Going to the Xmas eve service at my old place of worship

The pic has nothing to do with this entry. It’s just an arrangement that appeared on the table this morning. I will give a lengthier explanation below, for the hyper-curious; so please skip past if you are interested only in my diary entry.

About the image

Again, this is simply an arrangement of items that appeared on the table this morning. It consists of the back of the book that I was reading last night, plus an image that looks like a phone but is actually just a stiff piece of paper that came with some junk-mail advertisements – it was lying on the book just like this when I entered the room, so it seemed significant enough to photograph, at least for a blog; I mean, these entries aren’t exactly the most important things in the world, so why would one waste much time devising images to illustrate them? – and the false phone’s reddish screen pushes against the color of the cover, and the phone’s white text almost plays with the blurb of text on the book beneath. Also a plastic cap from a sports-drink bottle happened to be positioned on the table down there: it is in the right corner of the image, and I have crossed it out with blue e-pen, for no reason. Lastly, up top, one can barely make out the words in cursive on the blurry paper that is jutting from the pages of the book.

I repeat: the sight of these objects felt significant to me because of the similarities and differences of their colors and shapes.

Dear diary,

My entry from yesterday was a cliffhanger. In it, I explained how I received a postcard from my biological mother asking me to attend her church’s service on Christmas eve. I wrote that entry on Christmas eve’s eve: the eve of Christmas eve. It is now Christmas day. (Early morning; 4 a.m.) So I have the knowledge of how my story turned out, because I lived it – I moved my human body thru space and time, and saw sights and felt feelings, all appalling – so my superego now charges me with the duty of recording my take on the proceedings. That’s why I’m up slaving at my typewriter rather than sleeping soundly with the rest of the world. And visions of sugarplums dance in their heads.

So, against my better judgment, I attended church with my mother sister and aunt. It’s the church of my childhood; the one I grew up in. I hate that place. I hate its God I hate its faith I hate its ways. The only reason I yielded to my mother’s entreaty is that she claimed, as a family, afterwards, that we would chew over Pastor Tim’s sermon. Now, conversation is my favorite thing in the world; and I am dolefully tragically deprived of human interaction, in my life as a hermit; so I was looking forward to hearing all the things that my kinfolk thought. Can one have an intellectual reaction to a Reformed Church sermon?—that was the question burning in my mind. It’s like: Prepare for an evening of discussing the nutritional value of cardboard. I’m all ears for this; my dada detector is all antennae.

So the church service sucked – the music was heartless, the people were snooty, the pastor was glib; there was no GOD (as expected). And we sat in the balcony, which was supposed to ease my natural devil’s dread of false Christians; but it only increased my discomfort seventyfold, as it added the fear of heights to my compendium of neuroses: we sat in a pew that was right up against the railing, so my inner voice of wisdom kept pleading “jump-jump-jump!” For this would have been a way to end the service early. (I can’t say whether I regret not heeding its counsel.)

In short, while at the chruch, I was so ablaze with angst that my body kept shaking like Betty in the “Club Silencio” scene from Mulholland Drive (2001).

Then in the car ride home (we all rode together; my aunt taxied us) my sister breaks the silence with:

“Well, Bryan, what did you think?”

I was taken aback by this, because I assumed that they—my sister mother or aunt—would tell ME what they loved about the sermon, how it moved them, how it opened their mind to etc. NOT that I would give my assessment; for they know that I already cast my final judgment on Christianity: I wrote my own Bible for Christ’s sake. (Feel free to insert the prefix “Anti-” before the words “Bible” and “Christ.”) So I answered my sister noncommittally:

“What do I think...? Well... I don’t know; I mean, I’m not the one who wanted to go to this thing; I would have preferred to stay home, but I came along in order to prove that I’m willing to keep an open mind; plus I care about what you all think, I respect your reactions; but, you know, I wrote a lot about this stuff already—about church, God, religion—and my views haven’t changed after tonight.”

So then there’s just dead silence for the rest of the trip home.

Now we walk inside the house, and, as we’re hanging up our winter coats, I say to my sister, in earshot of all: “You see, I made a vow to keep a positive attitude about going to church tonight; even tho I assumed it would be hard for me to stomach, I intended to focus on the good and ignore what I find distasteful; but I assumed that you & mom would ease the pressure by offering some of your reactions first (since this is your cup of tea, not mine); then I could absorb your perspectives and share my own thoughts. Wasn’t that the purpose of my coming along tonight?—that I could hear the sermon, so we’d all be on the same page; and you wouldn’t have to waste time attempting to re-articulate the pastor’s message for me: you could just dive right in with your reactions. —But when you ask me, upfront, cold, what I think of it all, you force me from the get-go to appear negative and censorious, which is exactly what I wanted to avoid…”

Here my aunt breaks in and says, half to my sister & half to me:

“Yeah, Susan, I was cringing when you asked him that in the car – because I remember all the times in the past when Bryan would mouth off his weird views and cite as evidence these awful passages from the Bible that I’d never known, and it’s too disturbing; I don’t wanna get into that again.”

