“Religious Services: Come for the farts, stay for the God.”

Warning: it’s another immature one.

After the unrivalled success of “High School Graduation Bingo, 2006 Edition” (I got to call out “Bingo!” after hearing, for example, the words “journey,” “spread your wings,” “look to your left,” and a joke about doing laundry very poorly at college), I’ve decided to create a new version of Bingo for farts during religious services.

Obviously you’ll be wantin’ some instructions on how to play Church Fart Bingo: The way it’d work is that any time a participant went church surfing or synagogue chasing they’d bring their Bingo card with them. On it would be different services you could go to: mass, evensong, shacharit, maariv, kol nidre, Rosh Hashanah morning (1st day), Quaker meeting, zen meditation, etc. And then you’d just play the waiting game. Because, if you go to church/synagogue as often as I do, you’ll end up hearing enough farts to get Bingo eventually. And then, no matter if the cantor is in the middle of wailing away in Hebrew about how different people are going to die this year or if the priest is in the middle of turning wine into the blood of Christ, you would be LEGALLY OBLIGATED to scream out at the top of your lungs, “BINGOOOOO!”

So the reason I bring this up is that tonight I ended up at Kol Nidre. Partly because I’m training to teach religion and need to keep up with how different people are praying, partly because I still sometimes feel as though if I don’t go to services on Yom Kippur I’m going to get smote/smited/whatever the word is, and partly because I was missing some old, dear friends. I thought going to Kol Nidre would be a nice way to recall fond memories of getting the inappropriate giggles with friends during Yamei Kippur past, when someone farted during the morning service, when the old professor acting as cantor had a peculiar voice that a friend spent the following years imitating at completely random intervals, or when the cantor went ridiculously slo-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-owly and caused the fast to drag on for even longer than necessary.

Hearing all that Hebrew and hearing the familiar tunes made me think of old friends in LA, Chicago and Jerusalem, and I’ll completely unashamedly admit that my eyes started tearing up. It’s rather embarrassing to do this during Kol Nidre, because I’m sure crying while you’re begging God for forgiveness in Hebrew can only look to your neighbors as though you did something well and truly fucked up this year that needs some serious atoning for. I imagine neighbors would be thinking, “Bitch, you clearly need to prostrate yourself.” Not really in the mood for a hearty helping of homesickness, I started to regret coming to the service, repeatedly asking myself, “What the hell were you thinking when you came?”


And then someone in my row ripped a substantial fart.


Stifling a quick giggle, I brushed it off as just a squeaky chair or a shoe noise. But then an unmistakable odor filled the air and confirmed my suspicions. And, dear readers, surely at this point in our relationship you can correctly predict my immensely mature reaction. Yes, the correct answer is indeed a solid 20 minutes of silent giggles, tears streaming down my face, a lobster-red face, and my entire body shaking like I was having some kind of a seizure.

Being trapped in a crowded Yom Kippur service with the severe people of England only made my struggle worse, as my brain kept trying to convince my sense of humor that we needed to behave ourselves. It’s supposed to be the most serious night of the year and I’m laughing about flatulence. Typical Sam, I’m afraid.

I calmed down for a minute, but then reflected on the number of religious services I’ve been to in which a member of the congregation audibly cheesed. After realizing that the number is actually appallingly high, and that the Jews have (according to empirical data that I have compiled) been the worst offenders, I completely lost it again and was back to silently shaking with giggles. With these kinds of stats I feel like I should pass Tums around at religious services, though maybe I’ll wait to see what patterns emerge on the graphs before deciding on a course of action.

But I promise I do have a point in sharing my story of someone farting during Kol Nidre. See, this is what I love about my life. At the very moment when I was feeling my lowest, like I made a huge mistake, like everything was now totally shit…at that very moment what I think is the single funniest thing in the world that could possibly happen ACTUALLY HAPPENED. If that’s not unquestionable proof that God exists and is a loving god, I don’t know what is.

Aw crap though, I’ve started using farts as proof of God’s existence. What would Anselm say?

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.