Come and See
A Pastoral Exhortation to Those Who Have Left,
and to Those Who Never Arrived
To anyone who will not be at Mass this Sunday, and has no particular intention of being there the Sunday after: grace to you, and peace. Now, please go back to Church. It matters. Thank you. 😇
You did not ask for this. Somebody has sent it to you, or you have come upon it by accident, and you are already braced for the pitch. I should declare an interest at the outset — I am a priest, and so about as disinterested in this question as a baker is about brioche. Take that as a warning rather than a promise of fairness. But I will try to keep the following free of the two things that make such documents unbearable: the assumption that you left for stupid reasons, and the assumption that you are going to come back.
An Israelite Indeed
There is a moment early in St John’s Gospel that I would put to you before anything else. Philip has found Nathanael and told him, with more enthusiasm than tact, that the one Moses wrote of has turned up, and that he is from Nazareth. Nathanael’s reply is not a question. It is a sneer:
ἐκ Ναζαρὲτ δύναταί τι ἀγαθὸν εἶναι;
Can anything good come out of Nazareth?
Notice what Philip does not do. He does not argue. He does not produce evidence, or take offence, or explain that Nathanael’s prejudice against Nazareth is itself the product of forces he has not examined. He says three words: come and see.[1]
And notice what happens when the sneering man arrives. Our Lord does not rebuke him. He commends him — an Israelite indeed, in whom there is no guile.[2] The scepticism was not the obstacle. It was the credential. What was wanted was a man who would not say he believed a thing before he did.
I have always found that consoling, and I offer it to you in the same spirit. Whatever else this letter is, it is not an attempt to get you to say something you do not mean.
Why You Left
Let me go first, and concede the ground.
Some of you left because of the music. I am not going to defend the music. Some of you left because of a homily that began nowhere, proceeded by stages, and arrived nowhere, and because you calculated — correctly — that you had a finite number of Sunday mornings. Some of you left because of the sign of peace, and the stranger who administered it to you with an enthusiasm you had done nothing to invite. Some of you left because you were asked, week after week, to feel things you did not feel, and you found that you could not go on performing.
These are real reasons. They are not silly. If a restaurant served food like that, you would not go back either, and no one would call you a lapsed diner.
And some of you — and here I stop making jokes — left because of what was done to children by men in collars, and what was done afterwards by men in offices to keep it quiet. I have no clever paragraph for that. It is the worst thing we have ever done, and no argument dissolves it. If that is why you left, you left for a reason I would have respected in you, and I would think less of you had you shrugged.
I am not going to ask you to weigh any of this against anything. I am going to ask something much smaller, and I will come to it at the end.
A Rumour You May Have Heard
You may have seen the headlines, since they come round every few years. They are, for once, roughly accurate.
The finding that people who attend religious services regularly live longer, and are less prone to depression, is one of the sturdier results in social epidemiology. The best work follows large cohorts over decades and was designed specifically to see off the obvious objection — that healthy people are simply the ones who can get to church. In the Nurses’ Health Study, weekly-plus attendance was associated with roughly a third lower all-cause mortality.[3] Across the rigorous longitudinal literature, the figures settle at around a quarter for mortality and about a third for the odds of subsequent depression.[4] There are also signs — contested, and I will not lean on them — that congregations in this country are filling again, and that the people filling them are young.[5]
Having told you all that, let me now advise you to pay no attention to it whatsoever.
All These Things Shall Be Added
I mean that seriously, and the reason is the most cheerful thing in this letter.
ζητεῖτε δὲ πρῶτον τὴν βασιλείαν [τοῦ θεοῦ] καὶ τὴν δικαιοσύνην αὐτοῦ, καὶ ταῦτα πάντα προστεθήσεται ὑμῖν.
Seek first the kingdom, and his righteousness — and all these things shall be added unto you.
Added. Thrown in. Not the point, and not withheld either. The health and the happiness and the neighbours who know your name are the things that come along behind; they are what a life turned outward produces without meaning to, the way a tree produces shade without ever having taken an interest in shade.[6]
Which is why the statistics, though true, are useless as a reason. A man who comes to Mass in order to live longer is not doing what the men beside him are doing; he is doing an impression of it, and he will know within a month. You cannot get the fruit by planting the fruit.
But here is the cheerful part, and it is aimed at those of you who have noticed that a great deal of what you value in this civilisation — the assumption that the weak have claims on the strong, that the person in front of you is infinitely valuable, that mercy is better than power — arrived here on a Christian ship. If you have noticed that, you have noticed something true, and rather a lot of professional Christians noticed it later than you did. I do not think it can be kept without its source; that is my honest view and you are free to think me wrong. But notice what follows if I am right: it is not your job to manufacture these things by effort and legislation. They are added. They come with. That is a considerable relief, and it is the opposite of a burden.
