Preface:

In December of 2009, I drove to a church in the town where I live, in southern New Jersey. Earlier in the week, I’d seen an ad in a local newspaper that read, ‘Contemporary Community Church.’ Lately I’d been spending way too much time alone, and this sounded like a place where it could be safe for me to be amongst people again.

On my first tentative pass at trying to find the church I drove to a street of the same name as the one listed for the church and found only an old Riverboat transformed into a restaurant and a few seaport trinket shops, all of which were un-open on an early Sunday morning. The street was also empty of any pedestrians who might have been able to give me directions.

I initially took this – with some degree of relief – as a ‘tea-leaf’ sign that I should not go to this church in order to assuage my increasing, nearly desperate, sense of isolation and loneliness.

You see, four months earlier my mother had passed away after living with Alzheimer’s for more than two years. During that time, I had been her primary caregiver. For the last six months of her life, she’d become immobile and incontinent. Home aids and hospice workers would assist her and me for an average of five hours on weekdays and four hours on weekends. For the remainder of my time I was virtually a shut in, nineteen to twenty hours a day, seven days a week. When my mother passed away the home aids and hospice workers literally disappeared, leaving me by myself to deal with my emotional and physical exhaustion, loss and grief. Additionally, unbeknownst to me at the time, I was also in the throes of a clinical traumatic stress disorder as a result of prolonged acute tension that took place between myself and s sibling during the final months of my mother’s life. (I document that experience in An Almost Unbearable Heartache, available on-line at 32 Beach Productions.)

When I returned home from my unsuccessful mission to find the church, I felt a way that I can barely remember now. The best I can describe it, from recollection, is a full body and mind sense of being pulled down and drawn into a overwhelming sense of fear of what might come next. (The executor of my mother’s estate, including her house, was the sibling I had a contentious relationship with and she ordered me evicted from my home just after the beginning of the New Year, less than a month away.) While I was in this dreadful state, getting out of a chair in order to answer a phone or walk to a bathroom was a task. It was as though there was a conspiracy of invisible forces whose aim was to pin me in the chair where I was sitting and let me stew there in my thoughts doing nothing, forever.

It is as torturous a sensation to experience as I can only imagine being buried alive would be. More than a few times during this period I wondered – realistically, not morbidly -- if the end of this experience would be me joining my mother?

After four months of dealing with feelings like this alone, I was determined to change how I was living, but only at the very beginning stages of being able to do so. Trying to find the church, even though it turned out to be a feeble and futile attempt, was nevertheless the beginning of something new. Giving myself some credit, and a little break, allowed my attention to drift out of my mind and see the newspaper with the ad for the church on the floor next to my chair. There was a phone number and I quickly dialed it before I could talk myself out it. I left a simple recorded message asking for directions.

I wasn’t looking for a ‘church’, so it wouldn’t have been a disappointment if they didn’t call back. The important thing, for me, was that I had tried to do something that would get me out of the grip of whatever it was that I was in the grip of and out amongst people again.

Sometime during the following week, someone did return my call. The voice was that of a youngish woman who explained to me that the street the church is located on was divided in two by an avenue. If I would have returned to the avenue and drove half a block south, I would have found the other half of the street and the church. She didn’t say anything to promote the church, not did she ask me any questions. She told me her name and to ask for her if I showed up on Sunday.

To say that her genuineness made it easier for me to get there the next Sunday would be a lie, but at least it did nothing to augment my chronic wavering. I’ve tried a couple of times already to describe what it is like when one is under the spell of despair or dealing with acute stress. Here’s another: two and two no longer add up to four. When you are faced with a simple proposition, such as if you are spending too much time alone then get out and meet people, it simply doesn’t add up or compute. You will either get stuck around three, or flare out exponentially with too many zeros to count (4,000,000,000,000…).

Although I literally went through a gadzillion reasons why not to go church, or anywhere, the following Sunday, somehow I made it. It was a week or two before Christmas – a day that I was dreading and intentionally avoiding being aware of. It turned out that it was this Sunday that the church was holding its Christmas celebration. Young restive children, under the guidance of earnest adults, reenacted, yet again, the nativity scene.

It could not have been homier than if Norman Rockwell had painted it. Or more different in that respect from the life of the mind I was engaged in. Without my consent, or intention, I confronted my biggest fear of the moment – Christmas. I managed to laugh with the children, smile at the adults, sing along with familiar carols, and not feel so alienated. A start.

Unless you have been in the throes of despair, or have suffered a deep emotional bruise, than I don’t think you can fully appreciate how significant little things like this can be. Or perhaps you can. Either way, it’s how I ended up ‘going to church’ and eventually feeling inspired – ironically, for non-sectarian reasons – to write this book on my experience of faith and grace.

Taking a little poetic license with the science, I think it’s fair to conjecture then that the invisible world preceded the phenomenal one. After all, things can’t go ‘bang’ unless there is friction of some kind. And nothing cannot have friction with nothing. There was something there, even if it remains invisible to our scientific scrutiny and rational understanding. (Why put so much ‘faith’ in science when it can’t explain 99% of the world we live in?)

I make this point only to support my thesis that in the physical world Grace is an a-priory evolutionary force that is there not only to make our individual lives more pleasant and meaningful, but is essential to our potential survival and growth as a species.