Story originally printed in the La Crosse Tribune or online at www.lacrossetribune.com
Published - Wednesday, July 16, 2008
Religious search compels man to seek Quaker gathering in La Crosse
Michael Sersch’s religious search has been an eclectic journey through the landscape of American Christianity.
Born 30 years ago in Marshfield, Wis., to a Roman Catholic mother and Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod father, Sersch was raised Catholic but sent to an Evangelical summer camp to learn the Bible. Growing up, his parents often gathered with charismatics in the living room of their home.
Later, at the College of
St. Benedict and St. John’s University in Collegeville, Minn., Sersch was drawn to the silent contemplation of Benedictine monks. He also became involved with non-violent activism and would fall asleep staring at paper reminders of the world’s tragedies taped to his wall.
Since college, he has broken with his Catholicism, lived in a community with homeless men, explored Episcopal and Mennonite churches, married, worked with his wife, Deborah Nerud, at a retreat center in Chicago, read Marcus Borg’s “Reading the Bible Again for the First Time” and fathered a child.
His quest has led Sersch, who has lived in La Crosse since 2005, to Quakers, and he hopes to find others to join him in starting a local Friends Meeting, or Quaker gathering.
“The Quakers are making sense to me at this point,” Sersch said. “I’m trying to find a small community now that is willing to go deep and go silent, and from there we can do action.”
In arriving at this point, Sersch has stepped away from other parts of his journey. While inviting strangers into the home was a regular event at the Catholic Worker house where he lived in Winona, Minn., his concern for his son, 20-month-old Sebastian, keeps him and Nerud from doing that now. While he still values the spiritual, intellectual and non-violent traditions of Catholicism, he no longer connects with the liturgy and has a hard time reconciling Catholicism with the church’s hierarchy.
And while he once imagined becoming an inner-city activist who would spend most of his days locked up for non-violent protesting, he now jokes about wanting to shake the college student he had been.
“I look back now and say these things are important to be aware of, but maybe not to fall asleep to,” he said. “Is a pretty landscape so hard to put up?”
Sersch and I met on Wednesday at his family’s home, where Nerud grows squash, beets, radishes and other vegetables in the backyard. After listening to the story of his wanderings, I asked Sersch why he does all this stuff. He paused and then answered that he always has had a strong desire to integrate community, spirituality and action. And he says gatherings of Quakers, formally known as the Religious Society of Friends, offer this, with simple meetings where people sit in silence and speak as they are moved.
“Right now this feels like where the spirit is moving me,” he said. “In traditional Christian terms, that’s the Holy Spirit. I tend to shy away from that language, personally, because I think that it can cloud more than it can expand. We have 2,000 years of theology and writing on what is the Trinity and in the end it’s still a mystery, as it should be. But for me, the spirit is very real, and I believe it can be discerned in the human heart.”
Joe Orso works part time for the La Crosse Tribune and the Franciscan Spirituality Center. Opinions in this column are his own. He can be reached at jorso@lacrossetribune.com
or (608) 791-8429.
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