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.
Tuesday, May 22, 2007
Thursday, May 17, 2007
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?
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?
Saturday, May 5, 2007
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."
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."
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