Just cause you feel it, doesnt mean its there...

If only it was this easy to get bacon:



When I was younger, and still living with my parents, I would do my best to skip out on going to church. I would pretend to be sick (didnt work), tell my mom I didnt want to go (didnt work), or pretend to sleep until she left the house (sometimes worked). I didnt really have a sense of anything other than self-interest. I didnt like going to church, well thats not entirely true. I abhorred it. I detested it. It felt, and did the last time I went, like an extremely boring, sham way to spend sunday mornings. If I had known how to then, I probably would have sold my soul on e-bay and then claimed that going to church wouldnt help me at all... as I would then be without proper ownership of the soul I would be saving... (if youre eleven and reading this blog, thats a sure way to get out of going to church. I recommend doing that asap!)... alas, What could I learn in that building? Obviously, it didnt teach me how to do practical things, like to use commas. If there is a ubiquitous spiritual depravity ravaging modern life, it is not to be remedied by sitting in a church once a week, pretending to talk with a imagined friend who lives in heaven... wherever that is located.



No matter what I did I would usually end up sitting in the congregation, singing poorly, watching my prayers go by my mental computer screen in all the fonts I could imagine, and ultimately wait for the two hour service and half hour socializing to end. In my memory I would somehow ALWAYS and without exception, sit near the one old lady who always smelled like garam-masala mixed with burnt hair... or near the other one who would fart and pretend not to notice. Farting in a crowd is not nice. Farting in a crowded room with a captive audience who have nowhere to go and insufficient ventilation is flat out rude. But she didnt care, she would eventually live with Jesus. Surely Jesus smiled upon such behavior, or lack of bowel control. Such was the nature of my experience with Jehovah's Witnesses.

This wasnt always the pattern. When I was even younger, my family attended a Lutheran church. My parents went to the 'adult' service and I went to Sunday school. I never figured out why they called it the 'adult' service, a title clearly used in modern life to label 3 kinds of categories 1) fully grown or developed, 2) emotionally or mentally mature, 3) sexually explicit or pornographic. Other than the nearly naked image of a man at the front of the room, I never fully classified church services into any of these categories. It shall forever be a puzzle to me...

I asked too many questions and was told to sit and be obedient, because Jesus wanted me to be that way. It was frustrating, but came to an end when we arrived early one week and found the preachers children playing with an ouija board while the preacher was giving an impromptu doomsday service (No, not the unholy comic arch-villain aka'd as doomsday... that would have been cool and we probably would have stayed). Apparently neither of these things sat well with my mom. We left that church and through some miraculous act of na-da, our bodies were spared from the inevitable bolt of lightning destined to flash the moment we set foot outside. Like much of religion, it simply didnt happen.

Then began the search. It was springtime.

After a while, some neighbors down the road heard we were looking for a new holy-house to hang in, so they invited us to come to their fabulous baptist summer blow-out bash. Baptists are known for many things, including but not limited to alliteration and boisterously fun biblical interpretation. Of course we went, how could anyone want to miss out? It was late summer then and my memory of the food would normally be the traumatic element, however on this occasion things got a little hairy.

In the middle of service, the speakers changed and my mom got up to use the restroom. We were on the innermost place of the pew, next to the isle in the back of the room. Once she left I was the closest person to the isle. The pastor (probably recognizing that I was a new face) told me to come with him as he came down the isle from finishing his talk. Of course I went with him, my mom was already out of the room and the neighbor mom said it was fine!

My next memory is one of being interrogated in his office. He was demanding that I repent my sins or I would burn in hell with Satan laughing while he stoked the fire. About ten minutes of this went by until my mother began to rampage through the building, looking for her son. She finally burst in on us and interrupted the gestapo proceedings. We went into the main hall and found our friends who had brought us in their vehicle. My mother explained what happened and demanded to leave, but they refused and told us to wait until the service was finished.

We waited outside on the steps together, fending off mosquitos and nausea from baptist picnic food.

A few months went by, during which time my mother gave birth to my sister. Interestingly enough, my sister and the ability to think for myself are two very good things to come of this story, and two of the things I value most in my life currently.

A few months later, we had a new family routine and an episcopal church. We had been going to this new church for about three months if I recall correctly. I learned how to draw the infinty symbol on their chalk boards, I liked the group of children I was with. One day when my mom picked me up from school, we needed to stop at church before going home. I sat in the passenger side of the truck and watched her walk up the snowy, icy walkway to go speak with the pastor. I watched her slip and break her leg on that walkway. I went inside and had the pastor call 911. I also had a hard time understanding why I couldnt ride in the ambulance when it came. It must have been that confusion which set me up to completely miss the reason why the pastor refused to salt the walk when my mom could finally come back to church, only now with crutches, a cast, and bolts in her leg. He said it was gods will that she fell, and he would not purchase salt to put on the walkway if no one else needed it to get into the building.

Because of limited mobility and the good judgment of my father, we stopped attending that church.

At this time there was a lot on our collective family plate. I was in school, my father worked full time, and my mother could barely manage to care for her infant daughter, much less hold down a job or manage a home on her own (for whatever reason, thats how my parents roll). Imagine our surprise, and my mothers delight, when the Jehovah's Witnesses not only knocked on the door but offered to help with the laundry, cooking, and cleaning as well. Yipee Skippy! Skittle-y-doo!

I wrestled with going to yet another new church for a long time. I would go when it was absolutely necessary in my moms eyes, yet after all the run-around, my father set a boundary on my behalf to enable me to choose (somewhat) if I would actually go.

There is so much more to write, I must hold back at this point and leave with one final thought. Transubstantiation is weird shit. Whether its the saved Witnesses taking the communion supper, or Catholics taking the Eucharist, I always thought of it as some kind of bizarre Zombie ritual. Eating the flesh of your savior as an act of maintenance for your eternal life and place in his kingdom of resurrected souls-in-the-flesh. Here is an artists depiction of what my adolescent mind was preoccupied with during prayer (in various fonts, of course):