Sing to the Lord a Hillsong

In my busy New York internship life, it’s difficult to find time to pencil in some fun between my workplace obligations of sexual harassment and Xeroxing Xeroxes so that colleagues can Xerox my Xeroxes of Xeroxes and promptly lose them. When I do get a break from having my knees massaged and trying not to vomit, I then find it difficult to find affordable fun. As I’m sure you know, New York is expensive. The temptation is to buy several industrial-sized bottles of wine that taste like the loose change that has collected at the bottom of my purse and lock myself in my room, but even this loses its appeal after the first several times. I say “loses its appeal” when actually I mean I can’t afford it.

My British neshama suggests going to museums. After all, the National Gallery (which is free) had become my London free toilet. (One of my hobbies is establishing toilets around cities the way some nations establish colonies.) However, in these United States most museums are actually quite expensive. I did manage to find something free called the “Museum of Biblical Art.” But after accidentally posting this picture on their giant TV screen through the wonders of social media:

…I was disappointed that the “Museum of Biblical Art” turned out to be the “One Room of Artistically Rendered Scrolls of Esther.” I had hoped for some meaty paintings. A Thomas ramming his hand into Jesus’ side the way I like to poke packages of ground beef at the supermarket. A panicked, bound Isaac asking Abraham, “WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK, DAD?” Instead I got a handful of mediocre Hebrew calligraphy.

So what does one do in New York for fun when one is poor?

One can go to church.

It’s free, and you’re guaranteed some kind of a show. In fact, the more you go the easier it is to spot a disaster. Usually my free-time trips to church involve a visit to a charismatic venue, but after joining the serving team at an Anglo-Catholic parish I have invented a new game called “Spot the Me,” in which I visit high churches and look for the server who cannot go two minutes without touching her nose, rolling her ankles, or accidentally doing “The Sprinkler” when her legs get caught in her cassock. So far I appear the be the only me.

However, the more I treat churches like a sporting event...

(or indeed sports like a church—see the Mets prayer circle)

…the more I notice the international phenomenon of the Weeping Australian, found in any denomination of church that refers to God as “awesome” in the Californian sense.

You’ve probably come across the Weeping Australian before if you’ve ever been to a charismatic church. He’s the teaching pastor who is so overwhelmed that you won’t let his mate Jesus Christ into your heart that he has to wipe away tears into the tiny vest he wears paired with his skinny jeans. What’s jarring about the Weeping Australian is that you’re used to seeing the Australian as either perpetually friendly or perpetually stabby/drunk, and yet here he is choking back a sob as he leads you in a round of applause for Jesus Christ, who was so kind as to grace us with His presence at this club tonight. His eyes are so overwhelmed with emotion that they are forced shut as he joins the band onstage to repeat the chorus for the 563rd time, in case God didn’t know how swell He is the first 562 times we let Him know.

My favorite Weeping Australian story occurred just last week. In a nightclub packed with young and lost New Yorkers, the WA invited us to close our eyes. Which was, of course, my cue to keep mine open. Experience told me that this was my favorite part—the Weeping Australian would stress to us the need to let Jesus back into our hearts as though JC were crying and hanging out on a porch in the rain waiting to be let inside. Usually the long closed-eyes ramble would increase in urgency, and when panic about how badly we need Jesus reached a climax the WA would invite us to put up our hands if we felt Jesus had been locked out for long enough and we wanted to let the poor man back in. With eyes closed, usually a hefty majority would put their hands up. However, on this particular Sunday at this particular service, I noticed that something like 10 people put their hands up. The Weeping Australian soon became the Panicked Australian. Over and over again he repeated the call to put your hand up if you wanted to vote for Jesus, and still no one else put their hand up. Realizing that this was as good as it was going to get, he then started “ooooing” and “aaaahing” at the sheer number of people who were recommitting themselves to Christ at this service. “Wow,” he told the temporarily blinded audience, “there are just SO many hands. This is really incredible.” Still the same 10 or so were not joined by more hands. “Wow…this is just so inspiring. So overwhelming.” Then, “Don’t open your eyes, keep them closed. This really is awesome, I wish you could see how many people want to recognize that Jesus Christ died for them." The music swells, the lights dance, and still no additional hands go up. "Just awesome, awesome. Amazing. …Okay, you can put your hands down…and open your eyes now.” It was, quite honestly, the most convincing argument I’ve ever witnessed that religion is complete crap.

