I Joined a Church for the Casseroles
And for the community that came with them
My father and I were always the early risers. On Saturday morning at 7 a.m., I was usually sitting on a kitchen stool eating a bowl of Shredded Wheat. My father was a few feet away from me, sitting “lotus-style” on the window seat. He donned robes that used to be black, but after multiple decades had resigned themselves to a milky gray.
Amidst snaking pillars of incense, my father closed his eyes and for 20 minutes he simply sat there and breathed. Then he started chanting — deep, throaty chants — while kneeling on the floor and bowing repeatedly.
Growing up, my father’s weekend Buddhist rituals were about the closest thing I ever had to church.
Even though my Catholic and Jewish friends always complained about church or synagogue, I have to admit, I was a little jealous. They had a common bond, not to mention a whole group of other friends outside of school.
Then my best friend invited me to a Catholic service one Sunday, and my initial excitement wore off quickly. I didn’t know any of the songs, and people were endlessly standing up and sitting down. I just wanted to sit. The following year, I would begin to attend friends’ bar mitzvahs and realize that despite the supposedly intractable differences between…
