Growing up in Three Rivers in the 1960s, Suzanne Strempek Shea had a fairly typical Catholic childhood. Weekdays, she donned a plaid uniform and headed to the local parochial school, where she was taught by nuns, both the book-hurling, skull-rapping variety and the inspiring "fun nun" variety. On Sundays, the Strempeks climbed into the family Chevy for weekly Mass at Sts. Peter and Paul Church. On the way, they passed one of the town's non-Catholic churches. Its congregants, Suzanne and her classmates learned in school, were doomed to hell, and its threshold they were warned never to cross, lest they meet a similar fate.
As an adult, Strempek Shea knew she could enter one of those "other" churches without the roof crashing down on her head. But she still attended the Catholic church, albeit with mounting reservations.
"While I held on to my parents' gift of God, it was his house that I came to find problematic," Strempek Shea writes in her new memoir, Sundays in America: A Yearlong Road Trip in Search of Christian Faith (Beacon Press).
Her disillusionment sprang in large part from the sex abuse scandals within the Catholic Church, including, locally, the still-unresolved case of Danny Croteau, an altar boy murdered in 1972, and allegations that the Springfield diocese had covered up information that linked the murder to Richard Lavigne, a Valley priest who subsequently pleaded guilty to molesting other children. "Discovery of the deception practiced by so very many of the men in charge of my religion made me look anew at the place that was my spiritual home," Strempek Shea writes.
Further complicating matters was Strempek Shea's diagnosis, in 2000, with breast cancer (chronicled in an earlier memoir, Songs from a Lead-Lined Room). "Some people run to religion when they're ill; I went in the opposite direction," she writes. "Fear of death propelled me, as did anger that the tidy little cart of my life had been upset."
Strempek Shea still attended church but skipped mass, instead seeking out the quiet and solitude of an empty building. And that remained her habit until the death in 2005 of Pope John Paul II, a figure of immeasurable significance in the Polish-American community in which she grew up. Strempek Shea found herself drawn to news coverage of his wake and funeral, her attention focused on the devoted mourners who crowded St. Peter's Square.
"As a Catholic who in recent years has experienced a disconnect, I felt a true homesickness for that level of passion," she writes. While Strempek Shea never lost her personal faith ("God and I might have had our disagreements, but I've never stopped loving and believing in him," she writes), she found herself missing the sense of community that organized religion can offer.
"[F]our years after floating away from organized religion, I got the idea that I might want to go on a pilgrimage of sorts, tour a few other houses of worship, finally find out just what goes on in those churches I grew up forbidden to enter, and understand what makes for devotion to a religious community," she writes. "Rather than sit quietly by myself in an empty church, I would, for a day, be part of a congregation once more."
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A former Springfield Republican reporter and award-winning author of five novels and two previous memoirs, Strempek Shea, naturally enough, approached her pilgrimage as a writing project. Sundays in America tells the story of the year she spent visiting various Protestant churches ("the 'banned' Christian faiths of my childhood").
Strempek Shea didn't do much research before visiting the churches, preferring to experience each place with the openness of any off-the-street visitor. Nor did she tell the people she met about her project, since she didn't want them to treat her differently than they would any visitor.
Strempek Shea's background as a reporter allowed her to experience the services while still taking copious notes, capturing long stretches of sermons and jotting detailed descriptions of church interiors and the people who filled them. She took notes in a series of small black moleskin books that bore a convenient resemblance to prayer books. But, she says, her notetaking drew little notice; in fact, she was happily surprised to find many congregations provide pencils and bulletins with blank pages for congregants to take notes on the sermon.
Indeed, Strempek Shea was only questioned about her notetaking once, at a Rhode Island evangelical church where one congregant who sniffed her out as a reporter—and who, she notes, bore a striking resemblance to the Cheers character Cliff Clavin—yelled at her from the pulpit. "You better get your story straight. God knows what you're doing," he scolded.
"I'm in church and being yelled at, something that hasn't happened to me since third grade, when Roseann Gondek and I had a giggling fit during First Communion practice," writes Strempek Shea, who managed to escape the service without further confrontation.
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Strempek Shea's journey—and book—began in a decidedly warmer atmosphere: Harlem's New Mount Zion Baptist Church, where she and her husband, Tom Shea, a Springfield Republican columnist, visited on Easter Sunday, 2006.