Now, this outpouring at once annoyed me and saddened me. So, after a few moments, I ventured to make a statement, which I hoped would smooth things over and invite conversation, so that we could get on the track that I was expecting we’d take from the start. I said to my aunt, “I understand why you say what you said, and you’re right—in the past, I went thru a period where I was very angry with the church, and I wanted to argue about Christianity, but now I’m no longer like that: I’ve changed (for the better, I hope), and I’m interested in hearing what these religious ideas mean to you personally—I don’t want to be seen as adverse or condemnatory; but, all I can do, until I’ve actually proven that I’m different, is simply to say so and hope that you’ll give me another chance. (Somewhere in the Bible, I think, Jesus recommends forgiveness.) It’s true that I was quarrelsome in the past; but my new motto is from part 4 of ‘Song of Myself’—you know the poem by Walt Whitman: ‘Backward I see in my own days where I sweated through fog with linguists and contenders, / I have no mockings or arguments, I witness and wait’.”

So nobody answered my little speech here. Everyone migrated to the kitchen and began talking about the food that was coming out of the oven. Small talk rescued the mood from my consular efforts.

Soon we found ourselves in the dining room, enjoying the Christmas meal. I was reminded of Jesus’s retort to the devil (Matthew 4:4) “Man shall not live by bread alone.”

During and after the meal, small talk continued. So, on behalf of my comrades in flames, I stood up and said: “I still like that original idea, which was writ on the invitation to tonight’s event, that we would discuss, as a family, Pastor Tim’s sermon (for otherwise, why did we all attend the service?); but, if fear of my irreligiousness bars that from occurring, then how about we focus our discussion on Jesus alone? even limit our scope to the church’s canonical gospels? & only to offer affirmation of his sayings and teachings: no censure allowed. I’d agree to that gladly; because I love his teachings sayings & acts, and I’m eager to share how much. I really do love Jesus. It’s Saint Paul who I hate…”

Then my aunt perked up and said: “You hate Paul? The book of Romans is one of my favorites in the Bible!”

And I said, “Mine too! I love it.”

And she said, “But you just said you hate Paul.”

And I said, “I hate Paul, that’s true. But I love some of his writings. I love them for their zaniness. The middle part of Romans chapter 9 is one of my favorite blasts. Can we read some of it? Just listen to verse 13 forward…” Then I grabbed a King James Bible and read:

As it is written, “Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated.” What shall we say then? Is there unrighteousness with God? God forbid. For he saith to Moses, I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion. So then it is not of him that willeth, nor of him that runneth, but of God that sheweth mercy. For the scripture saith unto Pharaoh, “Even for this same purpose have I raised thee up, that I might shew my power in thee, and that my name might be declared throughout all the earth.” Therefore hath he mercy on whom he will have mercy, and whom he will he hardeneth.
     Thou wilt say then unto me, “Why doth he yet find fault? For who hath resisted his will?” Nay but, O man, who art thou that repliest against God? Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it, “Why hast thou made me thus?” Hath not the potter power over the clay, of the same lump to make one vessel unto honour, and another unto dishonour? What if God, willing to shew his wrath, and to make his power known, endured with much longsuffering the vessels of wrath fitted to destruction: and that he might make known the riches of his glory on the vessels of mercy, which he had afore prepared unto glory, even us!

“This passage” I continued “is basically Paul admitting (unwittingly) that, despite his gigantic salvation contraption – his theological invention of Christ-blood that purportedly blinds God to original sin – we’re nevertheless all essentially DOOMED. Your fate is your fate solely because God created you to funnel thitherward; and that is all. This is in line with the end of the Book of Job, where, after God brags at length about the amoral powers of his creations, Job reacts by exclaiming directly to God: ‘My ears had heard rumors of you, but now that I have seen you with my eyes, I shudder with sorrow for the fate of mortal clay.’ Those are Job’s last recorded words. It reminds me of that passage from Max Brod’s biography of Kafka, where, while puzzling over God’s intentions in creating existence’s evils, Brod asks his friend if there might be hope outside of our world, and Kafka smiles and answers: Plenty of hope—for God… only not for us.

