Well, the good news is that I did finally venture out of the library. This morning your favorite (yeah, I said it. What of it?) field anthropologist ended up attending mass, and in terms of having a meaningful experience I think I would have to call it an indisputable failure. And, as always, that was my own damn fault. True, it wasn’t as bad as the time I spent almost all of a Quaker meeting thinking about what would happen if someone were to fart (would they just stand up and claim it as divine inspiration?), but it wasn’t much better.
Usually when I venture into mass or any other service I tend to use it as an opportunity for a nice think, since I’m not much of a participant. Sometimes it turns into a great experience, as if it’s meditation for stuffy Republicans like me, but other times…like today…it’s basically an hour of me trying to block out inappropriate thoughts. And no, you filthy perverts, when I say “inappropriate thoughts” I don’t mean vulgar mental images. Today “inappropriate thoughts” means, “What is the worst song I could possibly start belting right now in the middle of mass?”
This is my version of a Koan, I guess.
Think about it. You are in a large church, surrounded by priests, people training for the priesthood, and the saintly people they know and love. It’s an incredibly important service, there’s a sacrament in it and everything, and my God is there a lot of solemn kneeling in prayer. You’ve given it a lot of thought and you’ve concluded that you’ll probably only be able to get a few bars in before one of the acolytes tackles you into submission—so which song is it? Which song is the most hideously inappropriate thing you could possibly imagine belting during the middle of mass?
What got me thinking about this was all the special clothing they put on for services. Observing the cassock and cotta-fest that is mass made me think of muumuus. Thinking of muumuus made me think of fat ladies. Thinking of fat ladies made me think of the busty black women who sing, “It’s Raining Men.” Which, obviously, gave me the urge to stand on top of my chair and start belting “It’s Raining Men.”
As soon as I became conscious of that thought I conceded defeat. Trying to have a proper think during today’s mass would be an exercise in futility, so I might as well devote the next hour or so to coming up with an even worse thought than singing “It’s Raining Men” instead of “Agnus Dei.”
I decided that “It’s Raining Men” clearly wasn’t beaten by such favorites as Tom Jones’ “Sex Bomb” or Billy Joel’s “Uptown Girl,” but it was definitively trumped by anything produced by the Village People, particularly the YMCA. (Though, once the fog machine that is the thurible really gets going, what is the church if not a massive and cheesy bar mitzvah? Get some cheap DJ lighting in there to play on the fog and you got yourself a Jewish rite of passage.)
The ready-made ridiculous dance moves (and I don’t just mean the wacky arm movements—yes, I mean the embarrassing pelvic thrusting, too) that come with the territory made the YMCA a strong candidate, but thinking about bar mitzvahs made me consider the potential of music from other faiths. The obvious choice was the Islamic call to prayer, but that seemed less ridiculous and more dickish. Simply drowning out one statement of faith with another would be turning a bit of fantasy into a bit of jihad, and that just ain’t my style.
What about the song “Chai”?
We had to learn how to dance to this travesty in religious school. I have to imagine that Israeli dancing is probably the most offensive thing you could possibly do in a church; not because it’s offensive to the church in particular, but just because Israeli dancing is simply offensive in all contexts. I should probably provide full disclosure though: the fact that my uncoordinated ass was forced to dance in circles as a crucial part of my religious education from the age of 3 until I was 12 might have something to do with my dislike of Israeli dance. So maybe singing and dancing to “Chai” in the middle of mass is not objectively all that awful, when compared with the option of the YMCA.
But I don’t want to rule out all faith-related musical inappropriateness. Although, to be honest, the worst thing you could possibly sing in the middle of a mass in a high church setting probably comes from the Christian tradition itself:
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