This essay gives grace to the purpose for sitting in an empty church even while Christian denominations are frustrated with empty pews
Echo opinion essay published by Mary Townsend in The New York Times : What I Am Looking For In Empty Churches If you walk into a church right now, you are almost guaranteed to see other people. It’s the busiest time of the year for churches — even the normally empty ones are full. But full churches are what I usually avoid. My favorite thing to do is find an empty church and sit. Since I’m a single mother of two, it’s not hard to see why I’d be looking for a little peace and quiet. But there’s more to it than that, and it’s not always easy to explain. I’m after a certain kind of silence. I first discovered this kind of quiet some years back, when I’d gone to Italy for what seemed to be no reason at all. Without any sort of plan, I decided to go inside every church I came across, no exceptions. No church too small, no marble too lurid, would stop me. The poet Philip Larkin wrote in his “ Church Going ” in 1954, that when he stepped inside a church, he did so with ...