In the Pew

As you may recall, I recently made several abortive attempts to go to church.  Well, I’m glad to announce I finally made it happen.  Actually, I made it happen weeks ago, but I was hoping to do a little compare and contrast by also going to a Buddhist temple.  However, my attempts to get to temple have been abortive thus far.  So for now, my experience in the pew.

I rose early on the morning of Sunday, January 9th and put on my dressiest sweater–the gray one with the decorative buttons on the cuffs and a scoop neck–and a pair of jeans.  Back when my church family was 99% of my social circle, looking good at services was as important to me as it might be for a normal girl to look good at the club.  This was my dating pool and I dressed to impress.  I don’t have that in me anymore.  Now I sometimes dress up for my writing group–the only consistent place I see any single men.  Sigh.

So off I went.  I was almost late and just sort of beat the procession of choristers and the priest in the door.  I froze for a second until one of the ushers helpfully told me to just go ahead and not to worry.  I got a program from said usher and found a seat near the back of the sanctuary.  Once I settled in, I took a good look around.

I’d decided to attend the Anglican church around the corner from my apartment and I wasn’t disappointed by the actual space.  I know nothing about architecture so it’d be a joke for me to try to tell you about it, and truthfully it’s probably not so different from any other Catholic or Anglican church–but it was beautiful.  They say that churches are designed to elicit a desire to worship in the people who enter; this space succeeded in this.  The stained glass windows at the front of the sanctuary caught the sunlight just right and made it seem like God was specifically sending those rays into this particular church.

Most of the 20-odd people there were sitting far apart, each seemingly attending their own private service.  I wondered then if they were all strangers, but later on I would see them greet each other.  That was interesting to me–this ability to be separate, yet together.  In hindsight, I liked that:  people could actually have a private worship experience, but still enjoy each other socially later.

The bulk of the of the service isn’t really worth writing home or blogging about.  I will say this though–you needed a play book to get through it.  Without the program the usher handed me when I walked in, I would never have known what was going on.  And the Book of Common Prayer was the actual play book of the service.  For a while I thought everyone just knew by heart all the responses to the calls made by the various people at the front. After a while I figured out that they were all reading from the prayer book.  In addition to spoken call and response, there was sung call and response and I actually found it really amusing and kind of awful.  It was mostly sung on one note and it was awkward syllabically to say the least.  I assume that it works better in Latin than it does in English.  Perhaps we shouldn’t have made words of worship accessible to the masses.

The sermon was blessedly short.  During my years in the fundy church I came to expect 45-minute, 3-point sermons with funny story intros and desperate wrap-ups.  But having been away from that sort of overkill for so long, I have no more tolerance for it.  So when the sermon turned out to be a 10-minute defense of Christianity, I was relieved, if a bit confused.  I couldn’t really figure out who the audience was for this sermon.  Never have I seen such an example of preaching to the choir.  There were mentions of Richard Dawkins (author of “The God Delusion”) and Bart Ehrman (author of many books including “Lost Christianities”) and I thought it was odd to hear their names  in such a short talk.  I was left with the impression that someone in the congregation had read a work by one of these two authors and questioned the priest at length or something.  The funny thing was that hearing the priest try to mount such a defense of Christianity only inspired me to want to argue with him.  That was when I realized that church was probably not going to be for me.  At least not this one.

The service ended and there was an organ postlude.  I am accustomed to these and in the church I grew up in, this was supposed to be the time during which you reflected and I guess got in your last minute prayers before you started your week of sinning.  The organist played a beautiful piece by Bach and it dawned on me that it was the only moment during the whole service that I felt anything close to a sense of the divine.  It was the only thing that brought me a measure of peace and tranquility.  Everyone clapped when it was done and my sense of peace and calm immediately went the way of the dodo.

Before I could make a quick getaway, the priest found me and made sure to introduce himself.  I suppose I couldn’t have been hard to miss.  A new face and an ethnic minority at that.  He made the usual overtures–did I want to stay for tea and coffee, no I have to run (lie), could they put me on the mailing list, I’ll think about it (lie).  He wasn’t pushy in the least but there was such an earnestness about the request that it was hard to tell him outright that I wasn’t interested in being a member of any sort or of even socializing with the people around me.  I was a bit dismayed that I couldn’t seem to escape the evangelistic element of Christianity, even in a denomination I wouldn’t characterize as particularly evangelistic.

Reflecting on the part of the service that left me feeling the most warm and fuzzy, I’m thinking that maybe I need to just go to performances of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra a lot more.  As for conventional church services, I’m glad I gave it a try, but I don’t see myself going back.

