Greek Orthodox

For the first time I couldn't make it through to the end. I didn't even care if it was rude. I just could not take another chant and mindless male maladies. It was just SOOOOOOOOO boring. It was after we had been waiting for communion for about an hour after they announced it that I called it kaputz. I'm not alone in this feeling; most of the congregation is with me. At the beginning of the service the place was nearly empty, however, as time went by people began to pour in. What had been a void held more than a few neighborhoods in 1950's fashion, complete with heels and skirts on all the women and the occasional veil. In the front hallway you could either purchase the daily candle for a dollar or the weekly big red candle for $8. The price tags of salvation were written on a piece of faded construction paper, which obviously spared no expense. No one took the small candles; no one was coming back till next Friday.

Apparently the majority of the congregation waits until the end when confession happens to come to services. There is nothing more understandable. After all the church cites their righteous place as the best religion based upon the fact that "nothing has changed about us in the last 2000 years" and "Not even the communists could destroy us." Wow. We are talking about a thought pattern that evolved at the same time when people actually thought the world was flat and that leeches could cure, believed witches needed burning, a time when a woman said, probably in fear of being stoned or because she didn't understand how people got pregnant, that she had immaculately conceived, and people said thank god our saviour has arrived. Needless to say these believers don't really care about conforming to present interests.

I couldn't understand anything they said because it was in Greek (obviously). I don't think anyone else could either. The preacher men, who were all dressed like Pope posers, circled a table with various artifacts chanting, waving incense, kissing each other on the cheeks, chanting more, shaking clothes, opening books, circling more, bowing, tapping little boys, lighting candles, chanting..... you get the idea. At times the black men, in the corner, who were very Rasputinesque in my mind, would say something that sounded scary and due to the acoustics, I'm sure sounded like a whisper in some places and hellfire in others. There was also a choir above that I couldn't see but which seemed to sing the same chant over and over and over. I suppose it was different, but the type of variety it sponsored was probably on the order of a few notes circled in red ink so they didn't forget them.

Then the preacher came out and did this schpeil on what you should and should not do. There was no ambiguity in this. Don't do anything that would signify you are grown up or can think for yourself. Don't have sex, don't drink, don't be gay, don't not do what I say, don't let your kids play video games, don't give in to sin and these newfangled licentious ways (aka, watch out for internet porn), come to church, believe in church and in God. Why? Because it's old and it's pretty.

Seriously, in their brochure regarding the purpose of their iconoclast dome and handiwork, that's the number one reason they give for its importance: it looks nice. Now this I can identify with. It was extremely beautiful. I have always loved iconoclast art for its cartoonish nature, Jesus's huge head and hands which often dwarf Mary's even when he is still pictured as a babe. I have done several reproductions myself. It doesn't make up for almost two hours of my life in which I watched men bob around and have nothing to say that made any sense except "It's pretty."

It's All Greek to Them

We went because of its dome, an extremely large half a globe, covered in gold. On our way to services in Denver's Temple Emmanuel on a Friday evening, we spotted the dome; it isn't exactly subtle amid the large brick houses of the wealthy neighborhood. Nary another gold covered dome in sight, truth be told.

Inside, there is possibly less subtlety. The dome, inside, is covered with iconographic paintings, anchored, front and center, with a super-sized vision of someone called Theotokis and a baby with exceedingly large and adult-like hands on her lap. Jesus, as you may have guessed, and the Greek Orthodox version of Mary.

Theotokos, to the Greeks, is what Mary is to Roman Catholics, magnified tenfold. Judging by the iconography all above and all around us, she is probably more important than Jesus. Or perhaps it is just this cathedral, named for her: The Cathedral of the Assumption of Theotokos. We had a fair amount of time to browse the ceiling, as everyone was standing when we entered, the sounds of a well-tuned choir filling the domed environment without discrimination. Domes have amazing acoustical value. If I was designing a church, it would definitely be shaped like a dome. It made me think of how insane prophets of old must have felt when the Voice of God came at them out of the wilderness: "That you, God? Where are you?" Sound seemed to emanate from no particular place, yet to fill every place. Ben says it's much the same or maybe better, in India's Taj Mahal. Underlying the choir's melodious murmurings in Greek, I eventually discerned another vein of words, a deep and sonorous voice, chanting also in Greek.

Behind the tall gold pillars that separated what I can only call the "Holy of Holies" from the more public altar area, came clouds of gray and yellow smoke. Gold crosses on the backs of satiny ivory gowns were just about all we could see of the four priests gathered around the inner altar. They chanted and muttered and bowed to the ornately bejewelled and silvered book in front of them, kissing it and each other in a ritual that we in the pews stood silently to observe. To the right of the Holiest sanctum, looking for all the world like a collection of Heckle and Jeckle imitators, a varying collection of black-robed priests huddled, like magpies on a telephone wire. Like magpies, they whispered among themselves, as did the congregation.

The congregation in a Greek Orthodox cathedral apparently has very little to do. The liturgy invites few responses; there is no participatory singing. I suspect that Roman Catholic services were much like this not so very long ago, before the liberalization that pretty much did away with Latin in their churches. After experiencing two religious services within one week which each conducted their observances largely within the bounds of a foreign language, I have to admit I see the point of retaining unfamiliar language. I think the Catholics are pretty much doomedd, since they removed the incomprehensibility of Latin from their services, making the idea of God seem like something common sensical or rational, faith something we can understand and articulate to others and ourselves rather than ineffable, inscrutable, ineluctable. The Greeks still know how to guard the mystery, hence the unarguable nature of their belief. Even Mary pales beside Theotokos. When it comes to God, being distanced is good. How much easier to uphold the Divine Mystery if it is only analyzed and discussed with words that are unintelligible? In the domed church I would create, there would definitely be a foreign language spoken by the priests. Maybe I'd use Laura-Claire's made-up language. No one but Mady and LC and Mariel would understand any of it. Perfect for a religion!

Compromises

We drove deep into country club land. Into a geography where newly constructed houses were created individually with remodeled kitchens and entry foyers that spanned several floors. Where kids did chores, not because they actually needed doing (there were cleaner women for that), but to learn responsibility. There were speed bumps every block, but no children outside to avoid hitting. It was a place where swim teams and video game tournaments meant social lives.

That being said, we turned into the hedged parking lot and gazed up at the monstrous modern ode to Yahweh. These people who apparently have so much of everything for some reason still need a god. But what reason could they have?

People are so creative with their compromises. How does one become extremely rich and still feel generous? How does one wear brand names and look alike clothing and still feel like an individual? How does one become a doctor or scientist and still have a faith? How to reconcile the various forces in ones life? It is no wonder that strange crossroads such as this synagogue exist. Where bongo drums and dancing meet reformed Judaism. Where people sing for hours songs they haven’t an idea what they mean because they don’t actually understand the language. The rabbi spoke about the power of an email. Where has the divine gone, in these places?

It seems it has been compromised. The faith of the majority of these affluent attendees is more of a cultural familiarity and comfort than a profound sense of direction.
I would compare it to children’s chore list. It is not a necessity. It is expected to be mildly entertaining, and there is no problem if you talk through the entire service. Some might call it a waste of time, but there is definitely an affect, just as there is an affect of children going through the motions of doing chores. At least there is the learned familiarity with it. So you go. You try to have fun, learn some stories, sing some songs, it might be boring, but with a little ingenuity, you can figure out a way to deal. Then you can proudly check the religion box on scantrons; Jewish, and maybe even get a free plane ticket to be flown over to Israel, to view a people whose faith and daily life has so much more to do with necessity.

What was at once so strange to me now seems normal, and somewhat nauseating. The more churches I attend, the less I can stomach them. When I first arrive I remain interested by my surroundings, but this fades and I'm left a need for substance. These religions are all starting to become the same. Yet they claim there is a divide between them. They seem to be a comforting compromise of whatever different walk of life someone has always attended to. What do they have to offer in the way of difference except for jargon and history. None of the music is interesting. The thoughts they offer are not well thought out ideas on life and death and meaning, but rather odes to the familiar. It seems no wonder that religion often becomes reactionary. Its' distinctions are of the past, so how can it react to an evolving present, or even the future. The more I attend the less respect I incur.

