The Church of the Holy Dodger Dog

As I sat in Dodger Stadium, watching thousands of people stream onto the outfield to “recommit themselves to Christ,” it suddenly occurred to me that this was an ideal moment to get up and get myself a Dodger Dog. The concession lines would probably be empty, because for the first time in about three hours those in the stands were forced to choose between getting a third helping of nachos and getting born again.

I know for a fact I wasn’t the only one thinking about food at the moment. The second I entered Dodger Stadium the first thing I noticed was a sea of people carrying what looked like shipping containers filled with nachos to their families. Once I sat down, after wading through puddles of peanut shells, I noticed that everyone around me had a crate of hotdogs in their laps. As I looked around half expecting to find a man shouting that he has Cracker Jacks for sale, I noticed the pile of peanut shells rapidly growing into a flood of Noachian proportions.

Still though, even though the worshippers were eating enough food to feed a sizeable nation, I was willing to give religion at Dodger Stadium a chance. Truth be told, I couldn’t help fantasizing what it would have been like if I had showed up with a baseball glove and a Dodger t-shirt, wandering around the stands looking really confused. Would there be a seventh inning stretch? But, really, I gave it a shot.  I laughed off the fact that we were bouncing a beach ball around the stands, and I brushed off the fact that one Christian lady cussed out her fellow Christians for dropping the ball when it came to continuing The Wave.

But then came the prayer. Some pastor took to the stage to lead some generic “just” prayer, and the stadium reverently bowed its heads. At this point I noticed that, yes, people had bowed their heads. But some, and a fair few, continued to stuff food in their mouths…while keeping their heads bowed in prayer.

How do you pray and eat at the same time? Am I just spectacularly uncoordinated that I think this would prove difficult? If nothing else it seems disrespectful. “Dear Lord, SNARF we just want to GARRR thank you for just GULP giving us today and just HAAMMM just making us URGH all that we just are….”

Looking around at people bowing their heads and closing their eyes in reverence while shoveling Dodger Dogs into their mouths was perhaps the highlight of my life. It was at this point that I started laughing so hard that I cried.

These are the things I missed this past year in the English Anglo-Catholic world. And how would this year have been different? I imagined a world of seminarians eating nachos while kneeling in prayer. Of half a congregation getting up during the middle of the Creed in Latin to go get another suitcase-sized bag of peanuts. Or of choral evensong in St. Paul’s being interrupted by a fat man in a t-shirt letting out an echoing hearty belch fueled by gallons of non-alcoholic beer.

But no. it could never happen in England, and not just the non-alcoholic beer part. This Church at Dodger Stadium is such an American expression of Church—not the fact that it’s a megachurch, not the greasy charisma, not the red/white/blue color scheme, not the jokes about other people’s bad hygiene, but the FOOD.

And you know what, America? This is why we are all fat.  This is a sign of the end times—Americans who bother coming to “church” cannot put their hot dogs or frozen lemonades down for the one minute it takes to say a prayer.

Aw crap though. Now my next visit to a “normal” church is going to feel sorely lacking in Dodger Dogs.

Vocation

Today I went to an ordination. This being the first ordination I've ever attended, maybe you're expecting a thoughtful reflection on what ordination is, or about the work of a deacon, or about service in the church, or maybe about vocation.

Well, I am going to talk about vocation. Specifically, about the vocation of the guy sitting behind me, whose vocation was apparently singing "Alleluia sing to Jesus" loudly enough in Christ Church Cathedral (Oxford, England) that my family back in Los Angeles could appreciate it.

Put that video on full blast, and you still cannot appreciate the volume. It was like all the voices of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir combined, became Anglican, and were being channeled by a single man in a clerical collar. The only other time I hear singing that loud is when I'm alone in my car, driving along a mountain road with treacherous curves, and Ringo Starr's "Photograph" comes on the radio.

Now this isn't a complaint, mind you. No, I salute this man. I'm so embarrassed by my own singing that literally eating myself is a less terrifying prospect than singing in front of other people. When I look back at some of the most embarrassing moments of my life, such as peeing myself at age 12, or (falsely) coming out as a lesbian to my 10th grade students, or accidentally correcting someone's pronunciation of a word when actually they had a lisp, or the time I had to give an impromptu speech in Hebrew in front of a room full of executives about a project that I had not actually done, or the time my friend pantsed me outside Gelsons and I ended up mooning some poor old woman who was out doing her shopping, or the time I was 8 and I played a brick in a musical and had to dance around onstage in a bright yellow unitard ...when I look back on those moments, I thank God that at least I wasn't singing. At least when I was the unitard-clad brick I was only pretending to sing.

It looked a bit like this, except mine had the added asthetic benefits of childhood obesity.

And yet here's this man, surrounded by Englishmen in suits and some women who are dressed vaguely like the Queen, and he's singing this hymn with the same amount of gusto that primary school children have for totally random topics, like whales or cacti. I wanted to turn around to give him a thumbs up and a "you go, girlfriend!" But I figured that might make him stop.

