Sunday, January 14, 2007
This Week in God
This morning at church the bishop said our mass, which meant that we had slightly better production values -- you know, larger hats, more musical numbers and the like. It also meant that the lady in front of me whipped out a funsaver camera and started taking random pictures of the bishop, apparently taking a loose definition of the term "fun." I'm not really sure what the occasion was, but he didn't try to convince me to join the seminary or bomb an abortion clinic, so I was fairly satisfied.
During the mass, though, my mind wandered a bit, as it sometimes does. This time I was thinking about my childhood religious experiences, however, as opposed to sex or the unwatched episode of Janice Dickinson Modeling Agency on my DVR. I used to have to spend every Wednesday night (I remember it was Wednesday because I always had to miss Unsolved Mysteries) taking Public School Religion class (or PSR, as those of us in the know call it). Each week we read aloud from a book called Growing in God's Love that had pictures of people in seventies clothing playing acoustic guitars on the cover. Of course, many of the kids in my class were from a neighboring farm town where reading didn't quite take the priority of going to the Dairy Queen or wearing purple denim, so it was often slow going. I recall that one of them once posited that the fruits of the Holy Spirit were apples, oranges, and bananas, causing the severe nun who ran our class to swell up with rage and announce that there was nothing funny here, a statement which was seldom if ever true. She had the same reaction when Sara Stumpf, whose father ran the second most successful tire yard in town, asked her if she had hair under her wimple.
I also spent three or four years as an altar boy, an experience I loathed, and not just because I once nearly got heat stroke during a four hour May Crowning service. Primarily I just hated being bossed around all the time -- hold this Bible up, carry that body and blood of Christ, wash these hands of that impurity -- it got pretty old. Plus those vestments didn't look good on anybody. The androgynous look is a hard sell.
This morning at church the bishop said our mass, which meant that we had slightly better production values -- you know, larger hats, more musical numbers and the like. It also meant that the lady in front of me whipped out a funsaver camera and started taking random pictures of the bishop, apparently taking a loose definition of the term "fun." I'm not really sure what the occasion was, but he didn't try to convince me to join the seminary or bomb an abortion clinic, so I was fairly satisfied.
During the mass, though, my mind wandered a bit, as it sometimes does. This time I was thinking about my childhood religious experiences, however, as opposed to sex or the unwatched episode of Janice Dickinson Modeling Agency on my DVR. I used to have to spend every Wednesday night (I remember it was Wednesday because I always had to miss Unsolved Mysteries) taking Public School Religion class (or PSR, as those of us in the know call it). Each week we read aloud from a book called Growing in God's Love that had pictures of people in seventies clothing playing acoustic guitars on the cover. Of course, many of the kids in my class were from a neighboring farm town where reading didn't quite take the priority of going to the Dairy Queen or wearing purple denim, so it was often slow going. I recall that one of them once posited that the fruits of the Holy Spirit were apples, oranges, and bananas, causing the severe nun who ran our class to swell up with rage and announce that there was nothing funny here, a statement which was seldom if ever true. She had the same reaction when Sara Stumpf, whose father ran the second most successful tire yard in town, asked her if she had hair under her wimple.
I also spent three or four years as an altar boy, an experience I loathed, and not just because I once nearly got heat stroke during a four hour May Crowning service. Primarily I just hated being bossed around all the time -- hold this Bible up, carry that body and blood of Christ, wash these hands of that impurity -- it got pretty old. Plus those vestments didn't look good on anybody. The androgynous look is a hard sell.