Since it seems to have little to do with an actual need for belief, I begin to wonder what are its' social benefits? I am at a loss except to say that it is a comfort of alliance. I had so hoped to find something more to religion than I knew, not that I wanted to become religious, but at least to see that it did some good in the world and was not only rhetoric. But with each adventure we take I become more and more convinced that its' negative effects have all the more weight than the positive ones.

One could say that it is nice for people of similar background to come together and sing and dance and be nice to each other. However, it is not that simple. Along with that coming together is a superficiality about why they are there and what is important. What good can come from following along to a song or prayer you don't even understand? I was at first impressed with the spontaneity of their wedding dance. Then I learned it was requisite. What does this say besides perhaps we should get other people to do our thinking for us? I guess that is the basis of faith, yet I am left feeling worn out and empty. Perhaps this is why I did not know where to begin writing this week, I am left with nothing from these services. Not even an interesting anecdote.

Context of Klezmer

When you can't understand what someone is saying, when you don't know their language or syntax, it's pretty much impossible to respond with any intelligence. Intelligence, you see, resides in understanding. At Temple Emmanuel on a gorgeous Friday evening, there was no understanding on my part, and only partly because of the Hebrew.

The service, "Shabbat Unplugged" they named it, was basically a three piece band--percussion, keyboard and guitar--instead of a cantor singing songs of a repetitious nature in Hebrew for a full hour and a half. Three times the rabbi got up from his seat in the congregation to face the audience and deliver a brief homily; I couldn't tell you what he said anymore than I can tell you what the singer sang even though the rabbi spoke in English.

Understanding, I'm beginning to see, is not at all the point of religious services. With the possible exception of the Buddhists and the Quakers among the religions we have visited so far, the point of religious services seems uniformly to be submission and acquiescence to a condition of mindless worship of an other, an abandonment of individual intelligence in favor of group conformity. I know that some of the members of this Jewish reform congregation remember enough of the Hebrew learned for youthful bar/bat mitzvahs that the refrains of the songs were comprehensible, but that does not mean the words were intelligent; the few lines that were translated on the media screen (oh shades of the Christian evangelical congregations) were singularly unmoving and uninformative, things like, "The bride is at the gate."

So perhaps it isn't really that surprising that the members of this congregation get up and do a little Middle Eastern circle dance around the temple while the band is singing on stage. What's to listen to? What's to learn? What's to think of? The Jewish Mother in me shrugs well-rounded shoulders. So what's wrong with a little dancing in the temple? Is it my fault God gave me two good feet and a set of hips that was built to sashay every bit as much as they were built to bear children, may God grant you many and may some of them be boys... Dance, as the Hasids and the Sufis know, takes you out of your intelligence and into your physical self. Ecstasy is a physical condition, as Pentecostal Christians know so well.

It seems the main point of the Friday service in this large, urban, reform temple was to stake a claim on legacy, to make sure no one in the congregation forgot at the end of the week that they are, first and foremost, not accountants or lawyers or medical receptionists wearing nice cardigan sets: they are Jewish. The Hebrew, the dancing, the long recitation of the names of the dearly departed, the constant reference to Israel evoking an alliance not only with the tribe of Israel, descendants all of King David, but the Land of Israel, may the one rest in peace, may the other somehow achieve peace. The service is done to solidify the group identity. The use of Hebrew, the failure to enter the Western mainstream with the adoption and use of English, makes the distinction between these Jews and the rest of the world clear. No one welcomed us; no one even smiled at us, except the little girl at the entrance to the synagogue who handed us a weekly bulletin of events.

At one point in the service, everyone rose to their feet and turned around to face the back of the temple. I don't know what the intention of this was, as the Hebrew that was being chanted was meaningless to my ears, but I got the feeling we were waiting for one of the prophets to enter the temple, like the place set for Elijah at Passover. But the facing backward seemed significant to me in another way, too. The whole service seemed to be looking backward, into the past. In both Christianity and Islam, there is an orientation toward the future, when judgment will be clear and the dead divided between the rewarded and the horrifyingly punished. In Judaism, there is only today, the moment to remember the past and who the Jews have been. Say Kaddish. It all makes the idea of the nation of Israel, the existence of a Jewish state, part of the unthinking acceptance that is the hallmark of religion.

Don't think about it. Just go along. Sing what's on the board. Read the words we set in front of you. Dance. Get away from that nasty bugger, Intellect. Move those feet, sway those hips, bear more children and make sure they go to temple with you. Is there safety in numbers? Will your daughters marry good Jewish boys and your sons good Jewish girls? When is that Messiah coming, anyway...

When I was a very young woman I wished I was Jewish. They all seemed so smart.

Rumiatic Fervor

I don't know what it is about the Unitarians that irks me so. I have thought about it considerably, especially since my sister is in the process of becoming an ordained minister of the Unitarian faith. I've been thinking about it additionally since Mady and I went to visit the Unitarians up in Boulder last week. I've been thinking about it and feeling additionally disturbed.

It all seems so pointless and self-important. Self-congratulatory, really, a roomful of white people come together ostensibly to celebrate a sense of community, a community of the perfectly well-intentioned and generally well-heeled. There are hardly any poor Unitarians, I have noticed over the years, except for an occasional student in temporary poverty or once in a while a stray artist whose art is obviously not sufficient to create meaning in his or her universe. In the congregation we just visited, the ease and affluence of the members was readily apparent in their proclamation of "Joys and Sorrows," wherein the joys were all trite and the sorrows mundane. Those left gasping by the blows of cruel fate are not gathered here nor are the ecstatic creatives.

Like Rumi. Whom I think of because he was the subject of the sermon: "Rumi: A Poet Philosopher for Our Time." More aptly, the title might have been "Rumi: Mystic Sufi as Utmost UU," for that was what the reverend seemed mightily to be implying. I have never heard anyone so grievously misrepresent Mawlana, as he is more rightfully called. The centrality of Islamic belief to his poetry and world view and passion was totally ignored by the Reverend Gunn. I'm not even sure she ever bothered to mention that he is probably second only to Muhammad in the prominence, prevalence and proliferation of the precepts and practices of the Islamic religion. Rumi, as we choose to call him in the West, like he is a lapdog poodle, craved reunion with the Qu'ranic god in a passionate and poetic life that spread Islam not only through the Middle East but which eventually made Islam appeal to Europeans and then Americans, and not least of all, to Unitarians. He does not talk of killing or fatwahs or the right to tear the membranes of posthumous virgins; no, Mawlana talks of love, the Beloved, his long lost friend, with whom I cannot help but believe he was truly, deeply, and ultimately inconsolably in love, and whom was probably killed by the order if not the sword of Rumi's son. And the Unitarian minister smiles benignly and crashes through a stanza of Rumi's poetry as if it was forged of iron and not the liquid of wine. It is the liquidity of Rumi which allows his words to endure; his words are molten fire; they lick your thighs even as they burn you.

But the reverend seems to miss all this, or perhaps she just doesn't want to disturb the bland faces upturned to her. We sing half-hearted and simplistic songs throughout the service, songs someone must have been paid a hefty $5 to create on demand, especially for the UU's liberated hymnal. But there is one song everyone seems to like, and lo and behold, it's ascribed to no one but RUMI! "Come, come whomever you are/Wanderer, worshipper, lover of living, it doesn't matter./Ours is not a caravan of despair/Come, even if you have broken your vow a thousand times/Come, yet again, come, come." Only problem is: this isn't Rumi, but a verse falsely assigned him. The minister likes it so well, though, she quotes it in her sermon as well.

I've read what Mady wrote in response to our Unitarian visit. What would Rumi say to these people gathered here; would he be pleased? Here are his own words. "If anyone interprets my words in any other way, I deplore that person and I deplore his words."(Rumi and His Sufi Path of Love, M. Fatih Citlak, ed., 2007). He was speaking of those who distill his poems of their praise for Allah, who distort his meaning to create an earthly and un-Islamic impact. Rumi was a mystic, an esoteric mystic who cannot help but remind me of Jesus, both of them craving reunion with god, both of them full of proverbs and tales and love, love, love.

