I recently attended church. It has been a very long time since I have heard commentary in that setting. Some commentary lasts the ages. The sermon’s conveyance of such abiding opinion was very good, welcoming yet challenging, talking truths mostly to those who already know and embrace them, yet who, if like I, find acting on them a challenge largely unfulfilled, and difficult to practice religiously.

I hadn’t been to Sunday worship in many years because churchgoing and I had a falling out. This particular Sunday, I and it somehow refitted. Chalk it up to mysterious ways and an unplanned act, at least by my will, to participate.

Having been away for so long, my observations of once familiar ritual were quite different from that remembered.

What struck me most was the hidden secular dynamic within the practice of faith. Who could say which of those in communion, gathered together in shared belief, were of one political persuasion or another?

Usually, I take my worship to the creation the creator created. There is something about the vastness of the ocean meeting a familiar shore, heavenly sky above, that drives home the most important sermon: That we should be instructed by this primal gift above any we worship of man-made, look at me, super cool, to die for, importance.

What about our continual affront of nature, compromising the planet’s very survival, escapes those who express worship of a supreme entity who loved us so much that nature was entrusted to us as our dominion?

Such interpretation of how the universe should be understood has a lot to do with my lapsed church attendance. Biblical interpretation on that Sunday, however, spoke very much to a more open and contemporary evaluation of established dogma.

The most positive takeaway from that worship service was its inclusiveness, its “you are all welcome,” without prejudice, without judgment, creating a community space that invited, befriended, and asked nothing except a voluntary contribution towards chapel re-roofing. That seemed a pretty modest admission price in allowing revisiting of my past participation and current reflection on present gifts received each day.

Many Sunday mornings I spend kneeling in the garden, among so many earthly co-inhabitants buzzing and crawling, or flowering colorfully upwards, racing through their seasonal lives with their own unspoken parables, scientifically glimpsed, of truly profound mysteries. It is a recommended tried and true path towards oneness.

Bowing heads with others remains another reliable means of searching out one’s true nature and inching closer to one another’s innate humanity — and to one’s own unique purpose.

The arrangement of the service was celebrated throughout by music. I have never heard Schumann or Chopin’s transcendent piano works displayed more fittingly. Their inspiration and completeness spoke volumes to the desired purpose at hand. The entire ceremony was a generous bouquet of devotion, even when all voices rose in a less well realized attempt at harmony, going about the difficult work of trying to make joyful noise from the 19th century hymns of Protestants.

Here and there, reminders of past church attendance attempted to disrupt my openness to that around and within me, but I was gently admonished by the purity of such excellent fellowship. That there need be so many denominational embodiments of religious kinship is worth separate consideration.

I mention all this because it begged immediate comparison to our everyday participation as members of society at large. There we plainly have great difficulty in finding undivided fellowship, more and more so, and religious differences play a major role in that dilemma. We are all Americans, religiously and politically free, free to practice our beliefs however we wish, or to disbelieve, even in America itself. That is not working out so well, these days. It has been way worse, far worse, even in my memory. But, that is how America’s great opportunity to achieve democratic fellowship was designed. Ideally, we would use those freedoms fully and thoughtfully, not just by rote partisanship. Sadly, too many don’t even participate enough to become partisan.

I know that sense of futility. That is what ultimately led me away from collective worship: the sense of religion being more an impediment than salvation — its track record of, so often, encouraging man’s inhumanity to those of another faith or culture. That conflict of political action over professed belief is all too present in so much ongoing religious intolerance.

My impromptu return to temple brought home an important truth: that religion can be uplifting when its practice doesn’t get in the way of its essential message, when preaching is done humbly and acknowledges, despite a popular book much to the contrary, that the “Unknowable” is definitely well named. What is essential, and the most divine revelation, is for mankind to truly practice kindness and forgiveness and keep practicing it until it becomes as accomplished as our penchant to ignore what is at the heart of the new testament. Being the world’s sword-maker isn’t what our founding fathers, or that of the gospel, envisioned as best practice for national or personal fulfillment.

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Gary Anderson is a resident of Bath.