And it’s not just Hillsong, which started in Australia and thus understandably has a heavy proportion of Australian team members. No, the Australians are everywhere in the evangelical world. As I sit through “Four Minutes of Fellowship” and sip a glass of water that a hot man in a tight t-shirt brought me on a silver tray, I reflect on the sheer number of Weeping Australians and can only assume that evangelism is a front for Australian imperialism. Secretly, the Australians are here to take over America through what they call “planting” these things they call “churches.” All I can say is, “LEAVE US BE! TAKE YOUR OUTBACK STEAKHOUSES AND BE GONE WITH YOU!”

I often like to imagine what it must be like for this never-ending stream of Weeping Australian pastors to come through US Customs and Border Control. The border control officer would subject the W.A. to a series of questions, during which the W.A. would silently and seamlessly cue a previously hidden band to start picking up their instruments behind him. Their seemingly nonsensical plucking and fiddling would ever so gradually form into an increasingly loud and coherent return to an evangelical power ballad. The pastor would get more frantic and out of breath and weepy with each answer, “16 Main Street.” “Four months!” “[*sniff*] for business!! [*choked sob*]” And still the music would grow in the background.

Finally the customs officer would say, “Anything to declare?” And the W.A. would respond by bellowing, “ONLY THE LOVE OF CHRIST CRUCIFIED!” as he bursts into tears and drops the mic that had seemed to materialize from nowhere, while the band erupts with yet another deafening refrain from Hillsong’s “I Will Rise."

Crap. I think I need to find a new free hobby besides churching.

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 Methodists, Part 2

So I went back to the Methodists today. You may remember that the last time I was there I was surrounded by old women who seemed to be under the impression that failing to throw themselves upon me would cause the universe to implode.

I figured I could use this nice break from my traditional stomping grounds in the Anglo-Catholic tradition, though I was slightly disappointed that the lack of incense exposure today would require me to take a shower. (Oh my God, that is such an attempt at a joke. I know I’m vile but I’ll have you know that I do wash biannually.)

And so, after wading through a sea of people eager to shake my hands and talk to me about the fact that it’s wet and windy outside, I finally made it to my seat. I swear to you I had the same conversation six different times. It went a bit like this:

Extremely Earnest Methodist: “Hello, are you a visitor?”

Me: “Yup, I am!”

EEM: “Ah, well done for braving the weather!”

Me: “Ah, well, I don’t live too far from here, to be fair…”

EEM: “It’s quite cold out!”

Me: “Yes, it is, but it’s thankfully very warm in here.”

EEM: “Yes, we have a timed heater! See, we set it for a few hours before church and then…[*insert detailed exploration of the heater’s workings, thoughts and feelings.*]”

Me: “Um…gosh…it sounds like a pretty amazing heater.”

EEM: “Oh it is! Oh hi, [*Fellow Extremely Earnest Methodist who has approached*], I was just telling this young lady about our heater!”

FEEMwha: “Oh yes, it’s set to a timer, you know!”

I promise you I had this conversation about six different times, to the point where I’m  strongly convinced that Methodists are not actually a religious group but instead the love children of an affair between John Wesley and a furnace.

But they are lovely people. Or lovely people-furnace hybrids.

So anyway, I sat down in one of the chairs and waited for the service to begin. And before the service they have someone playing on the piano some hymns that sound a bit like what the piano player at Nordstrom always sounds like. It’s like all the soul is sucked out of the song, as the notes echo around the escalator atrium and bounce off the fake marble.

I can’t do a good job of explaining it. All I know is that when I heard the Methodist hymn piano I wanted to buy clothing. Or rather, as I normally do in Nordstrom, I wanted to make grumpy huffing noises as my mom drags me around and—can you believe how awful this is—actually tries to buy me nice things. (If my mom is reading this: I love you, Mommy!!!)

Right. So the piano. It was playing “How Great Thou Art”

 I love the song, but now instead of getting my Methodist thang on, I was imagining Fat Elvis walking around Nordstrom asking saleswomen if this rhinestone jumpsuit comes in any larger sizes, and then inevitably being told by some severe-looking foreign woman who works there that he might have better luck on Nordstrom.com.

I sat in my seat, waiting for the service to begin, as the Methodists continued to chat with each other and occasionally give me heart palpitations by approaching me (“Oh God Oh God I don’t know if I can act excited about the timed heater for a seventh time!!!!”). But then I heard this weird noise. It sounded like Beaker from the Muppets. What the eff is that?