It's something you just don't sense in the community of the UUs. Passion of any kind seems entirely absent, replaced by its dull and glazed cousin, self-love. At the end of the service, all those gathered rise and form around the periphery of the church, a single circle. There are no whirling dervishes, no dancers, there is only the smug certainty that once again god has been served by the chosen ones, the nearly perfect already. Or could it be something different, that god has served these chosen ones...

I've been reading Christopher Hitchens, in addition to Rumi this week, and I underlined the following sentence from the first chapter of his latest book God Is Not Great: "There is no need for us to gather every day, or every seven days, or on any high and auspicious day, to proclaim our rectitude or to grovel and wallow in our unworthiness." The former case seems exemplary of the Unitarians' Sunday gathering. The latter is more closely aligned with the stricter and monotheistic religions of the world. I'll be reading Hitchens next Sunday. He's more interesting, by far.

Rumination

How would Rumi want his biography related? Through a fat woman who makes you hold hands in a dark room so that the word community can be stuffed down your throat and washed down with curdled proclamations of the word "Love," like it means something?


Or is it possible that Mawlānā Jalāl-ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī would relish how Westerners can't pronounce his name. Is it possible, that his understanding of the divine could be more clearly communicated through a night time sand whirlwind during which a giant rod of lightening struck, and in striking created from its' immense heat a glass bowl of sand which could afterward only continue to spin around like a dreidel. God's very own play thing which would be whipped around until he grew bored.

Happening upon that glass dreidel, divine, squinting through the places where there was only enough sand to make a small hole and peaking inside one could see various items trapped inside. A woman is sitting upon her horse, still comfortable as if the storm had not even touched them. It seems they must have emanated from the lightening. The woman holds a candle which seems not to flicker and in the light of it you can see that the coat of the horse and that of the woman seem to from the same seed for the color is impeccably matched.

It is possible that he would not wanted his life admired by mere holding of hands. By egotistical pattings on the backs of each other, or by hymns rewritten with attempted-divine words filled with emptiness. It is possible

Hope of the Hopeless

I took tons of notes, shocked by the words boring into my ears, reaching for Mady's proffered notebook soundlessly, dumbly, she somehow knowing and anticipating my need, my craving to document and quote, to verify that the words assailing me are not fragments of my worst consciousness nor repetitions of the worst of contemporary cultural commentary, but in fact are there, real, of this particular moment: uttered and received by this congregation of poorly dressed sycophants as truth. Somehow, writing the words not only documents them but distances me from them, like raising a fence around me for protection. For I do feel assailed. I do feel assaulted. The hatred and the sense of violent vindication both terrifies and appalls me. At the end of this service, both Mady and I need to flee.

When we approached the enormous edifice that is the Faith Bible Chapel in Arvada, Colorado, we were first greeted by two uniformed police officers and only secondarily by members of the congregation. I asked the police officers why they were there, pretending to assume they were there because of some raised terrorist alert. "Oh no, m'am. We're just here to make sure no one gets hurt." At the end of the service, they are still there, posted just outside the chapel doors again, keeping the peace. There is also an ambulance on alert in the parking lot. God forbid anyone of these just and righteous churchgoers should meet their end during the service. These, after all, are the Chosen. These, after all, have the Hope and the Promise of the End of It All. But God forbid their lives should end before that Glorious, All-Out End.

How horrible, how paltry and frustrating, how completely unfulfilling their lives must be that they can actually look forward to the End of the World. It does not take so much for most of us to find life justifiable, bearable somehow. Our daughter looking beautiful, shining clean and radiant in a prom dress next to some unknown young man even though we know full well we shouldn't care whether she looks beautiful or whether she has a date;, our son winning honorable mention in a contest he rightfully should have taken first place, our daughter emerging from under the hood of an old jalopy, grease streaking her happy features, a sunrise, a sunset, waves breaking on the watertop. But these people have lives so patently completely without joy that the pronouncement of the imminence of the end of the world as we know it makes them break out into applause, makes the husband in his cheap and shapeless suit bestow the fondest of smiles upon the joyous face of his wife, upturned.

It's Mother's Day. The moms of the congregation are called down to the front for a special blessing. Mady urges me to join them. I, frozen in fear, cannot. "If anyone asks, I'm your crazy spinster aunt," I hiss back at her. The moms are rewarded for their mommerly excellence with a gift: an emery board. I am so vastly relieved that I am not among them. A fingernail file in return for your life. It makes my puny bookseller pay look formidable somehow. Oh yeh. Moms also are rewarded for their selfless service to their children with a free doughnut following the service. Let them eat cake, and let them have nicely shaped and manicured fingernails, oval and smooth, betraying not the work they do.

This is the most sacrilegious religion I have ever witnessed and one I could not have imagined, even in the worst of my nightmares and day panics. Their foyer is full of booths, where cheap trinkets are being sold. Nothing at all religious, just baubles and bags and ornaments. I cannot help but think of Jesus entering the temple in Jerusalem in the days leading up to his crucifixion and overturning the tables of those who would do commerce in God's holy place. In the women's bathroom, a sign in each stall instructs Spanish speaking users to make sure to place their tampons in the proper receptacle. English speakers apparently know how to properly dispose of their waste and need no physical reminders. Reminders of Israel, flags and maps and brochures, are everywhere. It's like a travel bureau, one in which every traveller's going to Israel.

This puzzles both of us for a while, but by sermon's end it is all terribly, dreadfully, appallingly clear. These Christians love Israel and, in particular, love the war and the pain and the bloodshed that has lasted so long between the Jews and the Palestinians. This hatred, this conflict, this bloody fight for a small stretch of desert land on the other side of the world is, by these "Christians," the beginning of the hastening of the End. When Jesus comes back, you see, he will enter by the East Gate of Jerusalem. There can be no political settlement, no ceding of this Holy Gate to the Palestinians. The war must continue. We need to support Israel, so the Lord can come and smite all of these damned heathens so stone cold dead only hellfire will return them to screaming, tortured life again. The end will come only if we continue our present path of hatred and violence. We not only have no obligation to nurture peace, we have no reason to feed the poor or cure the ailing; all this sadness and evil is a sign of the Glorious End Approaching.

I can say no more. The pervasiveness of despair and hatred overwhelms me again as I write; words may create a fence that keeps these people from touching me, but it is such a small fence, a little white picket fence, and theirs is the barbed wire fences around Auschwitz, Bergen Bergen, Baba Yar....

Faith Bible Chapel

The End of the World is something most of us relegate to our imaginations. We are not terribly concerned that the world as we know it will cease to exist in the immediate or semi-immediate future. Perhaps we may imagine the precursors to be an Overpopulation problem that strips the world of its' ability to maintain homeostasis, Or maybe we imagine a Super-Computer, Or Cloned Army of Genetic Perfection that even our most Advanced Technology trembles in front of. Or perhaps the End of the World will come from Arrogance in terms of Nuclear Weaponry. These scenarios involve a loss of control over our own power, and perhaps it is because of our partial ownership of the problems that we do not have feelings of expectant faith towards their arrival.

However, this is not so for the congregation of Faith Bible Chapel which embraces Armageddon with an eerie greed. If you would like to encounter suicidal tendencies, in the name of Jesus Christ, venture down to middle America, to a new lower-end suburban town called Arvada. Arvada was almost entirely created in the last fifteen years. Historic Arvada exhibits such buildings as a Home Depot and the Olive Garden, built in what looks the antiquity of a decade.

The church itself looks like a business park. It is a new age convention center complete with requisite waterfalls, atriums, and cafes. If you go on a Sunday there is large probability that there will be several police and ambulances standing by "just in case." Not just slightly creepy.
Inside, there is a cafe where you can buy (that's right buy) scones, muffins, or the like. There were also many vendors where you can buy such Walmart products as mascara, scarves, creepy pictures of Jesus, or hair ties. It was Mother's Day on the day of our adventure, and I was under the impression this sale was a Mothers Day event, and it may not be there all the time. Above your head will hang the flags of the nations of the worlds, bringing a strange element of nationalism to this religious convention center. They seem to be saying God loves all nations, which is a strange replacement for what my grandparents taught me, that God loves every person.

