The late John Updike wrote this:

There was a time when I wondered why more people did not go to church. Taken purely as a human recreation, what could be more delightful, more unexpected, than to enter a venerable and lavishly scaled building kept warm and clean for use one or two hours a week. And to sit and stand in unison and sing and recite creeds and petitions that are like paths warn smooth in the raw terrain of our hearts. To listen or not listen as a poorly paid but resplendently robed man strives to console us with scraps of ancient epistles and halting accounts hopelessly compromised by words of those intimations of divine joy that are like pain in that the instant they're gone the mind cannot remember or believe them. To witness the windows donated by departed patrons and the altar flowers arranged by withdrawn hands, and the whole considered spectacle lustrous beneath its patina of inheritance. To pay for all this no more than we are moved to give, surely in all democracy there is nothing like it. Indeed it's the most available democratic experience. We vote less than once a year. Only in church and at the polls are we actually given our supposed value, our arithmetic of equality, one equals one.

I thought there was something beautiful about this description of what a church experience meant to one important American writer and I wanted to share it with you. (Of course, St. Mary's is open every day of the week...)