After a few squeaks the sound petered out. Maybe it was the timed heater? But then it came back again. Wait a minute. Wait. A. Minute. The squeaking is squealing along in time with the music. It is wordlessly quacking along to “How Great Thou Art.” Oh my God. There is a woman who looks older than Yoda sitting a few seats away and she is scat-ing along with the music, singing what can only be transcribed as “neener neener neener.”

Eventually they stopped talking about the heater for long enough to start the service, and we got to sing some hymns. And for some reason that is completely beyond me, the singing sounded really deep and low. I would have had a sneaking suspicion that the minister may have been Johnny Cash, but Johnny Cash sounded like a soprano compared to this guy. There were only a couple of other men in the congregation, but they too had terrifyingly low voices. Though the congregation was overwhelmingly populated by old woman who sang like a chorus of Beakers and sang earnestly (as that’s how Methodists do everything), for some reason the singing sounded like a low dirge.

It really was terrifying. It was like a new dimension had opened up. Oh my God. We are all going to die. I am surrounded by old women but for some reason our singing sounds like a Roman slave galley filled with beefy men from Gaul.

Thankfully though, we didn’t die. I made it off the slave galley, and even got invited to coffee afterwards.

I have nothing to say to really end this, so I’ll just say that I’ve also felt a bit low lately and a bit like Fat Elvis. And this blog post has made me think of Elvis. So in honor of that, I bring you VIVA FAT ELVIS:

Tell us more about the lineage

Friday morning I spent about an hour and 45 minutes staring at some dude's hairline. And when I say some dude I actually mean a Buddhist monk. And when I say Buddhist monk, I mean some guy who dressed in red robes and worked at a Buddhist center. To be honest I have no idea what he introduced himself as because, as I shall explain, I did not understand a single word that came out of this man's mouth.

There were definitely a solid few minutes where I was shaking with suppressed laughter when, sitting Indian style with my ass propped on a meditation cushion, I realized that I was stuck in a never-ending lecture with a man who was less intelligible than my newborn niece. I wasn't laughing at him, mind you--no way, having been the unintelligible foreigner in Israel, I'd never laugh at someone else's accent. Rather, I was laughing at myself, because at the time I thought I was the only person who didn't understand this man.

I looked around me as this lovely gentleman spoke to us, and all I saw were all of my classmates nodding attentively, as though this man had just provided some life-changing insight into the nature of the world. An insight which was completely lost on me. Needless to say, I began to zone out and wonder about things. For as much as I tried to understand this man he seemed to get even harder to understand. And after witnessing our tutor continually ask questions about lineage and history that invited hour-long responses, not a second of which I could understand, I began to wonder if I had had a stroke.

At one point the monk may have asked me a question. Yes, me personally. Actually though I'm not entirely sure it was a question, and I'm not entirely sure it was addressed to me. It was sort of the aural equivalent of someone with a lazy eye addressing you. There was definitely a moment where I considered pointing at myself and mouthing the words, "Sorry, me?" and quickly glancing behind me and slightly to the left.

All I know though is that I'm grateful we didn't do any silent meditation. When I saw the hippie white guy lead us into this room with mats and cushions I got a little afraid. I'm not afraid of finding Enlightenment, but I am afraid of the weird noises my stomach makes. Public silent meditation and I don't get along because my stomach is a bit of a diva. Well, he's not really a diva--maybe he's just one of those people that is afraid of awkward silences. "HEY GUYS!" my stomach likes to scream in silent moments. And even though most of these dear classmates have seen me fall over furniture, molest trees, fall in front of an ambulance, and eat disgusting amounts of kebab, I don't want them to misunderstand my stomach noises and think I'm the sort of person who goes to other people's shrines just to fart in them.

This did, however, lead to a private silent mediation during the monk's lecture. I began to ponder meaningful questions about the relationship between farts and Buddhism. Namely, "If you're about to reach Enlightenment in a shrine and somebody farts, do you get sent back a bit?" And "If you intentionally fart in a shrine to distract someone from reaching Enlightenment, will you get reborn as something really nasty?"

I can't believe they let me teach RE...

Double double toil and please just let me die now...

Oh man, I've been bitten by the theater bug. I offered to help with props/building/whatever with the local Passion Play, and a shortage of willing players has meant that I've since been upgraded to the status of actor, with an actual honest-to-goodness line. I flatter myself by thinking that the person who allowed me to take on this role thinks I can draw upon inner acting strength I didn't know I had to add meat to this one line, when in reality (as learned from this past Sunday's rehearsal) when I act--on a good day--I just sound like a quietly constipated version of my normal, dull self.

