Home.

Resurrection Ascension Church, Woodhaven Boulevard- Queens.

I sit on the third to last pew on the right side of the church.  Sunlight streams through the tainted windows that depict various scenes and different incidents from the Bible.  The 11.00 mass has just ended.  The crowd slowly makes its way to the door.  Some stop to greet people they know.  Some try to keep up with their four and six year olds as they run along the benches and down the aisles. Others converse with the pastor who has just celebrated the Eucharist.  The sacristan clears the altar.  He puts the chalice in a rectangular little box with a cross on it, and puts the Eucharist in the tabernacle set in the Blessed Sacrament behind the altar.  The cross on the left is covered as a reverence, and the coming of Easter.  A little ahead of me, sits a man probably in his late 40s.  He doesn't seem to move, or want to make his way to the door.  On my left, in the center of the church, or at least somewhat in the center, sits a Baptismal fount.  It is a circular basin that overflows water into a pool at the base.  I was told that people, who wished to convert to Christianity, were dipped into the water and baptized as Jesus was, at the river Jordan all those lifetimes ago.  The basin is used for newborns, while the Easter candle which bears the symbols of The Alpha and Omega – The Beginning and The End, stands tall at the side of the basin waiting to be lit during the Easter Vigil.    

I’m not that religious, really.  Do I believe there is a god?  Yes.  Do I believe that everyone should believe the same?  No.  For me, coming for Sunday mass has become more of an obligation rather than keeping the Sabbath Day holy.  I look on at the pastor, as he greets people, and imagine the things transpiring between the two parties.  Some ask for his blessings and to intercede their prayers, while others tell him of marvels that have occurred in the name of the Almighty Father.  No, I’m not religious.  Nevertheless, it doesn’t mean I don’t have FAITH.

May, will mark a year since I first set foot into this country.  In these past months, I have had ups and I have had downs.  Times when I have wished for nothing more than to go home.  Back to where I came from.  Back to the known and the familiar.  Back to where my life meant something and my dreams were just dreams.  Back to the comfortable little bubble that I built my whole world in.  I have had moments when I have felt lost and defeated.  Let down and thrown off guard by that cruel visitor called Change.  And at that time when nothing seemed easy and everything seemed lost, that time when everything around me felt strange and alien, this church, this 3rd to last pew on the right hand side is what reminded me of home.  Of the all the times I spent at the back of that church back in India, and had screaming matches with God.  (Well, technically I was screaming in my head because we were supposed to observe silence.)  It reminded me, of the days I sat and cried through my first heartbreak and begged Him to JUST MAKE THE PAIN STOP.  The times of immense joy that I shared with him in the form of swigs of wine sneaked from the Sacristy.  This church reminded me that no matter how lost I am, or however defeated I feel, I could always come home.  To Him.  Because he was home.  And ALWAYS would be.  Right in the heart of the unknown and the unfamiliar.

The man sitting ahead of me still hasn’t moved.  Maybe, like me, it isn’t only mass that confines him to the four walls of this place.