These oddities will soon be explained in their purpose & ideology, however at first feel free to be mystified. When you go into the convention room, where the sermon is to be delivered, you will most likely feel aghast at both the size and professional business quality delivered there. This is the stage for the profession of the commercialization of the end of the world. Around you will sit the strangest people you have ever met. The kind of people who make you wonder just how things got to this state. Sitting there you will most likely have the feeling that you are going to be sold something like a self help book. It is similar to the emptiness that is seeing Bob Dylan play in a venue where the Nuggets (or any similarly horrible basketball team) play. Where the best you can do to feel a part of something that you probably love is to stand up alone (feeling partially ostracized for being the first to stand in a crowd of sitters) who are looking a greater percentage of time at the live broadcast of Bob directly behind Bob, who you paid great money to see: live. This will be the only way you can "get into it."

It gives you a sort of hopelessness. I began to imagine those strangers surrounding me sitting here on any other day, knowing that they would be attending all matter of social events that should be participatory in a similarly soulless and rule driven places.

Although I have only been to two mega churches now, (the other being in Michigan) apparently the musical library is limited and I have already begun to know the songs which are projected on the power point screens. Not that they are hard to pick up, they are projected with just the words, no notes. If you know any music theory, they only use chords I, IV, and V. Once I heard a II. Since this is similar to, I would say, 90% of popular music created since the '50's and including most pop and motion pictures, you can sing a song without ever having heard it before. Simply amazing, eh? Seriously. Here in Arvada, they were either intelligent or fortunate to have the mas guapo boy in the entire audience as the lead singer. This was perhaps why the family across the aisle had daughters who seemed happy to be there.

After singing a few songs, and watching several people begin to jump around with out warning (apparently feeling the grace of God), women were invited up to be honored as mothers. Through these church experiences I have learned that to bless is palms down and to receive is palms up, which also makes sense. After the minister scolded the women for needing to find God's light (palms up) and once we (the congregation) blessed them (palms down), they were given a present. What better for these hard working mothers than large nail files with different brightly colored plastic handles. Then they had some sort of new baptism, and then they started in on Israel.

This is the part where you will begin to understand how the eccentricities of this place come together under the banner of politics. Turns out this is place is how Colorado stays a red state. The ideology is that we are promised a second coming of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior, who died on a cross FOR YOUR SINS! Yes, I know it's heavy, but its' a reality that a lot of people deal with. The time for his return is at hand. How do we know this? The world is coming apart at the seams and with some editing we can arrive at Bible verses that tell us to screw the world up as much as possible, aim for a condition which seems so irreparable, full of hopelessness and despair, ugliness, and torrential hate that only a true miracle will be able to save you and lo and behold a miracle (J.C. to be exact) will return to you.

Kind of a self fulfilling prophecy, eh? I mean survive that nightmare and you've gotta feel like a miracle happened. If you don't make it. at least there's heaven right? All of a sudden I start to understand the flags, paramedics, the indoor Walmart trash, and the soul-lessness of the place starts to make sense. Sitting there you start to realize that you're in a commercial for your own demise, and not just that, but if this commercial is as much junk as the rest of the stuff they're trying to sell you then you'll probably end up in a pile of trash soon. Then you look around you and everyone else seems so happy to be there and you wonder if they have a soul, because they don't look like they could, smiling when everything is so crappy around them that you think that this really is the worst nightmare you've ever had, and then the preacher tells you that he's sure that your worst nightmare is going to happen soon, and that it will be the end of the world but he's got a ticket out of there. All you have to do is put your name in the interest basket and they'll deliver a loaf of bread complete with your personal salvation to your very own door step. It's on a sliding scale basis of coarse......

And people think fetishes are creepy.

More than Oatmeal

My only expectations came from reading A Day No Pigs Would Die, in a special class for kids who couldn’t read good when I was ten, and honestly that book terrified me. Other than that I knew Quakers were pacifists that sat in silence together. I was prepared for whatever cultish behavior this would entail.
I never thought an architecture could be so intimate. The room opened up in a lemon shape. There were chairs placed in concentric lemon shaped layers around the room. I was so thankful for its' uncircularity because this meant that I wouldn't have to make eye contact with a stranger for the next hour and a half. This is something I greatly fear and often sit two people on one side of the restaurant booth with no one opposite because I so greatly dislike intensive meaningless eye contact. One large window framed the panoramic foothills that surround Boulder it in a kind of banner shape with the immediate effect of provoking thoughts on the amplitude of the serenity of nature. A small dove sticker on the window was the only sign of a dogma or otherwise.
I immediately felt comfortable sitting there with these people I did not know. However it is amazing how dynamic a silence can be. While initially I felt so comfortable, after a while no one else came in or out, and I began to become aware of the woman next to me inhaling her oxygen and wheezing it out, the difference in creaks of the pews versus chairs, and developed an escalating fear of farting. I realized I was mostly breathing already exhaled air. At the same time I noticed the old woman sitting next to me had some veritably verde varicose veins, and they seemed to be pulsating. With the staleness of the air and great swath of glass began to feel like an aquarium. I was still glad to be there though. Looking over at my mom I once again felt calmed and I could see how people would come back here.
It was once the people standing up to talk started that I got discouraged. Quickly I realized that these were people who were more than concerned about instilling creativity into their children. These women were the paternalistic feminists who would like nothing more than to tell women about their oppression and rescue them from it adding yet another layer of hypocrisy to concepts of freedom. People who think that any woman who veils must be a victim of patriarchy.
These were the people who are always saying that my generation doesn't take responsibility for our times. Why aren't we in the streets these days? Why aren't we protesting? People who think Jack Johnson is more socially responsible than this crazy noise kids are listening to today. You know a lot of the stuff they listen to is just sampled on the computer? That doesn’t even take any musical talent?
And in the next sentence you hear them cursing how they don’t know what the hell their computer is doing. It turns out they have no idea what is going on in their computer. These are the people who give you dirty looks for not buying fair trade coffee, although the only reason that you don’t is that you don’t have the means to pay ten dollars for some beans you could get for six, and you just want to say OH THE IRONY!
One man got up and talked about a march for renewable fuels he went on that apparently no one in Boulder had seen, the paper hadn’t noticed, and he very eloquently said that he thought was a flop. He supposed that perhaps protests cannot happen on lovely days with everyone so comfortable, and perhaps a protest needed to be noisy, and seen, and uncomfortable. He was so right that my intestines unwound and smiled at him.
Unfortunately the congregation seemed to disagree, and many people afterwards stood up to talk about the importance of putting your energy out there.
Granted I am the engineer type, and so efficiency is important to me, as is doing things well, but the thing with energy is that there is an efficiency that goes along with energy. Whether we are talking about anything moving a car or the metaphysics of a political movement. Some people work hard to achieve something and others do it easily. Granted you have to put the energy out there, but as much as new age crap, self help books, and propaganda like The Secret would have you believe that is not all there is to it. That you tried is no excuse for failure, but perhaps a good cause for a second attempt. Which should definitely involve more than putting your energy out there, like say thought? Eh?

Quaking in Quiet

If the medium is the message, maybe, where religion is the subject rather than communications, maybe the church is the statement of belief.

When I say "church," I mean the actual building, the structure of walls and windows and the division of generalized space into discreet spaces, divisions between public and private, communal and individual, holy and mundane. In every single church we have attended so far in this series, the central space is the worship space, and it has been divided, whether Catholic or Baptist or Buddhist, between the area for the sacred (the priests and sure, why not, any god in residence) and the profane, we humans, full of foible. In the Quaker meeting house, there is no such division. The open space where Quakers congregate on Sunday morning is not even square. Chairs are ranged from various angles, forming no known geometric shape, not even the quirky rhomboid or trapezoid. We all vaguely face the center. I think the centering of this must be significant as we sit in silence, meditating, relaxing, or sleeping. We face no one human being. None is exalted above, all sit in silence.

Silence is deafening. My tinnitus ensures I know this; my world is never without several constant lines of humming at varying pitches and decibels. But sitting in the meeting house, one becomes aware of the obvious, that all silence is somehow rich with sound. At first one notices only the gurgling of one's own stomach, lamenting what is now painfully obvious, that one did not pause to eat breakfast this morning. Then, like crickets rising in chorus at sundown, other sounds begin to penetrate the foggy curtain of quiet in the roomful of people. A cough, a wooden chair creaking, the woman on the respirator who has apparently entered a doze. As minutes pass, more and more creakings from the wooden furniture, like wind picking up strength in a forest. Mine is not the only stomach rumbling; we are, after all, each a human. Silence is ripe and rife, like a drop of water seen under the microscope lens.