Catching a glimpse of fellow churchgoers entering the church that morning, Strempek Shea knew this was going to be a novel experience, even on the most superficial level. These worshipers were "dressed in the kind of glitzy attire I am more used to seeing on parents of the bride than on people heading to church"—certainly not to a Catholic church."Catholic chic," she writes, "has changed drastically in my lifetime, the meaning of Sunday best morphing from suits and ties for men and nylons and dresses and even gloves for women to a unisex combo of baggy Levi's and Red Sox hoodies."
Not that Strempek Shea particularly minds. "Attire certainly can be a way of honoring your creator, but in this day and age of shrinking church attendance, might it not be more important to celebrate that someone has shown up at all rather than that she's shown up in Gucci?" she writes.
What Strempek Shea went looking for was a welcoming community, and a service filled with joy and celebration. That's what she found at Mount Zion, from the moment she and Tom entered the building to warm greetings from the finely dressed congregants.
Then the service began. "The organ kicks in at a punchy pace and heads throughout the church nod as the choir fills the front and faces the congregation in three long, loose lines. The congregation, now standing, claps, shimmies, raises arms, agitates tambourines. From the balcony on down, throughout the church, nearly everyone sings along: Be praised forever. Be praised forever. Be praised forever, and ever more …"
By the end of the service, Strempek Shea had held hands with strangers, watched uniformed nurses hand out paper fans and tend to fainters and those otherwise emotionally overcome, and shouted out her own "Amens!" in response to the pastor's dynamic sermon.
"I'm sold," Strempek Shea writes. "This is, in short, fun. You can move. You can be moved."
Mount Zion set the bar high for Strempek Shea as she spent the next 51 weeks traveling the country. In a recent interview, she described the not-especially scientific process she used to draw up her itinerary. With about 2,500 Protestant denominations in the U.S., "I had a lot to choose from," she says.
Sometimes convenience guided her choices. She picked some churches because they were near friends she wanted to visit, some because they were close to places she was already planning to travel, some because they were in cities where Southwest Airlines was having a good sale that weekend. When Tom began experiencing inexplicable (and, fortunately, short-lived) health problems that summer, she stuck to churches within a quick driving distance from home.
Along the way, Strempek Shea worshiped with Shakers and Quakers, Baptists and Episcopalians, Christian Scientists and Mormons. Some churches she chose for their novelty: a San Francisco church built around the music of John Coltrane; a non-denominational Cowboy Church in Colorado Springs, which held special appeal for Strempek Shea, a lifelong wannabe cowgirl.
Other churches were chosen for their relevance to current events. Volunteering with Gulf Coast reconstruction efforts on the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, Strempek Shea visited a Mississippi Presbyterian congregation that was founded to help rebuild the area, and where the worshipers sat on folding chairs with "FEMA" written across the back.
On Memorial Day, she visited the West Point Cadet Chapel, where she appreciated the sermon but was saddened by the absence of any mention of the many West Point graduates who died in war. "But why should the subject of death be brought up here," she writes, "when the government forbids publication or broadcast of images of caskets returning home from Iraq, and whose commander in chief has yet to attend a single funeral for any of the 2,474 soldiers killed there in the 1,170 days the war has been waged as of this writing?" Before they left, Strempek Shea paid her own tribute, visiting the grave of one of the war dead, a 24-year-old named Laura Walker who was killed in Afghanistan.
Other churches had celebrity appeal. Strempek Shea traveled to a Baptist congregation in South Carolina to hear its visiting preacher, Anne Graham Lotz, the daughter of Billy Graham, and to Chicago to worship at the United Church of Christ attended by Barack Obama. (The candidate wasn't there that Sunday, nor was the pastor whose controversial statements have lately caused much agitation for the Obama campaign.) In Memphis, Strempek Shea visited a Baptist church founded by R and B legend Al Green, where the celebratory atmosphere within the modest church tempered her disappointment that Green wasn't preaching that day.
Another Sunday found Strempek Shea at the Baptist church in Plains, Ga., founded by Jimmy Carter, who teaches an adult Sunday school class "unless he's off shaming the slothful rest of us … by building houses for the poor, teaching college, or preventing blindness," she writes. Strempek Shea appreciated the former president's candid, humble teaching style but was sorely disappointed to hear Carter—a "civil rights icon," she notes—speaking out against gay marriage.
And at a Thanksgiving service at a Cape Cod Baptist church attended mostly by Mashpee Wampanoags, Strempek Shea was saddened to hear the minister indiscriminately describe Muslims as terrorists. "This makes no sense to me," she writes. "Wouldn't these people, of all minorities, avoid stereotyping others? And how about the black pastor who's doing the preaching? Has his heritage been without misery due to discrimination? What I'm hearing from the pulpit, the scalding stream of intolerance, is heating this chilly church in which I sit beside a black guy and two rows behind a Native American woman."
