by gods.”
Then, out of nowhere, our seven-year-old stated confidently, as if she wanted to return the favor and teach her mother something, “Gods are not real. Just like ghosts. They don’t exist.” My wife searched for where this fact came from. Our recent assurances about Halloween monsters, a Pixar film, “K-Pop Demon Hunters”? I looked down at my phone, terrified I might be asked to weigh in on the subject.
You wouldn’t have caught me uttering such blasphemy in my house when I was that age. By that time, I was already attending a Catholic bible study, preparing for the sacrament of Holy Communion. As a baby, I had been baptized in front of my whole family in the dim daylight streaming through the stained glass of St. Brigid’s church, a gothic style cathedral just a few blocks from the Long Island Railroad station in Westbury, NY, where my parents had been married. By the time I was fourteen, though, they were divorced, and my mother told us we didn’t need to go to church anymore.
My mom still made sure I received my Confirmation. We had a party afterwards at our house. I can see her standing in the sunlight in a formal spring dress, smelling of perfume and hairspray, collecting checks in envelopes from my relatives at the door, a ticket taker with an intense smile, a mafia don casually expecting a little something for the family. To her, the whole affair was less a solemn rite of passage into adulthood and more a necessary boost to my college fund.
The anti-social angst-ridden teen in me relished the idea of sleeping in on Sundays and never having to attend another service with a dude in a ridiculous outfit speaking Latin, an ancient dead language no one in attendance could understand. Catholics are weird. There, I said it.
Still, some small part of me was a little upset. What were all those years about? Wednesday nights after soccer practice at Sean Willis’s house coloring Jesus in workbooks, confessing my “sins” to a priest in a mahogany closet, honoring my grandfather by picking the Saint Anthony for my confirmation name. All those times I waited in line to be fed tasteless wafers by a strange guy in a funny hat or share a single glass of wine with a whole community of folks, many with a hacking winter cough, for what? I was angry. And maybe that’s why I never went back. Maybe I’d feel more of that Catholic guilt about giving up church if I were alone in this.
According to a Gallup study polling Americans each year from 1965 until today, when asked if religion was important to them, for the first time in 2019 less than 50% responded in the affirmative, down from 70% fifty years ago. In recent years this has been declining even further. Only 21% of Americans report they attend religious services “every week,” with another 9% saying they do so “almost every week” and 11% attending about once a month. That leaves the majority saying they “seldom” (26%) or “never” (31%) attend religious services.
This last statistic seems a bit odd. The first thing I noticed when we moved to Greenwich a few years ago was the sheer number of churches in a town of fewer than 5,000 people. There weren’t enough people to justify opening a coffee shop on Main Street, but somehow six churches were necessary. What were these congregations doing in all these enormous beautiful old buildings? I know, unlike a coffee shop, they don’t charge for their services. Still, I had questions.
How many people turn out every Sunday? Have I been missing out on something all these years? Have I been depriving my daughter of a healthy spiritual practice, a connection to a higher power other than the Disney streaming app or a community other than the K-Pop Demon Hunters fan club? I need to know.
And so, dear readers, I invite you to join me over the next few months as I explore the various places of worship in our small town, and attend regular services, in search of answers both practical and metaphysical. I’ll report back honestly and be as respectful as I can. I’m not sure if I’ll find a succinct response to my young daughter’s atheistic declarations but I’m confident that, from the outside peering in, I will learn something about what happens in Greenwich on any given Sunday morning.