To be fair, I am enjoying myself and I'm happy to be part of it. But honestly it also brings back horrific memories of my time as a theater major at college. All I wanted to do was play with lights and use the occasional power tool, but my college thought that in order to be a good lighting designer I needed to know how to act.

All I remember about that class is that every day was humiliating agony. I still cringe at the thought of having to perform that witches thing from the beginning of Macbeth in front of everybody. I remember during rehearsals for it my partners would nag me to put more effort into it. Get into character, they'd tell me. Double double toil and trouble... And I'd just silently pray that either I or everyone else or both would die before the performance date, because the thought of enthusiastically crouching around an imaginary cauldron and speaking in verse seemed somehow even worse than simply shitting my pants both visibly and audibly while onstage.

It got to the point where 18 year old me considered drastic solutions. Whenever I had to perform in front of my class I would fantasize that while I was reciting my poem/monologue/whatever I was wearing an enormous inflatable penis costume. "Surely that'd embarrass you even more, Sam," you're probably saying. But the fact is that imagining I was wearing an enormous inflatable penis costume made the rest of the class seem ridiculous. Here I am, wearing an invisible inflatable penis costume in front of the entire class--and these dumbasses don't even realize it! I'm giving a serious monologue in my dull voice of indigestion and I'm NOT EVEN ACKNOWLEDGING THE FACT THAT I'M DRESSED AS A HUGE INFLATABLE PENIS! And you're taking me seriously! Who's the idiot now, guys? Oh, that's right, YOU!

Well, a girl can dream...

I eventually gave up on the whole theater major thing. It wasn't just the horrific acting classes, but also the crap jobs I had to do backstage. My personal favorite was "Lint Mistress," where my job was literally picking lint off the leading man.

As part of the costume crew I had to follow around the costume designer, a grad student who had such a strong Great Lakes accent that I thought her jaw was going to pop off at any minute from the vowel strain. On one memorable occasion I was called in to help her with the leading man's pants (TROUSERS!), so I followed her into a small dressing room where the three of us could be alone together. She decided that the leading man's pants needed to be expanded, so without any kind of warning she just tore this guy's pants open. So the guy was just standing there with a huge, gaping hole in the region of Ass, looking completely appalled. The costume designer had to hurry out of the room to get more pins, leaving me alone with this guy I don't know but who I regularly pick lint off of, now with him in underpants and pathetic tatters that were once pants. I remember trying to turn around to preserve some semblance of this guy's modesty, only to find that a mirror was behind me. So instead I just sort of stared off to the side while the leading man and I both grew increasingly red in the face as we both tried to pretend like he was not wearing shredded pants right now. He was a senior and I was a freshman, so he tried to break up the awkwardness of the situation by asking me how I was settling in. "Not very well at the moment," I wanted to tell him.

After about five eternities the costume designer finally returned to fix the pants, but by that point I was pretty convinced that theater was no longer for me. I needed order in this chaotic world. I needed to know that pants would not suddenly be ripped apart at any given moment without any kind of a warning.

The whole realization that theater was not the major for me made me think of Roland the Farter, or more importantly Le Petomane.

Le Petomane was a guy who farted professionally in the Victorian era, a guy who is sometimes referred to as a "fartiste." Apparently he used to do farting impressions of the San Francisco Earthquake, and he'd do animal sounds. This flatulist retired during World War I because he thought the world was too inhumane. Just as I only wanted to play with lights, he just wanted to fart. That's all he wanted.

And that, my friends, is beautiful.


(Speaking of theater, if you'd like to read a short scene about St Thomas a Becket that I wrote when I was 16, please click here)

The Eighteenth Wheel

I’m in the library studying theology. Aw crap, you caught me. I’m actually hiding in the library (with an open theology book, mind you) because I’m too afraid to go downstairs for lunch. The college is hosting an Open Day for prospective ordinands, and so the dining hall is packed with priests, future priests, and potential future priests. I didn't really want to be the only person in the room who's destined for Hell. Not gonna lie, it’s a little intimidating. So intimidating, in fact, that I’m even giving up a free lunch [*gasp!*].

