How I found a church (or how my church found me…)

(Just a warning—this post is REALLY long. There’s a lot that happened with this, so I wanted to do it justice…)

For the past three months, Charlotte has provided pretty much everything I could ever ask for in a city—parks, neighborhoods with big, beautiful trees, a hip artsy area, a clean downtown, and even a little French bakery with the world’s best caramel brownie. There was only one thing Charlotte was missing, but it was big one for me.

A church.

Newman (my church in Chapel Hill) was a huge part of my life the past 4 years. Newman was my place. When I was there I was part of a community. When I was there I felt needed and supported and loved. Leaving Newman was one of the hardest parts of graduating. I knew moving on would be tough, but I could’ve never anticipated the ache I would feel week after week searching for a church, the yearning that would settle in the pit of my stomach on Sunday night, facing another epic long week at school with no real source of peace ahead.

This wasn’t for a lack of trying. I spent the last 3 months hopping from church to church, looking for the right fit.

First I tried St. Gabriel’s. This was the closest church to my apartment, located in a posh area of Charlotte called Myers Park. The congregation is medium sized, mostly families and the elderly. The music is typically Catholic, only a little more bland. I left feeling nothing.

Next I tried St. Matthew’s with my friend Ellen. This church is the farthest away—about 20 minutes from my apartment, way down in South Charlotte, which is wealthy suburbia. St. Matt’s is the closest thing to a Catholic mega church you can find. Ellen and I went to the evening LifeTeen Mass, which is a youth-oriented contemporary service. The music was more like Newman’s, which I liked, but I still struggled with the massive size. I left undecided.

Finally, I tried St Peter’s in uptown Charlotte with my friend Marissa. This church is small and quaint, located in a pretty part of downtown Charlotte. The service is very traditional—complete with organ and hymns from the 1800’s. I really wanted to like this one. It was small, and I felt kind of hip going to church in downtown Charlotte. I still left without feeling fulfilled.

So I rotated between these 3 churches, each Sunday hoping it would click—hoping that one day I would just realize which church I needed to go to. I particularly remember the Sunday two weeks ago. I had made the drive to St. Matt’s. I sat in the pew by myself, looking at the family in front of me. There were two girls, a mother and a father. The girls looked to be in middle school, about the age of my students. Like so many of the people around me, the girls were wearing matching North Face jackets. The mom had on Citizen jeans. Everyone was white. Everyone had plenty of money.

All of a sudden, I felt that being in that church at that moment was wrong. How could I go to school ever y day with my kids—my kids who are all on free and reduced lunch, my kids who are black or Latino, or Vietnamese refugees—and still go to a church like this? My kids like Manuel , who works every weekend at the Flea Market, only to give all the money to his parents so they can “pay the rent and stuff.” My kids like Natalia, who takes care of her 4 year old brother every day while her Mom works the 12 hour night shift. How could I live in their world every day and then come to this one on weekends? (I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with being white and having money and living in South Charlotte. St. Matt’s is a vibrant Catholic community, and I’m sure it does a lot of good for a lot of people. It just provided too much of a disconnect between my life as a teacher and my life as a church-goer.)

Anyway, by this point I was feeling confused and a little hopeless. Then I found Mo Tee.

Mo-Tee is in our newcomer ESL class. She moved to the US from Thailand a little less than a year ago. She is tiny, with long dark shiny hair that she wears in a ponytail. Unlike my other refugee students, her clothes are always clean and neatly pressed. She smiles and giggles often. Mo Tee is one of those students that you meet and fall in love with immediately.

Last week, as I was walking around class helping students with an assignment, I asked MoTee about her bracelet. It was a wooden bracelet with pictures of the Saints—several of my kids had them and I was wondering where they were from. “It’s from church” she said.
“What church do you go to?” I asked.
“I’m Catholic.”
“Oh, me too! Where is your church?”
She shrugged.
“It near our school?” (I was desperate at this point, remember.)
She nodded.

I left with a lingering of hope, and a mental note to google churches near our school.

The next day, shortly after walking into class, I noticed Mo Tee and her friend talking over a piece of notebook paper. There were boxes, lines and arrows written on it. I walked over to take a closer look.
“Is this a map?”
Mo Tee and her friend nodded.
“To your church?”
They nodded again.

It was a map of how to get to the church from her apartment. When I pointed to road names, she had no idea what they were called. The only thing she could tell me was take a right here, then straight on this road, then another left.

That night I googled “Vietnamese Catholic Churches Charlotte, NC.” I was surprised to see one pop up that was, in fact, very close to my school. It was called Our Lady of the Assumption. It had never popped up when I searched generally for Catholic Churches in Charlotte, but when I checked the website, I saw it has masses in English, Spanish, and occasionally in Vietnamese. I began to get excited.

The next day I came to Mo Tee with a piece of paper with Our Lady of the Assumption written on it. “Is this what your church is called?” I asked. She looked at the piece of paper, frowned, and shook her head. My excitement bubble burst.
I read the paper aloud, “Our Lady of the Assumption. Is that it?”
“AHH, yes!” She smiled and giggled with her friend. “That’s it.”

So, last Sunday morning, I got dressed and made the drive to Our Lady of the Assumption for the first time.

And I loved it.

It is the most diverse church I have ever been to. The congregation is equally divided between white, black, Latino, and Asian. It has a great choir that manages to sing traditional Catholic songs with some gusto. I found out that many of my students attend the Spanish mass, while at least three of my students (from Thailand, Vietnam, and Haiti) attend the English mass.

I brought Adam to church with me for support, and as we were leaving, I spotted Mo Tee and her long pony tail. I called out her name, probably a little too enthusiastically.

She stopped, turned around, and said hello rather meekly. Then she ran off to board the bus with her family. (The church provides a bus to take refugee families from their apartment complexes to church)

This was not quite what I had expected from her reaction after all that she had done to help me find this church. I felt like I owed this little girl so much, yet I left worried that I had somehow intimidated her.

But, as I’ve learned, shyness is standard for middle schoolers, not to mention the fact that it’s a quite a shock for them to learn that their teachers have lives outside of school. During class on Tuesday, she called me over to her. “Ms. Ryan, you come to my church again?”
“Yes,” I said, “I really liked it.”
“This Sunday, you sit with me at church?”


Yesterday, I went to Our Lady of the Assumption by myself. I walked to the left side of the church (where Mo Tee had told me she sat) and spotted Mo Tee’s family all lined up on a pew—Mom, dad, two brothers, two sisters, all small and dark and serious looking. I smiled at them and sat down a few rows over. There was clearly no room on their pew. I knew her parents didn’t speak any English, and I didn’t want to make things too awkward.

A minute later, Mo Tee, in her pink striped turtle neck and matching tennis shoes, came and sat down next to me. She looked up at me and smiled, rocking her legs back on forth across the pew. And in that moment, amidst all the uncertainty that I’ve ever felt about what I’m doing and where I’m going, I knew I was right where I needed to be.