Strempek Shea's sense of social justice shaped many of her reactions to the various congregations she visited. "[A] big part of these trips [was] finding out what other people believe and who—if anyone—they feel is unworthy to worship next to them," she writes. In many churches, she was disappointed by explicit anti-gay sentiments, whether in the form of outright condemnation or qualified "acceptance" that only welcomes gay people if they deny or feel apologetic for who they are.
Most of all, Strempek Shea balked at how many churches traffic in notions of an angry God and damnation for unrepentant sinners. Churches aren't alone in their dependence on the galvanizing power of fear, Strempek Shea notes, pointing to Hillary Clinton's recent campaign ad featuring a sleeping child and asking voters whom they'd want answering a 3 a.m. phone call at the White House. "Isn't that how people get to you when they really want to get to you?" Strempek Shea points out.
But certainly, it wasn't the way to get to Strempek Shea's heart. On a visit to Calvary's Light Church in Three Rivers—one of the mysterious Protestant churches she passed by as a child—Strempek Shea was happy to see the roof stay in place but disappointed to hear a message based on hell and damnation.
"The theology of fear is the foundation of this church, too. It doesn't scare me, it simply scares me away," she writes. "[T]o me, this type of message … doesn't feel like faith, but like anger and intolerance. And religion furthering negatives rather than love is more frightening that the most swiftly falling ceiling."
To Strempek Shea, a church should be a place of refuge and peace, not fear. "I never liked that sort of approach," she says. "When I was a child and a priest was yelling from the pulpit—even if it was in Polish, I knew what it was. And I didn't like it. This isn't the house for that. This is the house where we're all supposed to love everybody. We're all in the same boat."
Not surprisingly, Strempek Shea found herself especially drawn to congregations that reached out to people often excluded from more traditional churches. In Richmond, Virginia, for instance, she celebrated at a church that caters to gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered people. Watching the pastor warmly embrace each person as he or she came to the altar to receive communion, Strempek Shea was profoundly moved.
"Who wouldn't want these people? Who wouldn't want this community?" she writes. "I nearly tie myself to a chair leg with my backpack strap, so badly do I want to be standing up there in a circle of God's children, being told I am loved and wanted and, above all, okay just the way God made me."
As the weeks of Strempek Shea's year of Sundays passed, she writes, a sort of composite ideal church emerged: "… a community that welcomed me warmly, didn't give a whit about my politics or lifestyle, gave tons of whits about the social justice needs locally and beyond, contained little to no hierarchy, allowed congregants a say in decisions large and small, offered a spiritual message inspired by love rather than fear, and did this all in an art-filled space that rang with awesome music."
While Strempek Shea is unflinching in her critiques of Christian churches that spread shamelessly anti-Christian messages, she approached each new church with an impressively open mind and an open heart. That allowed her to find something positive— a "souvenir," she calls it—in just about every place she visited: moving music, welcoming congregants, a sermon that made her think about an old parable in a new way.
"I tried not to condemn anyone," she says. "I didn't want to be disrespectful. I didn't want to laugh about what anyone thinks."
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A year after her pilgrimage ended, Strempek Shea still considers herself a Catholic. "That's how I see myself. But that doesn't mean you can't go visiting, or see what other people are up to in their churches," she says. She still spends many of her Sundays visiting churches of other denominations, and she retains a soft spot for churches, of any denomination, when they're empty. "They're very peaceful places," she says. "It's not just a building. It's a place of peace."
For all her inquiring, Strempek Shea never questioned her personal faith. "I think I stayed with God rather than religion—which I think is what wrecks God for a lot of people," she says.
Among many inspiring, joyful places she visited on her journey was Baltimore's St. Sebastian's, a breakaway Catholic church for worshipers who feel unwelcome in the traditional Catholic church. On the day Strempek Shea attended, the openly gay pastor preached against discrimination, while the congregation sang a hymn with the chorus "All are welcome, all are welcome, all are welcome in this place."
"Unabashed love is as much the structure of St. Sebastian's as the wood and bricks and mortar," Strempek Shea writes. "And shouldn't that be the first fact in any church that claims to serve God?"
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Suzanne Strempek Shea will read from Sundays in America at the Palmer Public Library on April 3, 6:30 p.m.; the Hampden Public Library on April 5, 10 a.m.; Odyssey Books in South Hadley on April 8, 7 p.m.; Pam's Paperbacks in Wilbraham on April 26, 10 a.m.; and Jeffrey Amherst Books on April 26 at 1 p.m.