Going to Church

I wanted to go to church, but it didn’t happen.  I even tried three times.

Attempt number one was meant to be completely unthreatening.  My sister and I were going to go to a carol sing service at the local Anglican church just before Christmas.  I was excited.  It would be a totally neutral way to suss out if I liked this church enough to come back and maybe attend semi-regularly.  Maybe even sing in the church choir.

I’m still agnostic, but I think there’s something to be said for the act of worship and being in sacred space.  I miss it.  Actually that’s not entirely accurate.  I don’t miss dirge-like hymn-singing from my parents’ church nor the boring sermons.  I don’t miss the hellfire and brimstone services of the fundamentalist church I attended through my twenties.  I don’t miss the three-point talks about how to be a better Christian.  In fact, it would seem that I miss something I never had in the first place:  the quiet of being in a space where everyone silently and separately says their own prayers to God or whoever they think will answer.  I always picture Catholic churches this way.

When I was part of the fundamentalist group, I had a roommate who used to like to spend time in a church down the street just for the peace and quiet of it.  Our group, in contrast, rented space in an office building and it never had much of the feel of the sacred.  We also seemed to live by the idea that the louder we were, the more spiritual we were.  There wasn’t a lot of quietness within that group.  We also believed we were the only ones who had interpreted the Bible and the requirements for salvation correctly.  As such, it was a bit odd to be enjoying the sacred spaces of the hell-bound masses.  But even back then I understood my roommate’s need.

Unfortunately, my sister was too sick to go to the carol sing and I was too tired and intimidated to go alone.

My second attempt was this past Sunday morning.  Having missed the carol sing, I thought I’d try going to the regular holy communion service at the same Anglican church.  But I couldn’t manage to get to sleep until 4:00am the night prior and 9:30am came all too quick.  I bailed.

My third attempt was completely unplanned.  I had to go to the drugstore up the street later that Sunday night and on my way back I saw lights on in a Catholic church.  When I tried the doors though, they were all locked.  Barred from worship.

So far I don’t think that the universe is trying to block me from entering a church.  I do wonder, though, if other members of any given church would be perturbed if they knew my motives; that I don’t want to believe what they believe—I just want to share the space.  I wonder if it’s disingenuous to be there.  When I was all fundy, I know that I would not have been so welcoming to someone who wasn’t interested in becoming a full-fledged member.  However, if I dial back a bit farther in my religious history, back to when I went to church with my parents, I remember church being a welcoming, if boring place.  No one was pressured to think this or believe that; attending was enough.  After so many years of being part of something that had so little to do with grace or compassion or freedom, I forget that many churches, in fact the bulk of them, are spaces where welcoming the unsure and the unbelieving is the order of the day.

I don’t know if I’ll try the Catholic church across from the drugstore or the Anglican church around the corner from my apartment; but I intend to keep on trying until I end up in a sacred space somewhere.

Fahrenheit 451 – Not a Book Review

You might wonder where I’ve been for the past two months, since the marathon that was the 3-Day Novel Contest.  I apologize for my disappearance from the blogosphere.  In my defense, I’ve been doing some interesting stuff in real life.

I joined Amnesty International in the summer and, in September, wrote my first urgent action letter, asking for a fair trial for a political prisoner, to the Ayatollah in Iran.  That was surreal.  I volunteered on a mayoral campaign helping to write debate briefs.  That was cool until the candidate dropped out of the race.  Then I proceeded to mope for a few days.  My (former) German fuck buddy–who I had stopped fucking–stopped communicating with me after our pledge of continued friendship (a pledge made at his behest, I may add).  And because I had fallen for him, his total disregard for me was hard to digest and was cause for additional days of moping.  Now I’ve stopped moping and I’m working on his voodoo doll.

The month of October has been one long point of stress at work–two people, in a staff of six, quit within two weeks of each other.  In response to some revelations that came to light when those people quit, the remaining two of us had a less than pleasant confrontation with our management team.   That didn’t go our way, so we’re both job hunting.  This was all after an illegal pay cut back in the summer.  Sweet.  And lastly, while this may not seem like a big deal to you coupled folks, I have a swanky party coming up in two weeks, and in a rush of hope I RSVP’d for two.  I’d like to take someone who is A) not a gay man, and B) someone I actually like who likes me back–romantically.  So far, I am batting zero.  This all weighs heavy on my mind.

What bites is that there were blogworthy things going down in the past two months:  the crazy book-burning Florida preacher, the mayoral race here in Toronto, the turning of prostitution law on its head by the Ontario Supreme Court, the firing of Rick Sanchez–the list goes on.  Religion, politics and sex and I missed them all!  All things about which I have opinions but did not manage to strike with blog commentary while the iron was still red-hot.  So the question is what to say now?