Eventually, it produces words. A nicely dressed man rises and speaks in a quietly deep voice about a march he did the previous day to draw attention to the reality of global warming. He questions whether it mattered to participate in this walk since it drew no attention from either passers-by or press. "I would like to be proven wrong in this," he finishes humbly. He resumes his seat. Silence enfolds him. It proves a better answer than the woman who eventually rises to her feet and chatters about the worth of sending positive thoughts to the universe. The ground does not open under her feet, though I am cheering for it to do so.

Sometimes, very often in fact, people entirely miss the point. The woman did not understand the man's query. Thirty-two students were slaughtered at a university in Virginia yesterday, and Bush's response was, "I still believe in a person's right to bear arms." That is not the question. The question is, "What's wrong with us?" You can send all the thoughts and prayers you want to the universe, you can go out and buy the hit book "The Secret" and feel convinced that you'll get whatever thoughts you put out there and moreover, that you deserve to get everything you put out there, but what it comes down to is simply, "What's wrong with us?"

What's wrong with us may be, in not insignificant part, that we have forgotten how to listen. I find myself doing it all the time. I notice others doing it all the time, too. Doing what? Talking, talking, and telling. Not listening. Parents don't listen to their kids and while they don't always pick up machine guns or rifles or shotguns and shoot their fellow students or, like the recent case in Lafayette, suffocate their mother before stuffing her into the trunk of her own car, they lose hope in the simple act or condition of understanding. Couples stop listening to each other until finally they need to find a therapist who can stand-in and provide an open set of ears. It's no accident that the basic refrain of counselors has become, "What I hear you saying is this." Therapists have become our ears.

But here in the sanctuary of the Quakers, we hear it all, the little sounds of the old man's labored breathing, the creaking of the chairs, the cough of the closet smoker. We even hear a comment and a question or maybe a treasured anecdote: the words we use to explain ourselves. Mady and I, of course, say nothing. We are listeners; we are observers. I like it, this quiet. I find myself close to wishing no one would talk. Deliberate silence is so resonant you can almost hear music in it.

I don't want anyone to tell me anything. I don't want to tell anyone anything. Like the song says, "I just wanna be here with you."

Unity

Perhaps other people felt a sense of unity. As we sat in the sea of churchgoers, I was vaguely aware that these people still dressed as if their mothers came over in the morning to choose their outfits. It was Easter Sunday. A cold and possibly the most dreary Easter Sunday I have witnessed. Outside, the pink decorations looked serene in the disuse of this day. Either that or tacky, and this was how I was inclined to feel sitting in that pew drinking my coffee with people aspiring to pretend it was spring outside and staring eerily through the back of my head. (Particulary this one woman in a very thick white turtleneck.) I distinctly remember starting to feel creeped out and having to physically hold onto my mom to keep the idea at bay that this was some sort of a conspiracy church and the congregation was waiting to jump on me and brainwash me.

Eventually, I managed to relax with the notion that these people were harmless to me.

The premise of this church is that they had to acknowledge the "theatrics" of church, and so they let it be just that. However, when putting on a play every week, no week can be that extraordinary, and the result was a group of maybe 20 middle aged people, probably parents, who, while not altogether untalented came off as being stuck in high school and still wanting one last chance to be somebody.

I couldn't help but visualize practically all of the actors at home in front of their mirrors practicing their parts. Jesus, who was probably 55, extremely overweight and balding; the strangely sexual dancer who almost seemed to be coming onto Jesus in a very arcing movements kind of way; the overzealous minister's wife (one of those women who thinks long flowy skirts = creativity/divinity and who I am so glad is not my mother); Judas, whom you knew all the girls thought was so funny but whom I could only laugh at and not with; the nerdy overgrown kid who stands in the front row with constant fists at his side. Also the minister, who randomly stopped the show to call for collection time and the other random man with long curly hair who couldn't keep it out of his eyes--admittedly but decidedly pretty ringlets . There was not an ounce of professionalism, dedication or critical thought, even the brochures had been made in Print Shop Deluxe, the '98 edition, the alignment off, pinker text on a light pink background. I never understood why they had classes in these kinds of things, but now I do. Out front they had literature on helping various random people in random cultures, perhaps with a picture of a little Peruvian boy on it, or a girl wearing a veil whose eyes were just showing, as if the problems they alluded to were really as simple as hunger and a scarf.

I guess I just expected more of them. It was a kind of annoyance that they would take the time to get themselves up on the stage and then not have much to give except for a story that everyone already knows. What if this was all you knew? What if you grew up here? A real culture has a few people who you can look at as examples or the greats. Unity church seems not to.

The Passive Passion of New Age Christianity

There's a line in the book I'm reading, Paul Auster's Travels in the Scriptorium, in which a policeman pleads with the appropriately named central character, Mr. Blank, to reveal the content of a dream. "Without that dream," he pleads, "I'm nothing, literally nothing." Today, Easter Sunday, sitting passively in the veritable audience at Boulder's Unity Church, a congregation become absolutely that, a passive audience, no longer participating in community, no longer sharing a creed or a tradition or a liturgy for this is, after all, modern day Christianity, New Age faith as practiced on Sundays by people of short attention span and little or no intellect, I was reminded of that pathetic plea. Mady and I sat in rapt and occasionally terrified attention as we listened to a stageful of performers doing an Easter cantata, "No Greater Love."

It was the Baptists, gone to further extremes of whiteness, like the teeth of Americans, beyond white all the way to a gleaming and scary parody of white. Here, the singers were schooled; you felt that each one of them had, at some prior high point of their life, won a talent show, a ribbon, gone to state with their choir and done well in a momentary solo. And now here they have been reborn. Jesus, on stage today, a fat, elderly and altogether middle class white man who reminded me precisely of the choir director at Ben's high school. His wife also had a leading role, though in the male-dominated saga that is the life of Christ, all women are relegated to decidedly more peripheral roles. Hers was tacked on at the cantata's end, an obvious concession to the church's second Power Couple. Power Couple Number One consisted of the minister and his wife, he a greasy looking, surprisingly seedy seeming for swank and monied Boulder man in a white suit and slicked back hair who did nothing more than welcome the audience and solicit the offering; she a wild, leaping conductor of the choir on stage, sometimes menacing the audience with her spirit-possessed arm wavings and skirt spinnings. They, too, got to join the ensemble on stage at show's end, stars all.

"I'm literally nothing without that dream." All these people coming to this church to feel like someone, some thing. The dreams haven't panned out all that well. The job's boring, the kids have left home, flatulence is common. Only here, with a nice little microphone hooked over the left ear, a soft chiffon scarf drizzled with sequins sparkling in the spotlight, are their dreams of importance and aspirations to stardom acknowledged. I have never been privy to a church service where my role was to applaud. Here, American Christianity seems reduced to its essentials. A performance. You do nothing but watch and applaud. A standing ovation for Jesus, and what the heck, one for Judas as well. Oddly perhaps, I found myself happy for all these people that they had found some place that appreciated them, some place they actually did matter, somewhere to be a star. Maybe that's what going to church does for people. Assures them that yes, they're each significant. Jesus loves them, and each hair on their head matters and is counted, even as old age claims a few additional strands daily. I think it's nice they can feel this way; I hope it, the feeling loved and all, makes them nicer to their dogs when they go home. Give your dog a bone.

I watched Scorsese and Shrader's film of the Nikos Kazantakis novel The Last Temptation of Christ last night. There, Dafoe's tortured, frightened Jesus vacillated between the misery of cowardice and the majesty of lunacy. There is no happy ending to a crucifixion, not really. But here, in the American church, all hint of suffering is gone from the story of the Passion. In fact, all the passion is gone. There's just this fat ole fellow name of Jesus who leads the crowds and fulfills all our promises. Yep. You got it. One size fits all. Faith as a great big mum-mu we all can wear without worrying how we look. Since Jesus saved us, that's right, we have a right and a reason to go to church and become a star in God's wide firmament. Given that, why should we not sing mightily. We're the annointed. Nothing else really matters.

