Remember the Sabbath?

I don't want to go to church. But I don't want to feel guilty about not going to church. Going to church, being with fellow Christians, should be like coming home, taking off your shoes, relaxing after a day at work and resting in their presence. Instead, I always feel unworthy of most of my fellow church-goers, like they are the modern-day equivalent of St. Pious or St. Applepie-us. I don't know my saints, clearly.

How do we get beyond feeling like a naughty child on Sunday mornings with the newspaper and coffee, kids playing nearby or downstairs, and NPR drifting in from the other room? How do we not think ourselves lapsed in ignoring our weekly obligations to God?

But does God really care if we are at church or home? Maybe it's that at church I actually spend a little time trying to plug into the divine presence, approach the mysterious, commune with the Creator with my peer communicants. At home, my prayers, if I make them, are individual, like diary entries, or a blog with only one reader. When praying, singing, or learning en masse, we become pilgrims together, heading toward the New Jerusalem.

So often, though, the cares of the day take over, the urgent but not important (as opposed to the important but not always apparently urgent work of God). I consider how distracting the kids really are at church, how hard it is to make my emotional pilgrimage. How I might help my wife around the house. How I really just want to see and hang out with them anyway.

I resist the need to see God at church, my cutting him out of other areas; but the other places, the kitchen, the basement, the back yard, don't necessarily seem imbued with his presence, so crowded as they often are by yelling kids or me and my yelling at the kids. Still, when the children playing together, side-by-side or with each other with their legos or tinker toys, I sometimes think that heaven has this kind of interplay of egos with each other in a genuine give and take. I just don't usually find it at church.