Well no one’s paying me for this, so I’ve decided I’m going to be the Johnny Come Lately who talks about all these things long after they’ve been dropped from the news cycle.  The retrospective voice as it were.  In my next two posts I’ll talk about the Toronto mayoral election and Ontario prostitution law, but today, the crazy dude in Florida.

When I heard about the “individual in Florida” (thank you Obama for the most courteously dismissive way to refer to someone in a long time), I felt the way I feel when I watch disturbing documentaries about Scientology, or the Catholic church.  I just want to throw some head honcho from those organizations up against a wall, do something extremely violent to them and scream at them until they admit that they know what they’re doing is wrong.  This is my issue with the individual in Florida–not so much that he threatened the book-burning, but that he knew better.  My big beef with this individual is that I don’t believe he’s as stupid as he’d have us all believe.

Just in case you didn’t know already, this is the same individual, who had his parishioners send their children to school in T-shirts bearing the message “Islam is of the Devil” back in August of 2009 (which begs the question, why were these kids in school in August?).  I don’t know if the individual who heads up this crazy-town church is just on a membership drive every time he pulls one of these stunts, but one has to question why he doesn’t attack any other religions with this sort of vehemence.  You don’t see him having a day put aside to burn the Tripitaka or “Dianetics,” or any of the Hindu holy books.  None of the children of his church are sent to school wearing a “Buddhism is of the Devil” T-shirt.  And we all know why–none of these would do anything but elicit a bit of confusion and laughter from the general public (or a costly lawsuit from the church of Scientology)–not weeks of headlines.  You can’t convince me that this guy doesn’t know that when you throw Islam or the Quran into the mix, that it turns even the most mundane issue into a white-hot controversy.

Dave Letterman did an interview with the individual Bill O’Reilly in which he posited that O’Reilly just had to be smarter than the stuff coming out of his mouth.  O’Reilly’s answer is moot, but this is the same thing I think about the individual in Florida.  He MUST know that the things he does are automatic headline grabbers.  He can’t be that oblivious or that stupid.  He seems too quick to try to parlay his notoriety into something more meaningful (i.e. a talk with the people behind the mosque in NYC) to be utterly unaware that he might gain notoriety in the first place.  You have to wonder if, realizing the T-shirt stunt didn’t get him national headlines, he went back to the drawing board and, a year later, came up with book burning.

The part of me that wants to hear Bill O’Reilly admit out loud that he doesn’t believe most of what he says; the part of me that wants to hear a leader of Scientology admit that the tactics they use against people are criminal and awful and that the whole place is a giant pyramid scheme in which ruined lives are just collateral damage; the part of me that wants Sarah Palin to admit to stepping up her idiocy for her own political and fiscal gain; the part of me that wants to see the Pope admit that the Vatican doesn’t care about the millions of faithful Catholics around the world as long as they can hang on to the money and the power:  that’s the part of me that wants to make the individual in Florida admit that he’s a power-hungry attention whore who doesn’t give two shits about what the Bible might or might not say.  I want him to stand up and be counted amongst the many charlatans that have come before him and will come again.

But here’s the great thing about people like this individual–they can’t hide forever.  People this caught up in being this duplicitous in their public life often have more than a few damaging skeletons in their closets.  When you find an individual who spends all their time trying to erode gay rights, you can basically set your watch to the moment when they will be caught with a rent boy in a seedy hotel room.  When you find an individual who rails against prostitution or fully recognizing sex work in any meaningful way, you can be guaranteed they’ve got three hookers on speed dial.  So while I doubt that the individual in Florida has a secret Quran-reading habit or some sort of kink for making out with ladies wearing burqas, I’m fairly certain he has a predilection for something that doesn’t fall within his professed belief system.  And I will wait patiently for that day of revelation to come.  Care to wait with me?

Old Time Religion

I grew up in a religious household and while not the strictest, there were a few things that were very clear to me early on.  I needed be sorry for my sins and accept Jesus into my heart if I didn’t want to end up in fiery pits of hell at the end of my life.  Salvation was never a sure thing; sometimes re-commitment of one’s life to Christ was required.  I was re-committing on an almost yearly basis by the age of ten.  Lying, stealing, swearing, cheating and masturbation were wrong.  At the very least, you shouldn’t get caught doing them.  Drunkenness, drug use, pre- and extra-marital sex were exceptionally wrong.  Violence was only a big deal outside of the house and no one was going to call you out on anger.  But we could dance.

