I didn’t go to church when I was a kid (which probably explains my moral laxity in many matters). My mother and father were lapsed Catholics and Protestants, respectively, and agreed on at least one thing: that their children should never have to endure the heaven-and-hell dissertations that made their Sundays so tedious. 

But every now and then I go to a Protestant church with my wife, who’s sort of an occasional Christian herself (though I am sure she would object to being described that way). She became a member of the First Presbyterian Church in Brooklyn Heights before we adopted our daughter, 15 years ago, and it has seen us through some difficult days since. We went the Sunday after 9.11 and the reverend gave the service over to the congregation, who took turns picking song from the hymnals. “America the Beautiful” was in there and I remember choking back the tears as we sang. (I also remember describing that moment to one of my Salon friends in SF who had written to ask how we were doing in the wake of that disaster. I think the combination of church and patriotism scared her off and I never heard from her again — the cultural divide in microcosm.)

Today seemed such a day, for all the right reasons; we wanted to share some of that overwhelming emotion we’ve all been experiencing since Tuesday but, seeing as how we were running late in typical Sunday fashion, we attended services at the Lafayette Presbyterian Church around the corner from us in Fort Greene. It’s a church with a lot of history: founding pastor Theodore Ledyard Cuyler was a militant abolitionist in the days before the Civil War, and Cuyler later invited a woman, the Quaker preacher Sarah Smiley, to preach from his pulpit. It was a first for a Presbyterian church and Cuyler was accused of heresy. It’s still a multiracial, multi-cultural kind of church and sure enough, Obama’s name was mentioned from the pulpit and the pews.

I never know what I’m looking for when I go to church so I’m always surprised when it finds me. Today it was while singing the old slave spiritual, “There Is a Balm In Gilead” — “Sometimes I feel discouraged/And think my work’s in vain…” Sometimes I do, too — about once a day, usually, and it’s worse on weekends when I have to go to dinner parties and listen to the stories of other people’s success. But having been one of the millions who labored to help get Obama elected — volunteering, blogging, talking about him to anyone who would listen for about a year now — I could feel, for once, that my work had not been in vain. We finally have a president we can be proud of. 

Of course, not all congregations were so happy today.  My niece Emily, who goes to college in Texas, has a roommate who was very upset. Her mom told her to finish school quickly and head home because the abomination of an Obama nation was a sure sign that “The End of Days is at hand!” But wait — isn’t that supposed to be a good thing? Doesn’t that herald the return of Christ? Someone needs to explain that to me. In the meanwhile, I’ll keep swaying and clapping, singing with the choir.