“Returning to Paul, tho,” I continued, “I feel that I have a right to hate him because I’m a lot like him. Paul was a hot-head, a spaz: I totally relate to that. Like how my sister Susan said earlier that, before this present life, her soul existed as an ancient Egyptian slave, I myself believe that my soul was Saint Paul the Apostle. But whereas Susan is serious and means it literally when she asserts this about her ‘past life’, I am only being provocative by identifying with Paul/Saul – I just notice parts of my personality that overlap with Saul’s, and they’re always the unlikable aspects. The reason I love Jesus is that he challenged the church of his time to awake from its lazy judgmentalism, and to relax its harsh and rigid codifications; whereas I hate Paul because, immediately after Jesus finished breaking down those ugly aspects of church, its selfish and wrongheaded ways, Paul built all this right back up again, and established a church even uglier than before. Now flash forward to today: here we are, spiritually starving after having attended the Christmas service...

“Ah! but the thought just struck me: I failed already: my remarks have gone negative. I wanted to be positive. Let me try to turn this around. Let me no longer say that I hate the church but rather that I love the potential church – I care enough about spirituality to JUST SAY NO to the lies of the Reformed Church (or if ‘lies’ is too strong, I’ll go with ‘mistakes’), and that makes me seem against church in general, whereas I’m actually yearning for a renewal of that concept of community: a revamping of it. And, like Nietzsche before me, I’m so concerned with the improvement of morality that I’ve become an immoralist. Yes I want a NEW CHURCH to be born, a Whitmanian-Blakean church, wholly democratic, where everything that lives is holy. A congregation that governs itself – no pastor necessary; priests sold separately – all our members are prophets, which is to say POETS (the term just means “makers”); there is no single ruler over us all: no king, and so no king of kings. And I know that Jesus is on my side.”

I won’t quote all the rest of the things that I said at the dinner table, because I’m out of time now—I gotta get ready for Christmas luncheon, which is at noon today. The sun rose while I was writing. But I must admit: the above entry got away from me – I intended to recount the highlights of last night’s discussion, and I ended up falling into the abyss of mine INTERMINABLE PONTIFICATION. This is a shame—a crying shame—because I didn’t even get to the climax of the event, which was my tantrum: for, after my aunt left, we who remained—mom sis helpmate & self—kept the conversation going; but neither mom nor sis made a peep about Tim’s sermon. Perhaps they’d been all religion’d out by “Saul 2.0” (Yours Truly). But I was getting angrier by the second, for I had had to endure a lot of anxiety while sitting thru that church service, and I felt that I was due some sort of payment; at least the “talk” that’d been expressed on the original contract. When it reached the hour of the wolf, I lost my cool and began to berate my mother. I called it a deceptive trick, her luring me to visit the church and then withholding the promised compensation. And she said she didn’t force me, she was in fact surprised that I acquiesced: “Ask Susan; I assumed that you’d refuse!” And Susan nodded. So I replied:

Well you asked in a way that was impossible to refuse. How am I supposed to say: NO you can’t have your “Christmas wish”! Of course I’m going to try to be a good sport; so I went along tonight. So I fulfilled my part of the deal, and now you two just sit here like tailor’s dummies and act like it’s all OK. Well it’s NOT OK. It’s a cruel trick. I hate your church. I hate your God. I hate your Jesus. This little stunt that you pulled off tonight just annihilated any respect I had for Christianity. All I wanna do now is curse God and die. I’m going to go home tonight, and while you and Susan are saying your prayers, I’ll be muttering counter-prayers mocking your God, cursing his “Son.” I’ll be worshiping the DEVIL. And it’s because of YOU. Your passive-aggressive nags are an obstruction to any future harmony. Your church claims to be the place where people can find God. That’s false, that’s wrong: A person can find God anywhere. God only acts and is in existing beings. You know what your church really is? It’s the only place where God does NOT reside. It’s where one should go to escape from God. Instead of running to Tarshish, Jonah should have joined the Reformed Church of Eagan; for God is not allowed inside the building. Your church has protective barriers surrounding it which keep God OUT and only allow in smug dreary businesspeople and baby-boomers. Selfish drones who don’t want to think about God. —And I don’t even like God, but your stupid idea tonight leaves me wasting my…

Alright I really gotta go. Now just consider this—I’m heading over to see these fools again, right now, after geysering flames for the final hours of last night…

My brother and his wife couldn’t make it yesterday, that’s why we’re all doing lunch today…

NOTE: by the time I post this, it’ll be after everything has passed, but I swear with my right hand on The Whale by Herman Melville that I’m composing all this HOT in the moment, during real time, while it’s befalling. It was important that I transcribe all my memories immediately in the wake of each catastrophe, so that when I return to read over what happened, several generations in the future, I can say I believe that, in my past life, my soul existed as Bryan’s great-great-grandmother, who (according to aunt Roxanne) when confronted by the displeased congregation with the news that they were ousting her from her position in the church’s leadership, became so irate that she had a stroke and died on the spot.