When I was fifteen my parents became missionaries and I went off to this missionary run boarding school in Kenya.  The school catered to many different Protestant denominations of Christianity and the code of conduct for the students was at the more conservative end of the spectrum.  I believe that it was in 11^th grade that dating couples were finally allowed to hold hands—nothing more.  And the discovery of sexual activity was enough to get you expelled when I attended.  Passing Bible class was mandatory if you wanted to graduate with what was called a “college prep” diploma.  I’m not even sure what the other kind of diploma would do to your life.  Were you doomed to vocational schools?  I have no idea—I passed Bible with flying colours.

After times like Spiritual Emphasis Week (a week of extra sermons and altar calls and whatnot), there would be open talk in the dorms about what we were going to do differently after our latest epiphanies.  I remember having a conversation with one girl about how wrong masturbation was; I’d always felt like it had to be wrong but there was never any compelling Biblical evidence.  Somehow this conversation cleared it all up—full stop, no more of that.

At this school, there was no dancing.

A week and a month after graduation, I moved to Toronto and was consumed with the goal of finding a church.  And boy, did I ever.  I’m going to leave the inflammatory language out of this, but let’s just say the environment was less than healthy.  While we paid lip service to the idea of grace, it was all about the works.  How many people have you invited to church; how many people are you doing Bible studies with; is everyone in your family group having their time in the morning with the Jesus; is everyone in your group giving as much money as they can; and on and on.  It was like being a low level administrator in a puny dictatorship.

It was during this time that my ideas about Christians and non-Christians really crystallized.  We didn’t swear, didn’t cheat, and didn’t lie (even when telling the truth was cruel, unusual and pointless); we didn’t get drunk, we didn’t masturbate, we didn’t have sex until we were married, we shared our faith constantly and we were always about the business of getting people saved.  And we danced.

And non-Christians—well they were the opposite, but they danced too.

Now I’m agnostic and I am pretty much the opposite of what I thought a Christian to be.  I cuss like a sailor, I lie if I think it’s the best thing to do (read: when I need to cover my ass), I masturbate when feeling led, I have sex if I want to, I get drunk sometimes, I have no faith to share and I don’t think anyone is going to hell.  I don’t really cheat though—I’m pathological about fairness.  And I dance.

In my continuing journey on the path of not-sure-about-godness, I’ve met or reconnected with a lot of really wonderful people who are Christians.  But their lives probably more closely resemble my life now than my life before.  And it confuses the hell out of me.  I met a Muslim fellow recently who won’t drink or smoke or do pot anymore, but he was happy to sleep with me.  He confuses me too.  I know this used to make perfect sense to me—that you picked and chose what parts of your holy book, be it the Quran or the Bible, you would adhere to.  And there was this feeling that you were picking and choosing exactly how God wanted you to—so that you really weren’t picking at all.  But now it just seems like such a ludicrous idea.

What people take and leave is the product of their upbringing, their own faults and weaknesses, their social group and that seems so subjective to me as to make it pointless to try to label this as a religion.  With all that being brought to bear on one’s beliefs, the Bible seems almost incidental.  It’s like this rule book you have around to keep you from doing something really bad that you weren’t going to do anyway.

On a certain level I kind of respect the fundamentalist behaviour of Orthodox Jews or really traditional Christian sects in which woman still wear long skirts and cover their heads.  There’s something sort of refreshingly ‘out there’ about faith that is so…out there; this faith that doesn’t allow them to blend into the main stream.  There’s an intensity to it that just demands respect.  I am reminded of Revelation 3:15-16:  I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot.  I wish you were either one or the other!  So, because you are lukewarm—neither hot nor cold—I am about to spit you out of my mouth.  I used to live in mortal fear of being lukewarm (though I suspect I must have been since I was miserable).  I have to say that most Christianity to me, as practiced, appears pretty lukewarm.

I read a Facebook post recently by someone I used to know from high school.  In it she made some pretty ‘out there’ comments about women and their role as per the Bible and how the world was working against that.  Do I want to have coffee with her?  No.  Do I have to give her props for kind of not giving a shit about what anyone might think of her beliefs, no matter how far afield of the centre?  Yes.  On the other hand, do I want anyone who thinks like her having any say in the law of the land as it pertains to my body and specifically my womb?  Balls, no.  On a political level, at least, I see the argument for not espousing extremism; or at least keeping church and state an ocean apart.

I have no great desire to see all my Christian friends turn into holy rollers.  I don’t think we’d be friends much longer.  As it is, they accept me for who I am, with my beliefs and confusion and anger about religion and what it seems to do to people, and I’m grateful for that.  Maybe I just wish they’d take credit for being good people all on their own.