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.
Saturday, June 30, 2007
Sunday, June 24, 2007
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.
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.
Thursday, June 14, 2007
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
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
Saturday, June 9, 2007
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....
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....
Tuesday, May 22, 2007
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.
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.
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."
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)