Sundays in America

In Sundays in America Suzanne Strempek Shea confronts her feeling of spiritual homelessness resulting from the clergy sex abuse scandal in the Catholic church, coupled with the anger she experienced when breast cancer upset her tidy and well-ordered life. As a result, she drifted away from the church in which she was raised but never lost the desire to belong to a community of committed worshippers, a place to "refuel" for the week ahead and to feel God's presence.

When Pope John Paul II died, the author was captivated by the degree of sorrow expressed by his mourners. She experienced a homesickness for the faith (if not for the institutional church) of her youth and wanted to find what she termed "the right place for her heart and soul." To accomplish this she decided to go on a pilgrimage to learn what goes on in other churches and what form devotion takes in these religious communities. Traveling throughout the United States, from Hawaii to Maine, she would visit a different church each Sunday for a full year. The book provides accounts of what she encountered in each one.

To discover how Christian churches differ from each other and from the Catholic church, Ms. Shea wanted to experience their services as a worshipper rather than a guest or tourist. There was, however, an impediment to her project: she was brought up in a conservative Polish parish where she had been conditioned to believe that Protestants were automatically doomed and that if she so much as entered a non-Catholic church, the ceiling would fall in. The motif of the potentially falling ceiling recurs throughout the book, adding a note of levity to this thoughtful study.

Ms. Shea's spiritual odyssey began and ended on Easter. Her project was off to a promising start at Harlem's New Mount Zion Baptist Church, the polar opposite of her usual worship experience, where she found a solid, welcoming, exuberant faith. Her journey would take her to mainstream churches such as Manhattan's Riverside Church as well as to more unusual houses of worship like Colorado Springs Cowboy Church, San Francisco's St. John Will-I-Am Coltrane African Orthodox Church, and the Hopi Nation's Kykotsmovi Mennonite Church. Ms. Shea's quest for spiritual fulfillment was not limited to attending services; while in Alabama she also volunteered to help victims of Hurricane Katrina.

The author found herself at home in an alternative Roman Catholic church, St. Sebastian in Baltimore, where "unabashed love" greets those, such as homosexuals, who feel marginalized in traditional Catholic churches. Seeking a place where acceptance is extended to everyone, she was turned off by fundamentalist churches preaching intolerance in any form. As she visited each church, she took note of the race, age and gender of her fellow worshippers in the hope of finding a healthy mix that would confirm inclusiveness.

Ms. Shea concludes that her ideal church is a community based on joy rather than fear, one that welcomed her warmly, cared about social justice rather than an individual's politics or lifestyle, contained little-to-no hierarchy, gave members a say in decisions, provided a spiritual message based on love, "and did all this in an art-filled space that rang with awesome music."

She comes to realize that the churches she has visited are not so different after all because all Christians have the same goal-they just take different routes to end up in the same place. Further, she concludes that there are no perfect churches and that a church consists of people rather than a building. In the final analysis, she notes, it's all about "letting go" and "letting God."

An artist as well as the author of five novels and two other non-fiction books, Ms. Shea makes good use of her narrative skills in describing each service that she attended. She paints detailed pictures of the buildings and the worshippers and supplies just enough background on each denomination to orient the reader.

Sundays in America provides stimulating reading for those of any faith who may be considering a change of affiliation or who are simply curious about how other denominations do things. Ms. Shea's conclusion that all of these churches have similar goals after all is reminiscent of T.S. Eliot's lines in "Little Gidding": "…the end of all our exploring/Will be to arrive where we started/And know the place for the first time."

Denise J. Stankovics is a librarian and free lance writer living in Vernon, Conn. In a previous life she worked in communications and publications.