home

Yesterday the priest at my church gave a personal tour of his home town to me and the priest who comes to us from Nigeria to sub for the summer. How this outing came about is something of a mystery, but there we were, in Schwyz (capitol of canton Schwyz, one of the founding cantons of the Swiss confederacy, heart of the beast!) learning about the great fire of 1642, the patrician houses built by Swiss mercenary clans, the huge baroque parish church, and the local economy, which includes cows, the Victorinox Swiss army knife factory, and a definitely-above-average number of convents, monasteries, and chapels.

Photographic proof: the unlikely trio

With all the angst that I have around Church, you may well wonder why I stay, and a big part of the answer is here. I don't have anything approaching the experience of being so rooted in one place that I could see all my childhood haunts in one morning (on foot no less!). But church is a common thread linking all the places I've lived, and in that sense it's home. However many problems I have with it, it's an important part of me, and it would be painful to leave behind. On top of that, I'm grateful for this thing that links me to people who are in every other sense unlike me. The Church may be a worldwide hierarchy of faithful adherents to a specific dogma (and that's not a vision I particularly treasure), but it also has the potential to be an international community seeking unity in diversity, connection across boundaries - and that's an idea very close to my heart.