I went to church today
I've been getting twitchy about needing a community of people to share
myself with and to learn from and to be with. S and I have been
working on finding a church that could work for both of us (and M!).
I am not sure about church in general, and not totally sure about God,
but maybe I can be sure about a specific church. Church (I am hoping)
has the property that you can be ambitious in a way that you can't in
other communities (like the Contra dance). If I were the benevolent
dictator of the Contra dance, we would have a lot more food, and a lot
more structured social interaction and opportunities to be good to
each other. But the organizational goals of the contra dance group
aren't that ambitious. Anyway. Maybe that just means that I need to
live those individual goals and not worry about the formal
organization. But Church... We've stopped by the Disciples of Christ
church downtown, and Evangelical Community Church, near 2nd street. I
grew up Episcopalian, went to the Unitarian church for a while, now
I'm here. S grew up apart from church and found a community in the
Baptist Student Union.
Today I want to a place northeast of town called City Church for All
Nations. http://www.citychurchfamily.org/ Cool name! They had flags
from all different places hung around the walls. When I went in, it
was intimidating to a stuck up old Episcopalian like me, because the
lights were low and it was kinda like a rock concert. The first 20
minutes of the service were all music. Heh, it's interesting to
compare the congregational chant traditions of high-churchy places
(Taizé chant; Music that makes community) with the praise music at a place like this.
Both are easy music, both are REPEATED a LOT of times. Oh, and the
music at the African Methodist Episcopal church, too! I sang there
because of a joint-choir thing with their musicians and the Unitarian
Universalist choir. The gospel-influenced ones all have this
structure where the band leader makes hand gestures, holds up 1 or 2
fingers, or motions "keep going." If I'm right, the Taizé
chants don't have an A/B/C part structure, they repeat a single
musical sequence many times. Man, I have more to say, but I've got to
stop geeking out, and talk more about the church.
So there really were people from a lot of places and races and that
was cool. During the passing of the peace, I shook hands with an old
black guy, and I realized that was the first time in months I'd
touched a black person. I think. Oh, academia. Oh, suburbia
midwestish. Oh, Thomas. What does that mean?
So, the music was repetetetetitive and the words didn't mean that much
to me... "grace is falling down like rain"... I guess it was hard for
me to be in a place where I could appreciate that.
The preaching was very powerful. David Norris talked about Psalm 23,
and I guess I can't really tell his whole sermon here, but it made
sense to me. He referred straight to the Hebrew for some of the words
("valley of the shadow of death"), which surprised me because I would
have assumed that an Evangelical church would be really based on the
King James version of the Bible. So, neat. And I guess what really
got me was how real it was, and how participatory it was, and he was
reaching out, and people could reach back with their words. Not a
style of worship I'm used to, but I liked it.
They gave me a coffee mug on my way out! What does that mean?
Everything was so slick... their web site is all hardcore black and
green and they have icons for each of their ministry groups. And they
have coffee mugs. The parish announcements were done via a 5 minute
long video with pretty impressive production values. I don't know how
much of it shared week to week, but if they do that same thing each
week, that's probably 10+ hours of work, if you include rounding up
the people to make each announcement and stuff.
They had people who would pray with you up at the front, and I went up
there and someone laid hands on me and prayed with me, and that was
good. I like that. S has done that for me before too, and that
feeling of human contact and praying for good is really very powerful.
I guess I am raw today... I listened to Violet Hill by Coldplay while
writing this, and it had me bawling...
I'm raw, and I'm talking about things that I don't usually say. Let
me say again that I don't know much, and I hope you will see and
accept my non-knowing. With love for my friends and family,
~thomas~
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