the inmate's journal : spring fragrance

now you may not have been to a church like the assembly.  maybe it makes you want to go.  all that strange undressing.  i admit - you could do worse than jesus, nonstop singing, and matriarchal mayhem.  you could do spring fragrance, the church i returned to, the church that was so devoid of god i went to seek him in a bank.

 

yet at the time of sister gooch’s induction, i was still green, a fledgling flower of hope, believing god could be found in the institution that claimed his name.  how sweet the young in their faith.  how sweet the young.

 

in this age when the internet, in good adolescent fashion, assumes the burden of hope and despair, and the church drools its geriatric spittle while retelling the stories of its past, many of you may not have visited a church for anything other than that great anachronism, a wedding.  or, maybe, in drunkenness or a dare, from children or cancer, for music or for pageant, in poverty or in poverty, you visited once or twice until you recovered your senses and went to the mall and gave your debt to whom it truly belongs.

 

yet - and i ask this in authentic curiosity and horror - what if your only ecclesiastical experience has been at the roman catholic cathedral in your megapolis at christmas - the cardinal dressed like a medieval warlock, hairless boys offering him hats like robotic haberdashers, incense so thick god’s sneezing, and the illegal immigrant congregation kneeling, standing, and sitting as if their ancestors had always been papists.

 

what if your only experience was dill pickle united church of christ, where the mean age is 87, and 60% of the faithful are sent flowers every sunday and rev. spookum, freshly graduated from union theological seminary and full of karl barth, speaks long and bookishly (and, in his own special way, with animation) of the kerygmatic center which is not something under our jurisdiction, but something perpendicularly from above controlling us.  and you watch the seven or eight other members snoozing and hacking and mentally rewriting their wills, but misspelling everything, and thought, now i understand the simpsons.

 

the church is a perverse and polymorphous beast, sliming on the earth, egregiously insentient.  it howls like a pack of dogs on ecstasy, has the crazies like a cat, plays dead like an opossum, sheds skin like a snake, smokes cigars like freud, dances like odysseus, and puts on lipstick like ava gardner.  it has not three aspects like its triune god, nor six like the blind men’s elephant, but infinity minus one over nothing.  the church’s formula thus is—

 

∞-1

0

 

i'm no mathematician, but let me explain.

 

∞ is the sum of all the people who have ever entered a church times the number of people who have ever thought of entering a church times all the people who have thought of church times all the people who can spell church times all the people who can’t times all the sins that have been confessed times all the sins times fornication times smoke and fire times suffering times absence times death times pews and prunes and farts times everything.  whatever else that is, it’s infinity.

 

-1 is the indicator that the church is less than god.

 

0 is god.

 

there, theologians:  stuff that it in your curriculum and puff on it.

 

anyway, i’d been around.  in my early days, i was a bit of a church slut.  but the assembly, with all that flailing, made me long for something with the appearance of sanity.  and that, i thought, was surely spring fragrance, the church i had been baptized in as a 13-year-old desperate for cosmic love, the church of reverends with real degrees, who could marry people and not get arrested, the church where coital acts were stuffed where they belonged - in the marital mattress, a church full of managers and teachers and accountants and even vice-presidents and non-sodomizing professionals who always finished their cheerios.  every last circle.

 

it was a baptist church, of the respectable kind, nestled in the heart of a respectable suburb, with respectable members and respectable deacons and respectable rites and a very respectably mown lawn.  jesus, albeit a different jesus than rev. weal’s, was most evidently here.  you could tell by this spiritual dexterity that jesus was a good guy - he’d be friends with anyone.

 

if you know anything about baptists, though, you know they’re not always respectable.  they’re the great shape-shifters of the church - sometimes episcopalian wannabes, sometimes charismatic clowns, with an orator here, a demagogue there, here a skank, there a skank, everywhere a skank-skank, old mcjesus is lukewarm, ee i ee i o.

 

the nice thing about spring fragrance is that it was right smack in the middle of everything.  it was okay to raise your hands once in a while, but not too often … and never to flap like the freemans.  okay to sing, but not too long and never as if you really believed it.  okay to talk, but not talk about things that weren’t nice.  okay to have power, but not too much power.  okay to have a bit of mould around your bathtub, but not too much mould.  okay to read the newspapers, but only the right newspapers.

 

because it aimed for the average and hit it so successfully, the church was jammed every sunday - a thousand people, making kilomoney and egochildren, contributing to home depot’s bottom line, gathered in collective non-hysteria to feel good about their acquisitiveness and conformity.

look down a deep well, o christian, see a distant reflection of yourself, and call it lord.