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."
Tuesday, April 17, 2007
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.
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.
Sunday, April 8, 2007
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.
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.
Friday, March 16, 2007
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.
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.
Sunday, March 4, 2007
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.
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.
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