To be fair, even when it’s me among just this year’s bunch of ordinands I feel a little intimidated. I’m not sure “intimidated” is quite the right word, as on those occasions when I’m the only non-ordinand among ordinands I feel less intimidated and more like the third wheel on a 17-person date. They all lean into each other to share intimate conversations about church politics or which tune they’re going to use for the “Magnificat” at Evensong, and every now and then their intimacy is shattered by my feeling the need to laugh with a ridiculously loud volume at a joke about Giles Fraser just to prove that “HEY FOR ONCE I HAVE A FAINT IDEA WHAT YOU’RE TALKING ABOUT!” Those rare moments where I am even capable of doing an honest but deafening guffaw of recognition, however, are vastly outnumbered by moments of those weak smiles of someone trying to hide the fact that they are, relatively speaking, a dipshit. Most of the time I have genuinely no fucking clue what anyone is talking about, and I feel as though I crashed the house party of the Elect.

But this isn’t to bitch about the ordinands, the poor dears. They're all lovely people and those rare moments when I do understand what the hell they're talking about make all the moments of confusion worthwhile. Besides, it’s only natural to be very close to people going through the same program, and to be honest I think the people in my own program are more cult-like. Try sitting in on a conversation between a group of student-teachers and see how lost you feel—it’s like we vomit up a never-ending fountain of incomprehensible acronyms and “my pupils are shitter than your pupils” trump stories.

Still though. I think I’ll stay in the library just to be safe.

Remember thou art in England

Last night I partied chez the evangelicals. And when I say “partied” I really mean prayed. And when I say “prayed” I actually mean I just stood there, perhaps in a salute to my stern Presbyterian roots, with my lips sealed and my hands firmly stuck in my pockets.

That’s not to say I didn’t have fun. Oh God no, I had the time of my lameass life. What I enjoyed so much is that it was completely unexpected. I mean, when I imagine the Church of England—even “evangelical” C of E—I imagine people in suits, women’s hats that seem to do their own interpretive dances, and a bunch of stiff people with posh accents saying, “Hallo.” You know, Queen Victoria, cricket, tuna and baked potatoes, and all that.

What I found at St Aldate’s, however, was a rock band, TV screens, and a crowd of people with their hands in the air. Old people were rockin out all over the places, and this one enormous gentleman who looked like Jeremy Clarkson only put his arms down once when he was very suddenly called by the Holy Spirit to rush off to the bathroom. To be honest, it was like being back at a miniature version of Willow Creek, my preferred megachurch back in the US. They had the same free-form prayers where every other word was “just” (“We’re just gonna take it down just a notch here and just pray, to just let Jesus know that we’re just thrilled that He could just be here tonight and just lead us to just know Him. Yeah, really just to know just how great He is.”), the live muzak during prayer intervals, the ubiquitous Australian teaching pastor who always seems on the verge of tears when he teaches, and the insanely hot member of the worship band—there’s always one.

The whole experience made me think of Roman triumphs, where the victorious general followed by a slave who has the job of being the dickhead who holds a wreath over the general’s head and reminds him, “Remember thou art mortal.” I just kept thinking that I need a dickhead like that to remind me, “Remember thou art in England.” Because I honestly didn’t believe it. Until last night it did not occur to me that actual, honest-to-goodness English people prayed like this. No, I kept telling myself, I am back in America. This is how Americans pray, not English people. The upside of all this is that I now know where to go when I’m feeling homesick.

Other than my initial shock at finding out that there are some English people (and a fair few!) who do enjoy rocking out while they pray, the service wasn’t all that different or weird from what I’ve seen before. Well, there was a sort of weird half an hour where I was convinced the guy giving the sermon had an Amish accent. I kept wracking my brain trying to figure out just how the hell an Amish guy ended up here and praying this way. Like, my family’s religious journey has been a weird one, but I think shaving off your chin beard and swapping your horse and buggy for a car kind of trumps everything…and then I realized that the guy was probably just from one of those Germanic or Scandinavian countries. But it was a lot more magical when I thought he was Amish.

Another thing that I love about this church, and about all evangelical churches really, is that they are constantly trying to pray for you. I mean, try getting evangelicals to NOT pray for you—Jesus Christ, there’s a miracle waiting to happen. All other churches you have to specifically ask for people to pray for you, which can often be really intimidating, but with evangelicals you have to beat them off with a stick if you don’t want them praying/preying on you. Evangelicals are kind of like benevolent zombies, lurching forward with their praying arms outstretched, groaning “Can we just pray for you?” instead of “BRAAAAAAAIIIINSSSS.”

Ah, it’s just so fabulous though. Knowing there’s a mini megachurch in my town, suddenly I feel a lot more enthusiastic about this year.

