Dateline: Colorado Springs.

The Catholic Church in Colorado Springs usually flies under the radar. We are a small diocese, carved out of Denver's archdiocese in the 1980s, with a tradition of strong lay leadership. We are a diocese of soldiers and peace activists, and our cathedral's long association with the Marian House Soup Kitchen next door means that the bishop's church is also the parish for the Catholic homeless. It is my parish, too. We are welcome there, all of us. We are not one in politics, but politics doesn't call us together. We are called by Christ, in whom we are one.

When I gather Sunday mornings with other parishioners at St. Mary's, it is the least American hour of my week. Like all the American women I know, I take my purse everywhere. When I pick up my son at school and bring cash for a sports fee. When I stop to fill the car with gas and buy a gallon of milk. But at Mass there's nothing to buy. I walk there, hands open and outstretched, like a beggar. I'm not trading dollars for services; what's offered on the altar isn't for sale.

At Mass, I bow. Americans don't bow. We walk tall through our lives, erect, unbending, Gary Cooper at high noon. But at Mass, I bend and bow, kneeling like a servant, on my knees like a slave. Not an American moment, but a Catholic moment, one in an unbroken chain of moments, Sunday after Sunday, from first-century Jerusalem to twenty-first-century Colorado Springs.

So it was a surprise to find ourselves in the national news, interviewed by reporters looking for that most American invention, the sound bite, about that most American ritual, voting. Republican? Democrat? Angry? Happy? The bishop, yes or no? Communicated or ex? We are talking about our bishop's latest statement barring prochoice politicians and even voters from Communion, but neither exclusively nor primarily.

Most of my life is broken into divisions of property and occupation and memberships. Who can buy here, work here, belong here? My vote is an exercise in further division. No politician runs on the Catholic ticket or holds herself accountable only to Catholics. One question we're asking is based on the compromise that is politics: What if both candidates are proabortion? Which vote endangers one's immortal soul?

We've learned at St. Mary's that Communion gathers up these broken shards and makes us whole. No one is preferred; all receive from the one loaf, pray the same prayers, sing the same songs, make the same confession of sin. There is one cup in my parish: one cup for the soldiers shipping out for Iraq and one cup for the activists indicted for trespassing on military property. The mayor doesn't live in a shelter, but he kneels in St. Mary's with those who do. The man who supports school vouchers shares the sign of peace with the teachers' union member who opposes him. The Republican nurse stops after Mass to tell my ailing Democrat mother that she will come by her house to help next week. And, from what I see on Sundays, we are still walking together, singing together on the way to Communion.

In a city where the Bijou Community protests the military downtown every Friday as soldiers from Fort Carson pass by, we've had to learn the lesson of every family, how to get along despite our differences.

We at St. Mary's don't talk much about these differences, the same differences discussed endlessly on television and in the newspapers. It is not because they don't matter, but because they simply matter less than who we are and what brings us together, the work we have been given to do: to be the Body of Christ, fed by the Body of Christ, rooted in the heart of Christ and his church, going out in the world to be Christ for the world.

We have to learn to care for one another and to pray with one another, learn together to care for the sick and to clothe the naked, to welcome the stranger, and to feed the hungry. This is the work of our lives, the work that will take a lifetime to learn.

Our bishop, Michael Sheridan, has raised an important question: How should American Catholics vote? Catholics who say one's baptism can mean little or nothing in public life need to reconsider what happens in those waters. But there are, I believe, questions prior to the bishop's. Namely: How does a Catholic live? Pray? Marry? Raise children? Make a home? Care for the widow and the orphan, the elderly and the unborn? See the face of Christ in all its distressing disguises? These are not peculiarly American questions, but they are Catholic ones, and we at St. Mary's, those of us who gather at God's generous table, are still learning to live the answers.

We are like the Ephesians under John the Apostle. St. Jerome says John preached only one sermon, "My children, love one another." Elders went to him pleading for a new lesson. He listened, saying, "Of course, but first we must learn this one."

Melissa Musick Nussbaum is a writer who has taught Scripture at St. Mary's Cathedral in Colorado Springs for nineteen years.