Nobody Was Ever Argued In
I want to be clear about what I am not doing here.
I am not attempting to prove anything to you. Not because there are no arguments — there are, and some are very good, and I would go through them cheerfully over a pint if you ever wanted to. But in all my time I have never met anyone who arrived because he lost a debate. People are not driven in. They are drawn.
St. Augustine saw this, and reached for a line penned by Virgil to say it: trahit sua quemque voluptas — each of us is drawn by his own delight. His point was that when Christ speaks of the Father drawing men to him, no violence is being done to anybody. You are drawn by what you find delightful, and that is the least coerced thing about you.[7] Nobody is dragged. Everybody is charmed.
I live in a community of canons under St. Augustine’s Rule, which opens by saying that we are gathered so that we may be of one heart and one soul — in God.[8] Those last two words are the whole difficulty and the whole answer. We did not choose one another, we are not notably compatible, and the friendship that has come of it was not something any of us set out to build. It arrived while we were looking at something else. I would not know how to recommend it to you as a technique.
What You Are Not Being Asked to Do
Since freedom is the point, let me be exact about it.
You are not being asked to believe anything before you go. You are not being asked to have a position on any of the questions you assume the Church would want you to have a position on. You are not being asked to tell anybody, including me. You are not being asked to stay to the end — the back is nearer the door for a reason, and the reason is people like you, and it always has been. A collection plate will pass; let it pass. Nobody will take your name. Nobody will follow up. There is no list.
And you are not being asked to feel anything. If you go and nothing whatever happens, then nothing whatever has happened, and you have lost forty minutes on a morning that you would probably have spent looking at your mobile phone.
Come and See
So here is the small thing I said I would come to.
Go once. Pick a church you have no history with, so that nobody can be pleased to see you… Ideal if chit-chat is not your thing. Go in, sit at the back, and say nothing to anyone. Arrive late if you would rather miss the greeting at the door. Then watch what happens at the altar, which is very old, which was going on for centuries before you were born and will go on after you, and which does not depend in the smallest degree on your believing in it that morning.
Then go home and get on with your Sunday.
That is the whole of it. Philip’s answer to the sneer was not clever, and it did not close off Nathanael’s escape. He could have stayed exactly where he was, under his fig tree, and been perfectly comfortable, and no one would have thought the worse of him.
He went and looked.
Come and see.
+ Fr. G. V. W. Lewis, C.R.S.H.J.
Canons Regular of the Sacred Heart of Jesus
1 September 2026
[1] John 1:46 (NA28): ἔρχου καὶ ἴδε.
[2] John 1:47 (NA28): ἴδε ἀληθῶς Ἰσραηλίτης ἐν ὧ δόλος οὐκ ἔστιν.
[3] Shanshan Li, Meir J. Stampfer, David R. Williams, and Tyler J. VanderWeele, “Association of Religious Service Attendance with Mortality among Women,” JAMA Internal Medicine 176, no. 6 (2016): 777–85.
[4] Tyler J. VanderWeele, Tracy A. Balboni, and Howard K. Koh, “Invited Commentary: Religious Service Attendance and Implications for Clinical Care, Community Participation, and Public Health,” American Journal of Epidemiology 191, no. 1 (2022): 31–35. The longitudinal designs are expressly constructed to address reverse causation; the objection that only the healthy can attend has been taken seriously and answered.
[5] Rhiannon McAleer and Rob Barward-Symmons, The Quiet Revival (Swindon: Bible Society, 2025). The figures have attracted methodological criticism — an opt-in panel, possible priming, the usual over-reporting of virtue — and are not corroborated by the British Social Attitudes series or by denominational returns. They are offered here as a straw in the wind, nothing firmer.
[6] Matthew 6:33 (NA28). NA28 brackets τοῦ θεοῦ, marking genuine doubt as to its originality; the sense of the promise is unaffected either way.
[7] Virgil, Eclogues 2.65, quoted and turned to his own purpose by Augustine, In Iohannis euangelium tractatus 26.4, ed. R. Willems, CCSL 36 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1954). Augustine’s argument there is that the drawing of John 6:44 is no violence done to the will, but the attraction of a delight.
[8] Augustine, Praeceptum I.2, in Luc Verheijen, ed., La Règle de saint Augustin, 2 vols. (Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1967), vol. 1; cf. PL 32:1377. The phrase is drawn from Acts 4:32.