Exiting the church, we get favors, like we've just been to a birthday party. Pluck a cheerful silk and plastic flower from the ushers' basket and read the morsel of wisdom attached to its stem. Wisdom to go. I, a fan of fortune cookies from way back, love this idea and reach in eagerly. My flower, Mady points out, is pathetic, a lopsided purple pansy that looks like it was beat up by the unseasonable winter we are re-experiencing this week of April. But my fortune is good, and I'm ready to enlist. To Thomas Edison they give the credit for my little bit of wisdom: "If we did the things we are capable of, we would astound ourselves."

All those singers on stage, doing the things they're capable of doing. A community of believers in the infinite power of Self. I'll leave is to Mady to tell you about the dancer.

Riverside Baptist, Halleluah!

I was stunned by the sheer size of it. Oh sure, the Catholic cathedral was immense, too, but it had the good grace to stand empty. The Baptists still fill their church; nearly every seat was occupied. The balconies ringing the ground floor seating weren't open today, but after seeing how full it was on this ordinary Sunday, when the minister was preaching about that most alienating concept of tithing, I am absolutely certain the balconies, come Easter, would be sagging under the weight of so many exalting believers.

In this church, they get right down to it. The congregation is instructed to meet and greet each other before the preaching even begins, ensuring I would feel fully uncomfortable for the rest of the service. Touch is a big part of this church. They lay their hands on. The penitent, the holy, the seeker and the sought approach the stage humbly and place their hands on each other as with bowed heads they praise Jesus. I could not help but reflect how much my own Dad would like this, as it is only with the blessing of the church he feels free to transcend the cold teachings of his stolid Germanic nature.

This Baptist church service is very much "I'm a Believer: The Musical." They have no liturgy but song. The lyrics roll by on teleprompters to each side of the stage, and no one needs to worry about reading music; the choir is intended to lead the congregation's voices. The choir is right up on stage. The choir master is also the cantor is also the acolyte. He is apparently getting some sort of cosmic revenge on the Lord and his individual fate for not letting him win the audition for a role in "Rent" when he was young and attempting to achieve stardom on Broadway. Now he contents himself with reaching for the stars of a bright, lovely, and altogether certain Heaven. The choir, incidentally, was horrible, off-key and incoherent. No amount of hand waving or occasionally strewn "Amens!" can make up for a choir that sings off-key. And that brings us around to the hand waving.

A fluttering of hands here, another there. Apparently, the spirit of white Baptists has been taught moderation. I was disappointed, I have to admit, at the lack of spirit, along with the lack of African Americans. For this was not lily-white Boulder, after all; this was the center of Denver. Apparently, the African Americans have another Baptist church. I would rather have been there. I distrust the friendliness of any church in the middle of a poor neighborhood whose residents are mostly minorities if those minorities are not evident in the congregation. The only Hispanic we notice has a whole different posture and demeanor than that of the straight and holy white worshippers. He and his wife shuffle to the altar, their shoulders bowed with sorrow and/or hard labor, looking for all the world like they are not so much part of this well-heeled congregation as perhaps its custodians, looking to keep their jobs secure. Is it only me who thinks it significant that he is called to the front in recognition of his work with men incarcerated in Colorado prisons?

Here, as in every other residence of American Protestantism I've known, money's the thing. Tithing. Giving the Lord the (minimum) ten percent of one's gross income not because the Church needs it, but because "God deserves it." In this church, where every Sunday an average of over 1,000 souls and a few well-placed heathens gather, money is the issue. The pastor was sure to point out that tithing, while mandated only in the Old Testament along with discarded notions like shunning pork or working on the Sabbath, was certainly not intended to be repudiated by the fulfillment of the Law, with Jesus's birth and death and resurrection, although somehow all the other admonitions of the Old Testament were nicely discarded. And that brings me to something I find far more interesting--the recent discovery of bones in a cave that are purportedly those of Jesus and Mary Magdalene and some small boy: their only begotten son, to be sure. Bones are effectively the end of the resurrection myth. No wonder we haven't been reading much about this discovery since the first stories. Hush hush sweet Charlotte; Charlotte, don't you cry...

In this Baptist church, there is no ornamentation on the stage, nor even an altar. There are no thrones for the priests, no robes or neck stoles, either. There are no servants or small boys for the priest. He wears a simple gray suit. His haircut is as plain and all-American as his square-ish jawline. He quotes himself as an authority to back up the "facts" of what he posits as the truth about tithing, and to make his words more authoritative, has them broadcast on the enormous AV screens mounted high to the left and right of the staging area, like a rock n roll concert. I am struck by the amount of preparation and staging that must go into each Sunday's production. A cameraman sits high above the congregation in the centermost aisle, filming it all on a camera a network news crew would envy. These people need to tithe. Not be cause the church needs it, but because Jesus deserves it. Wow.

I recognize only one of the many songs of their service, so I sing it extra loudly. Ben is with us this week, and the three of us enter into the spirit of the service with far more energy than the small contingent of Jews in the back row, made obvious only in part by the yamulka on the man's head. We do our best not to gawk or giggle, and that is the best we can do. What are these people doing here? What ecstatic union are they seeking? Why don't they just go home and have really good sex with the person they love instead of wasting it on the plain, pasty, square jawed man with the bad haircut who reminds them that Jesus is the one who deserves it.

After the service, the minister hopes to lure the misbegotten to the path of righteousness by the sugary path of doughnuts--"Take the doors to the right and be saved"--and Mady and Ben insist we must have our share, so we go the path of the godly, but the minister is waiting there, right beside the doughnuts, all carefully roped off lest the undeserving apply. Will you choose the lion or the lady and, really, which side ARE you on?

We are clearly the undeserving and the markedly unholy, so we leave it all to Jesus and run for our sweet lives. Out in the parking lot, we feel like we've escaped, and we grin like the fools that we are happy and grateful to be.

RIVERSIDE BAPTIST 2007!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

There are times when you are blown away by the bizarreness of an experience and don't even know how to start processing it. A physical discription could be helpful.

The Riverside Baptist Church is a new arena shaped monument visible from over a mile away on I-25 going into Denver. There are two 15 ft screens on either side of the pulpit/stage which is decorated somewhat like the set of Oprah, except with a gospel choir. There are three cameras with accompanying camera men on platforms throughout the audience. The service is broadcast on the screens, making hymn books obsolete and providing the answers to the fill in the blank questions which appear in the bulletin. For example: Jesus __________ the practice of tithing when He had a perfect opportunity to _________. (Matthew. 5:17; 23:23)

There were three times when I almost lost it and laughed out loud, and my laugh has been compared to a wide range of sounds from seals to broken power tools. This is not the sort of thing you want when trying to be discrete. The first time was during a hymn.

First off, the choir was horrendous. I don't think half of them were singing, and I can't stress enough to you the need for a conductor. They were so bad that at times I thought I was singing the wrong thing because the confusion within the choir made it so muddled that the song had become indistinguishable. Anyway, it was time for a duet and so a man and woman came out front and started singing about the lord's grace and what not, while different members of the partially restarted choir lifted up their hands in silent exclamations of AMEN with a timing that had you wondering if you missed something.

My brother, whose name is Ben, but I call Kerms, came with us this time and was sitting next to me. The woman fared decently with her part. She seemed to be able to "throw her weight around" pretty well (appropriate in more than one sense), however the man had more trouble. His part grew to peak on the word God. Unfortunately for him he was more than a little flat and Kerms, upon hearing the note, somewhat hopefully grimaced the word, "Close." to me. It was too much.

A second part is a matter of mathematical reasoning. The sermon was over the matter of tithing and the preacher spent a long winded half an hour explaining the bizarre timing that God had bestowed upon us. Apparently his omniscience had provided so that the preacher's biblical readings talked about tithing at the uncannily same time the church budget came out! The preacher was explaining how we could all see God's glory and power in sermon attendance. He powerpointed the attendance numbers for the last 4 Sundays; they were something like: 957 , 959, 952, 965. He then highlighted the general increasing trend in attendance, (except for that third Sunday). I'm no statistician but a fluctuation of 13 people over a 4 week period of any voluntarily attending population of near 1000 is more of a sign of God's divinity than it is a sign of a general increasing trend. That would in no way be called a significant result. If just 2 families have a sick child you've essentially reached that fluctuation. Yet some how this became an increasing trend demonstrative of God's greatness.

