—Otherworldly. The Eastern Orthodox, with their domes and incense, the way they make you stand and chant till you’re exhausted, have got this on lock. No one will ever compete.1 Still, there’s more than one kind of otherworldly. One time I walked into the lit-like-a-shopping-mall sanctuary of a very this-worldly Episcopal church I was then attending to hear a local jazz group playing Sun Ra’s “We Travel The Spaceways.” That sounds like a gimmick but that song is so joyous and melancholy, and most of all so gentle, that it worked, and made me wonder what an Afro-Futurist but thoroughly small-o orthodox liturgy would feel like.
—Like an AA meeting but for sin. Walls like cell blocks. Shitty coffee. Annoying people. Pitiless, merciless, glamorless self-examination, so that one can put the self aside entirely. The “termite art” of churches. I once knew a philosophy grad student who made an argument from Jamesian pragmatism for the existence of God, based on the fact that that AA higher-power shit had really worked for him, and for a large number of AA people he knew. There can, of course, be nothing more Jamesian than arguing for God’s existence on this basis. William James is always in effect saying “I have no time for ‘metaphysics.’ Tell me about this ghost you saw.”
—Paintstakingly fancy but also barely hanging on. The liturgy is performed with absolute respect and commitment. Everyone tries as hard as they can. Nobody has any money or talent. The resulting solemn-children-playing-dressup effect constitutes an ongoing living demonstration of St. Paul’s “My strength is made perfect in your weakness.”
—In the woods. More churches should be in the woods.
—In the pretend-woods. In the spirit of Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, where she goes full madwoman-mystic over a basically prosaic strip of “nature” amid ugly suburbs, some churches should also take place in the thin strips of woods and bits of impromptu-zoo that subsist on the margins of (or erupt in the middle of) cities, towns, and suburbs. They should memorialize the possibility of woods where woods aren’t quite yet, just as we, ourselves, memorialize the possibility of full humanity (AKA the kingdom of God) without fully actualizing it. Do not get a permit.
—Incognito. What if, before every service, you had to put on a black veil, Hawthorne’s-minister style? What if you had to dress like that on the way to church, and you had to take a different way there every time, as though you were a diplomat’s child avoiding Shining Path kidnappers? Or what if church took place at a different location every time, and you got instructions from the captain of your cell via Signal message at 2AM the night before as to where it’s happening? And then the actual content of the service is utterly conventional.
—A roving gang, but virtuous. Using off-grid messaging systems, you pick the two or however many hours a week that you’re at “church.” You assemble in secret, read out a bit of Colossians, pray together, and someone ordained distributes the bread and wine. It all takes ten minutes. Then, for the rest of your “shift,” you go around witnessing and documenting police interactions with poor people and people of color. You find ICE raids to disrupt (tallest respectable-looking white guy to the front! Blondest white woman in Lululemon to the side, acting clueless and looking for a lost cat and getting in the way!) You search for instances of street harassment and descend upon the perpetrators like those awesome bicycling women in Born in Flames (1984). You help old ladies across the street and distribute tenners to any begging person who isn’t visibly high that second. You mutter “Jesus loves you”—don’t yell it, that’s annoying.
—Punk. Churches should confront and blaspheme. Not, of course, against God the creator, the love in whom all spacetime is a parenthesis, nor against God the son, in whom God entered spacetime to save our sorry asses, nor against God the spirit who plays in ten thousand places. I mean blaspheming that God would be stupid. We like God, or at least we’re trying to learn how to. Churches should instead attack and blaspheme against the god of this world, who loves a hierarchy but doesn’t believe that anything is excellent, who thinks you have to earn the right to exist and enjoys nothing more than taking hard-won bread away from someone who never stops working, who wants to make everything and everyone his mouthpiece but doesn’t have shit to say, who loves the strip club but things women are stupid and ugly. A person you flee at parties. Churches should, occasionally, find creative ways to mock, satirize, and beard this false god, without making him too much the focus of their thoughts and efforts. So maybe like once a year. They should, at these designated times, e.g.: buy and relieving the debt of people who can’t afford to pay it and who are genuinely feckless and don’t “deserve” the help2; purchase voting shares in corporations and give them (plus the income thus derived) to the halt and the lame, who grind down shareholder meetings thereafter with increasingly surreal demands; follow a rich man and his security detail in an unthreatening but unsettling way, smiling broadly and saying “Christ died for you! You don’t have to live like this! You can repent any time you want! Your children can grow up normal!”; do short-form exorcisms at business schools;3 take a group piss on one of those AI data centers (since those machines like water so damn much); etc.
—Goth. Repent, lament, regret. This world is a burden to its children. This world is an insult to its creator. This world is bullshit. At church, a Kohl-eyed woman in black reads a long litany, composed afresh each week, of the signs of humanity’s failure, the congregation punctuating every fifth or sixth item with “Woe! Woe!” or the like. Before you eat the bread and the wine, you are reminded that it is God’s body that keeps you alive, you have not and cannot escape the cycle of predation and consumption, you have not ceased to trouble the Lord God and cannot do so even by suicide (so don’t even think about it!), everywhere you go you bring sin. You exit the building to the strains of Siouxsie and the Banshees’s “Monitor,” not for any theological reason but just because it fucking wails.
—Normie. Go to the beach on a nice day, grill up a mess of Impossible Burgers, hand them out to anyone who comes by. How ‘bout those [local sports team]. Jesus died to free you from death. Have a great day.
PS: I would like to apologize to Ben Crosby, personally, for this post
Also This Week
—Commonweal ran an excerpt from my book. (Cough.)
—Friend of the newsletter Bradley Brabendir invited me to contribute to a symposium on the films of the great Paul Thomas Anderson; I rewrote an old post quite a bit to yield this essay on Magnolia. The other entries in the series are frankly better: Tim on Hard Eight; Jeremy Zeitlin on Boogie Nights.
—The Michigan Daily invited various members of faculty and staff at the University of Michigan to describe some of the characteristics we’d like to see in the university’s next President. Here’s a bit of what I wrote:
I’m not just being nice when I say that the whole piece is good. Silke Weineck drops fucking bars in this thing. So does Justin Joque, who stands up for the honor of dusty old books, and Yi-Li Wu, who describes the Presidential search committee as looking “like a CEO search for a biotech corporation.” I also appreciated Anonymous Staff Member. Among others.
I realize the otherworldliness looms larger for a Protestant wonder-bread-fed outsider like myself, but based on what I’ve read of specifically Orthodox theology, it’s also intentional.
You should also, as a routine matter, help the deserving poor; the point is to help all the poor and also to occasionally give a good whack on the head to the whole concept of “deserving.”
Just the “we renounce Satan and all his works” stuff, not the whole ritual
Sort of like the 95 theses for our time, but pithier, and at least as necessary.
"My strength is made perfect in your weakness" comes at a perfect time for me. I've been going to a tiny Anglo-Catholic church and have been simultaneously moved and puzzled by both the sincerity of its incredibly formal liturgy and also the essential shabbiness of it all (the eight or so attendees don't support a lot of extraneous pomp). I am used to High Church, but even so there is a certain spookiness in doing the bare rituals with no choir, no acolytes, no organ music, no rich donors. So why do we play dress-up like this at all? You've hit upon it. It's "weak," in a very, very good way. It would be even better if they moved the whole thing out onto the median strip.