One of the many reasons I love doing volunteer work at my church is because it's the only area of my life that, 100% of the time, turns out to be more fun than I expect it to be.
You know how it is. The majority of activities in life are underwhelming. You get all psyched for a party and then you get dressed up and go, and after about fifteen minutes you think "OK. I'm so bored I want to chop my own head off." or - as you're headed home from your friend's show in Pasadena at 1AM on a work night you think "Well, that's twenty dollars and three hours of my life I'll never get back..." Maybe it's just me, but most things don't live up to my expectations. Maybe I'm a bitch.
|
When I was a kid growing up in the Baptist church, they used to preach a lot about the Rapture. The church I attended with my mom and my grandma, Pleasant Valley South, was a very sweet, nurturing, wonderful place where I had many positive spiritual experiences, but that Rapture stuff - I gotta tell ya - it scared the shit out of me.
According to the Bible, the Rapture is that day, somewhere in the future, where God decides to take the righteous people up to heaven and he leaves the wicked people on earth to be judged and sent to purgatory and various levels of hell. You can imagine how this scenario might play out in the mind of a child sitting on a pew chewing Juicy Fruit gum from grandma's purse and listening to Preacher Mathis, with his Navy Tattoos running up and down his arms, expounding on how one of these days - nobody knows when - some of y'all are gonna git left.
|
Carol Anderson, the rector at my church, was one of the first women to be ordained as an Episcopal priest in the late 1970's. She is an imposing figure - an intellectual giant who is regarded as one of the world's foremost authorities on theology. Carol is a dear friend of mine and while I love and admire her, I have to admit I am still a teeny bit intimidated by her. While she's preaching she can be very warm and spiritual, but her one-on-one conversational style is brusque and direct, and you immediately sense that you'd better say what you mean quickly and get the heck out of her face because she's very busy saving the world. Woe be unto ye who try to push Carol around. You'll get a razor-sharp rebuttal straight from her genius-level I.Q. and you'll walk away with a red, smarting ego.
|
I went to Will Mecom's memorial service today. It was beautiful and sedate and elegant, with candles and communion and dignified behavior, and about ten minutes into it I thought, "What the hell IS this?" I looked around in horror at all my dry-eyed, quiet fellow mourners and wondered if I was actually dreaming that I was at some ghastly Stepford gathering and then I realized why it all felt so peculiar to me: I've never been to a funeral outside the south. "Ohhhhh .. I thought. This is how non-insane cultures do death. Interesting.."
|