And then he referenced, to prove his own statements, who else but himself. I'll be honest I didn't really laugh at this, but I did feel mildly naseous. (That could also have been the perfume on the lady next to me.)

The other time that seemed straight out of television was when he (the preacher), as a closing thought,asked for God's blessing on various things, including, this......our beloved.......... CORPORATION. After that everything seemed slightly ludicrous.

People had said verbal and mental halleluah's in their head to his statement. I felt like I was in a futuristic novel telling about the dangers of future societies gone awry.

Jodo Shinshu Buddhist Temple

Sunday, February 25, 2007

I usually have negative connotations associated with American Buddhism. They are very different from my Christian connotations or my generalized religion connotations. It is not one of pure estranged awe bordering on disgust, but that of yuppy snobs. I have spent practically the entirety of my life surrounded by a culture of these people, and I feel that I know them closely enough to really despise their existence.

These are the kind of people who believe yoga is a secondary form of Buddhism. Which, hell, as the sensei said in temple, your practice should be whatever floats your boat, but I'm talking about the kind of yogi who spends 400$ on a new meditation cushion or yoga mat and another 1,500 dollars on their yoga clothes. The kind who has designated hiking shorts. They can't just wear normal shorts when it comes to the specific purpose of walking.

The kind of person who buys all their groceries at Whole Foods and looks at you with disgrace when you don't buy Fair Trade coffee, which costs around 12$ for a bag compared to my apparently socially bankrupt coffee at $5.99. I've taken to calling FMV brand reservation food to pay my respect to the severe snobbery of these people. Somehow they think of themselves as the pinnacle of social consciousness as they get into their SUV hybrid and head up to the mountains to buy a piece of nature and apparently according to them inner peace during a ski weekend/meditation retreat in Aspen.

When these people tell you they are Buddhist, it makes you just want to squish a bug in front of them and watch as they don't notice.

The thing about the Jodo Shinshu service that made me doubt its validity as a religion (it often seemed too based on an actual philosophy that acknowledged its' flaws and invited questioning and thought to be a religion) was the negation of this culture.

The sensei seemed real, honest, intelligent and content. It did not bother him that the folding chairs were only 1/5th full. I got the sense that he might actually have some inner peace. And that could be because he didn't tell me he had attained inner peace. He didn't have instructions on how to attain it. Yes, there were rituals and old Asian artifacts, a chant, and meditation. However, he explained that his practice, the Jodo Shinshu practice, was the living practice. It does not need any of those components to be a good practice. The ego (a strangely western term I think for an eastern practice, which brings thoughts of Freud into a place I don't think he belongs, oh well) has no overarching reliance upon these practices and an expensive retreat will likely not help you with anything but fueling the economy.

I could have kissed him when he said that.

Emphasis on could have.......

Buddha in the House

The world is not what it appears to be. The sensei said it so simply, like it's self-evident. I blinked, once, twice, thrice and cast a sideways glance to my right side to see if Mady was similarly blindsided by plainspoken esoterica. She, of course, was not. She swims more steadily in the currents of philosophic oceans than I.

I had never been to a Buddhist religious service, indeed, wasn't sure Buddhists actually had hours of worship on Sunday mornings. But they do, at least in the U.S., where there is little else to do on Sunday mornings before shops open and professional sports teams begin their jostlings for more money and muscle and more muscle for the money. Me, I prefer going to museums early on Sundays. There are never crowds and the smatterings of other pagans is so soothing.

But I wander, as always. Back in the Jodo Shinsu Buddhist Temple, aka for some reason "sig," the sensei is speaking calmly and clearly and utterly without pretension about the unity of thought and feeling in the everyday world, the harkening of dharma in the mundane. This, he says, is the work of the ego, to obliterate itself in what we experience in our living rooms, our streets, our work places and our relationships with family, friends, and strangers.

Actually, he says none of this and maybe all of this. He does not use the word "obliterate." He does not mention our living rooms or streets or work places. He does mention that he can't go on a retreat because he doesn't have enough money. He mentions his home life, his own family. Before the service, I spot him outside the temple, enjoying the final drags off a cigarette before stubbing it out in the sand-filled urn. Enjoying the mundane, perhaps obliterating his ego in the tendrils of smoke that waft into the sullen Denver sky on a brisk gray morning in February. He has no acolytes trailing behind him as the Catholic priests did, but he does hold aloft a large book similarly, paying tribute, I suspect, to the collected wisdom of the Buddha within.

The world, he repeats, is not what it appears to be. Again, I glance sideways. This time Mady meets my look. She looks comfortable with the wisdom. I thrash in the shallows beside her. Whatever helps you to situate your ego in the material and the immaterial world, he suggests, is good. Maybe you chant. Maybe you meditate. Maybe you serve on the Board of your temple. You find some way to escape the limitations of your own ego. To become the Buddha, you see, is to lose your ego, as the Buddha did. I am reminded of my painful adolescent years, when I was utterly distraught with fear because somehow my faith, my Christianity, had fled my soul. And I would not be able to sleep, the little death of sleep, and so I would meditate upon the Greek sign for infinity as if I might transcend the shape to find some sort of understanding that would offer me solace and hope, maybe even save me from eternal damnation and hellfire if only I could grasp the essence of the shape, the sign, the symbol. And then the startling revelation, such as it came to my 14-year-old mind, that if ever I did manage to comprehend eternity I would disappear into it, become one with it.

But this Buddhism, this Jodo Shinsu Buddhism at least, is enmeshed and integrated with the concrete, the everyday, everywhere. The ego is in the world. The President is in the house. We transcend our ego by manifesting our ego, passing to the realm of pure consciousness by travelling the necessary path of self-consciousness, the small and rock strewn path gingerly picked over by the barefooted steps, mindfulness, awareness. Breathe deeply and keep your eyes not on the path but on the breath. The feet will find their placement. As Joyce unforgettably put it, "the ineluctable modality of the universe." Daedalus is also in the house, and the ego is in the world, and the world is not, I repeat, not, what it appears to be.

Then what is it. It is all around, ineluctably. The temple is not full, but it does have a full sense of welcome, and the people are so much friendlier and helpful than the Catholics of the great cathedral were. The sounds of children laughing float into the worship room from an adjoining space, where they are readying a feast for us, to be purchased after the service with the profits benefiting a charity of the children's choice. I am grateful that no one turns to me or shares the peace with me. I am left to determine my own place and peace and place of peace and my own ego in the world. I like that.

I could come again here. I could come again here for the thoughtfulness of it and maybe to learn what all the ornate features of the altar area are for. In some regards it is so similar: the written record of the revered one, the differentiation of congregational space and the priest's space, the plain versus the elaborate, the holy and the everyday, the singing and the incense. But here, following the sensei's talk, he opens for discussion and questions. No one speaks. I would like to know if anyone ever does. Or are these people, these congregants, just as passive as the Catholics, waiting for the truth to be told to them, waiting for deliverance, waiting for salvation, waiting for the end of the world...

No. We are waiting in line for the goodies the children in the next room have prepared. Waiting for joy and laughing in line as we do.

Cathedral Basilica of the Immaculate Conception

There are over one billion Catholics in the world today, with a growth rate that is just a little bit ahead of the overall population growth. In the U.S. nearly one-fourth of us identify ourselves as Catholics, over 67 million of us. Small wonder both Mady and I found it natural to begin our explorations of religious experience with a Catholic church. We chose the one with a name that seemed the ultimate in Catholicism: The Basilica of the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception. It is, in Denver, the home of the Archbishop, about whom I know very little except that his name sounds Spanish (Chaput), fortunately for him, because in German it would mean "Finished!" I have never seen a picture of him in which he was not wearing robes; I have never seen a picture of him laughing. I will take it on my own peculiar faith that he doesn't wear a nightgown to bed and that he laughs when someone tells him a good joke, preferably one about the Rabbi, the priest, and the Unitarian.