Ah yes, I think Darwin explored that idea

Today I wandered around town to acquaint myself with the churches and religious life here, being the responsible trainee RE teacher that I am. Well, if I were to issue a press release that’s what it’d say. In all honesty I was just trying to get a bit of walking in so I could justify a mid-morning snack of cookies and lunch at McDonald’s, and stopping into a couple of churches was just a reasonable afterthought.

So I stop in at one church, take a few pictures, struggle to find anyone in there who is actually praying, and keep moving along. I then turn up a huge pedestrian street, just teeming with humanity. There’s fat teenage girls pushing strollers and yelling at tourists to clear the fuck off, there’s hordes of Japanese people taking pictures of everything and seemingly oblivious to the angry fat mob, and then there are the religious people, standing out on this street with the same sort of dedication as the Titanic band.

I’m not entirely sure why they stand out there. I mean, regardless of what kind of tempting real estate in Heaven a religion offers you, I can’t imagine anyone ever gets convinced to become a Christian simply because some odd-smelling man with a bunch of slightly crumpled and moist pamphlets told them that Jesus died for their sins.

But the thing is, I always talk to them. In fact, I find it impossible NOT to. And so I guess it’s no surprise that today, as I tried to slip past a guy I had talked to about a week ago, one of these crazies called out, to my absolute horror, “Hello, Sam!” There was definitely a moment where I considered putting on a ridiculous foreign accent (“oo ees dees Sem yu spik aff?”), or running away, or simply committing ritual suicide right then and there. Because any one of those options would have been preferable to accepting the terrifying truth that I’m now on a first name basis with a street evangelist.

Well, I didn’t want to be a dick, so I walked over and said hello…but quickly excused myself, at which point he called out after me, “God bless you!” They always say that, and it always makes me want to sneeze retroactively or start singing “Gooooood Bless Aaaaameeeericaaaa…laaaaaaand thaaaaat I looooove, etc etc”.

Eventually I found my way to the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ claim shanty where an overly keen Asian lady with a terrifying empty look in her eyes asked me if I agreed with the statement that science and creation are not incompatible. I honestly do believe that, so I told her so. I waited for the challenge or confirmation that universally follows anything you say to a street evangelist. And I was met with a startled silence. ………… ”Oh!” She wasn’t sure quite where to continue now that she didn’t have any convincing to do. But at the same time her body language and intense empty stare seemed to suggest that I wasn’t dismissed yet. Finally she settled on pulling out a pamphlet that discussed how science and religion are compatible, and she read extracts to me, all the while giving me sideways glances that seemed to suggest that she couldn’t believe I seriously agreed with her.

It was rather boring being read to, but things got really interesting once she put the pamphlet down and tried to ad-lib, which brutally exposed how little training these poor missionaries get. She started discussing with me the idea that people came off the backs of turtles, and how this used to be a ridiculous claim, but now science actually backs up this biblical claim.

Now, I try not to be two-faced, but sometimes when it comes to religious beliefs I make an exception. Even among some of the more fucked up creation stories—and even among doctrinally sound Jehovah’s Witnesses!—this sounds absolutely retarded. But I smiled and nodded anyway, much like how in Israel I used to smile and nod or answer with completely random words if I didn’t understand the question (“What kind of sauce would you like?” “Five.”) Like, I literally had no idea how to respond to her statement.

The first completely incomprehensible part of this conversation was the part where she claimed science thinks we rode in on the backs of turtles. This begs the question: Which branch of science are you following? Because your concept of science seems to be based on a redacted account of all the nonsensical shit I’ve said when I’ve had too much to drink, like the time I (I’m told) insisted I was a brontosaurus. If this is the case, I’d like to know—I’ve always wanted to establish my own religion, but I’ll settle for a field of science. Samology?

And secondly, but more importantly, WHAT BIBLE ARE YOU READING? I mean, I understand the Bible says a lot of really weird things, but I’m pretty sure that, no matter how you want to interpret this woman’s statement, the Bible does not talk about humans mutating from turtle backs, nor does it mention humans coming to Earth, riding in on the backs of turtles like a slow, geriatric invading army. I mean, for fuck’s sake, even the “The Message” translation doesn’t embellish the Bible that badly.

Completely confused, I wandered away from the JWs and found myself at the table hosted by the Catholics. Instead of telling me crazy tales that trump even the tale of how Jesus is edible, they silently handed me a pamphlet on why the pope is a badass and I was left to walk away in peace. God bless the Catholics.

Achoo!
GOOOOOD BLESS AAAMEEEERICAAAAAA…..LAAAAAND THAAAT---aw, fuck it.

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.