Instead I post this silly bit of writing as a tribute to this man, whose enthusiasm for Jesus manifests itself in singing hymns louder than the drunken idiots sing soccer chants on the street outside my window at 3 am on school nights. And, may I say, YOU GO, GIRLFRIEND!

The Cosmic Couch

I’m writing this entry between pub trips. I’m not going to go on and on about the pub issue and how English people seem to like pubs more than Americans like clogged arteries, but just be aware.

I’m also gonna go ahead and warn you that if you’re expecting this post to be a silly romp through farting in church or how the Brits all have snaggleteeth…well, you might want to skip this post and come back tomorrow for another installment of my immaturity. Because shit’s about to get real.

I also want to warn you, since I know at least a couple confirmed readers are Godosexuals, that this post is also potentially offensive (like everything I write/say). I’m probably the only self-described religious person who could use the words “God” and “fuck” in the same sentence, so please just be warned.

Henyways…

Because I’m studying religion and because I live in a seminary, it’s hard for me to not think about religion and to not think about prayer, The Bible, God, and all that on a pretty constant basis. Today for example I started daydreaming about the New Testament and came up with a little jokette about St Stephen and rain (“When it rains really hard does St Stephen look up and say, ‘I see the heavens opened’?”) And then I realized that I would probably be better off spending more time developing social skills rather than jokes about proto-martyrs. But, let’s face it, I’m probably going to keep trying to develop Bible jokes.

Yeah, religion on an academic level is a huge force in my life. But at the same time I find it deeply, deeply embarrassing to talk about my own personal beliefs. I’m fine talking about my positions on ethics, but when asked larger theological questions I try to switch the subject to Doctor Who. And it’s so weird because I am the honest and open sort of person who will publicly claim ownership of farts in polite company—some would argue that I have no verbal filter whatsoever. But for some reason faith is so difficult to talk about. And this blog post is probably as close as I'm ever going to get to sharing my thoughts on the subject.

So before I continue with all this heavy shit, we have to go back a bit. Yesterday in grad school we went on a field trip to yet another church, this time the town’s cathedral. As part of our educational experience the tour guide instructed us to lie down on the floor, right in the chancel, and stare up at the vaulted ceiling. And as he tried to describe to us how this ceiling would have looked before the Reformation, I was so overwhelmed that I even temporarily forgot the nuclear reaction occurring in my stomach (coffee allergies…). I mean, I liked the church before, but the church was hands-down inspiring from this perspective. Think about it: you’re out in the countryside and you look up and see a bunch of stars—okay, you think to yourself, that’s a lotta stars. But you’re out in the countryside and you lie down to look up at the stars—okay, now suddenly you appreciate just what an incredible place the universe is, and if there is a God (and at this moment you’ve never been more convinced in your life that there must be) He must be shitting his almighty pants every day over the beauty of the universe, because you’re already losing control over your bowels just looking at this tiny fraction of the universe. So that’s kind of what lying down in the cathedral was like.

I tried to recreate this feeling in one of my college’s chapels. So I sprawled out on the floor in my scruffy jeans that were well overdue for a wash, and I just had myself a staring contest with the Virgin Mary. Occasionally I glanced up at the ceiling, which is much plainer than the cathedral’s. And instead of the overwhelming feeling of beauty, I felt an overwhelming feeling of ownership.

What do I mean by that? I mean I can pray here, this is MY space. This isn’t a place I show up to once a week, having put on a stuffy sweater and nice shoes, and pretend to have a chat with God. No, sitting on the floor of this church, I OWN this place. Well, actually God owns this place, but God and I are such BFFs that I can just hang out on His floor. I don’t sit up straight on his upholstered chair that he reserves for guests while he stiffly and politely offers me a glass of water—no, I plop down on God’s cosmic couch and chill the fuck out.

If he has something to tell me, he’ll tell me when he feels like it, and if I wanna ask him something I’ll ask him when I feel like it. Just like dear friends whose friendship has moved onto that wonderful stage where they don’t feel they have to constantly interact to avoid awkward silence and chatter about nothing.

That’s kinda the relationship I’d like to have with God. I don’t want to sit in a pew, I want to chill out on God’s Cosmic Couch. And I recognize that this all makes me sound like a total weirdo. So let’s remember that I’m still me. I don’t want to sound like the youth pastor of some Vineyard church, trying to sound all hip and with it and failing miserably (“Hey, dudes, Jesus’ love is so rockstar!”). And, even worse, I don’t want to get overly kumbaya on your asses, because that’s also so not me.

So my only option is to relate it to bathroom humor, which we can all agree seems to be my comfort zone. So put it this way: lying down in church gives you the same feeling of ownership that peeing does for bathrooms. Yeah, I should probably explain that: Once on a road trip I remarked to my brother that I liked peeing in roadside bathrooms, because then “it’s like I live there.” Yeah, that explanation probably didn’t help… I guess it’s just a Me thing.

So lying down in a church is all about ownership, and the beauty of the universe on a large scale, and closeness with God, and, and, and, and and….

And it’s also just lying down in a church.