He was not there today, but I have a hunch that one of the more elaborate chairs on the "stage" is his and his alone. "Thrones," I think of them, really. It was like the house of the three bears: there were small chairs for small boys in robes, medium chairs for the medium boys in white robes, larger chairs and more ornate, for the two men in green robes. "I'll take the medium boy in white," did one of them ever opine. "He looks JUST RIGHT." There was something creepy about the array of boys on the stage with the priests. Why the heck were they there? Most of the time, they did nothing. Occasionally, one or the other of the five, arranged like a menorah, the tallest in the middle, tapering down like true candles to the small boys on either end ("just right.."), one of the five would rise and walk solemnly to some other place or disappear into a slit in the drapes behind them. Even more occasionally, one or two would fulfill a genuine function, holding a candle, presently the incense burner, following a priest dutifully, with hands piously pressed together in front of them. Where do the Catholics find these boys, who at eight or twelve or even 15 are not embarrassed beyond measure to wear short white frocks and mince across a stage with their hands pressed together in prayer and never a laugh, no, not so much as a twinkle in their eyes.

Indeed, the whole place was utterly without humor. There was no humor in the priest's sermon, no smiles exchanged among parishioners, not even a genuine smile anywhere to be seen during that worst of all modernizations of church ritual: THE SHARING OF THE PEACE. A bunch of robots, acting upon the command of the priest, turning to each other and stiffly shaking hands, "Peace be with you." If that be peace, give me war.

Not surprising to think of war in these reflections, for the whole service pulsed with what I can only typify as repressed violence. The music, changing in one instant from some forgettable lightness of being to crashing chords and frenzied beats that were like Wagner on acid. The incense in what I think is called a censor being swung nonchalantly by the little angel boys initially, then, in the hands of the priest, being swung harder and harder, like a playground bully pushing a girl on the swing until she is terrified and screaming, swing it harder and higher and harder and higher...

It was all very sexual. When the priest reached into what I thought was just a velvet curtain at the back of the stage (I know this is not called a stage, but what IS it called in a cathedral, this sacred stage full of altars and trinkets and statues and gold?), I nearly gasped in fright. He parted the curtains, the soft, velvet, labial curtains with his hands pointed in, arrow like, thrusting and parting and pillaging. And then he pulls out, not a baby, immaculate or otherwise, but a chalice, the symbol of womanhood, the symbol of receptivity. the keeper of the sperm of the holy of holies. And he and the other priest and the angel boys all drink from this, spinning the metal chalice slightly in between tastings, wiping it clean with a white handkerchief. Women are filthy, you know, you know, don't you boys? Men are so much cleaner. Always carry a clean white handkerchief, certainly. Or, failing that, don a white little angel's robe.

There was not a single trace of joy in that whole cathedral that I could see, excepting the baby boy in the pew in front of us, who alternated between his mother's arms and his father's. "Holy infant, so tender and mild." Will he grow up to be an altar boy? He almost certainly will not grow up to become a priest; Americans don't produce priests any more. Like almost any other commodity we value... cars or electronics or priests... we import more than we produce, and we export, effectively, none. We bring them up from Latin America and, increasingly, from Africa now. The priest at the cathedral we visited was definitely Latino. Does that have anything to do with the fact that the biggest, most gorgeous (truly gorgeous!) cathedral in the Rocky Mountain West was nearly empty on a beautiful Sunday morning in February? Or was it the mean street outside, dreary, crime ridden, poverty stricken Colfax?

We would have to think about that over breakfast in the coffeehouse two blocks away, the Bump and Grind. Yeh. Think about such holiness while a drag queen lolled on our table, her knees demurely pressed together in truer piety than I saw anywhere in that damned cathedral.

Church of The Immacuate Conception

2/4/07 I’d been to Catholic Church a couple times before. This was decidedly a different experience. Several Catholic components that I’d thought were crucial were missing. It seemed that no one in the whole place actually knew what was going on. I sensed a kind of bystander effect. People appeared to hope no one would recognize they were clueless if they looked forward without blinking.

The sieves by the door that usually hold the holy water were both empty and saran wrapped. You couldn’t touch them, much less the water which should have been inside. There were no welcoming smiles, which, normally I understand to be requisite. No one said Hello, Good Morning, or asked us how we were doing. The Holy Ghost seemed more ghostly than usual. Like maybe he doesn’t translate well to a neighborhood of pawnshops and drag bakeries.

At the first hymn, and due to almost irreversible conditioning, which is even instilled in me although I was by no means brought up in a church, my mom and I both leapt into song. She is one of those soprano singers who always sings in her top register, and while it's not bad singing, in your head you debate over whether she’s living a solo diva fantasy or confused her connection to God with “trueness” of pitch. As if music by its shear impact communes to holiness. 3/4^th of the way through the song my mom elbowed me in the elbow and mouthed, “Is anyone else singing?” My mouth froze as I looked around because I (apparently along with the rest of the congregation) had the fear that my ignorance would be uncovered. Practically no one else was singing. Those who were singing could more aptly be categorized as minging or sumbeling to his holiness.

To make it stranger still at the end of the hymn the keyboardist started to go off on an organ rant which felt like Beethoven’s fifth meets a high speed chase scene, and perhaps we were advancing into a medieval music video written and directed by a chimpanzee on prozac and coffee. According to the surroundings no one had yet noticed except us.

It was a surreal mixture of things that seemed old school catholic and present comatose at the same time. As the time for communion commenced I found myself pondering where Christ’s body is manufactured. Upon research, I found out several interesting facts.

Communion wafers are largely made in convents by nuns. While this used to be an easy enough process, globalization, it seems, has become a nun-struggle. Less nuns coupled with an increased demand have meant increased work for the nuns. It has become difficult for them to balance the constraints put upon them by prayer and production of the lords body in a thin tastless wafer. An exemplary case from Cape Town, South Africa tells how they used to have enough nuns to provide. Now they have to employ both machinery and outside workers to keep up with demand. However, for nuns, the wafers still have a spiritual power. While speaking to a group of children about the crackers one nun explained. “Eucharist, she told the children, heals and unites. To make her point, Sr Catherine took a freshly baked sheet of altar bread, and crumbled it on the table before her. The pieces, she said, represent "the hurt world"”. (http://www.thesoutherncross.co.za/features/hosts.htm).

I never knew this, I thought the hurt of the world was more vividly described in pictures of things and people in pain, or struggle. I had no idea about the intense import that is bland bread shards.

In Quebec, communion wafers have become a diet food. While most of Quebec is secular and unbothered by having Christ’s body next to Cheese-Its, others do not feel so sure about this. “People are snacking on hosts and host pieces like it’s candy. They’re not distinguishing between the body of Christ and something you nibble on at home,” said François Trudel, a former Catholic missionary familiar with the production of communion wafers in Quebec. (http://seedlings.wordpress.com/2005/12/31/communion-snack-food/).

My favorite part about this is how he calls it host pieces, like a whole wafer is some sort of completeness.

Further controversy has arisen over the necessity of wheat in Jesus’s bod. Apparently, Catholicism states that Jesus must have wheat to be the real deal. This is met with cries of damnation from coeliacs all over the world. Who want a new Christ. A gluten free Christ.

Father Williams said gluten-free communion wafers have been available to coeliac sufferers for a decade, kept in a separate dish. But the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith had recently determined that only wheat-based flour was valid matter for celebrating the eucharist.

"The church would not deliberately attempt to poison its communicant members," he said. "The last thing we want is to alarm Catholic coeliac sufferers."”
(http://www.theage.com.au/articles2004/08/19/1092889278988.html

So, it seems that there is more to this communion business than originally meets the eye. Funnily enough, in the face of other rituals such as the promenation of a GIANT GOLD BIBLE, the virgin altar boys-not to mention a virgin mother, the incense which must be swished a certain number of times and ways, a Father with an accent that caused him to say "Praise God's Wort" repeatedly, a chapel clearly not designed for the P.A. system and the reverberations that it causes, and sitting under pictures of a man whiter than a sweed, yet by all logic should be brown nailed to a cross in blood and gore, it didn't seem that weird.