This very interesting piece in The New Criterion about the Church of England (written by a minister in the church) has almost too many bizarre elements to believe – I found myself laughing out loud at some of it (especially in the beginning) – but of course the entire thing reminded me of Eddie Izzard’s brilliant routine about the Church of England, which culminates with him imagining what would have happened if CofE were in charge of the Spanish Inquisition. The choices: “Tea and cake, or death?”
“Thank you for flying Church of England, cake or death?”
“Church of England is really more like a hobby.”
“The reading today is from … a magazine I found! Apparently, pink lipsticks are all the rage right now … and … uh … well … ” [light bulb goes on in his brain] “This reminds me of our Lord Jesus!”
“We need to have some principles, get us some principles!”
“There really isn’t any sin in the Church of England. You say, ‘Oh, Vicar, I have sinned.’ He says:” [in a kind of lush-y voice] ” ‘Well, so have I.’ ”
From that essay:
I recently attended a conference for clergy at a beautiful medieval church in Oxford. It was supposed to be a choral Eucharist but there was no organ musiconly some plinky-plonky stuff on an out-of-tune piano and mindless choruses in the Jesus Goes to Toytown fashion: interminable glum repetition of what was not worth singing once.
Then the Bishop came on and told us that at the laughably misnamed riot called The Peace he didnt want us merely to shake hands but to hug one anotherand not just to hug one another, but to put our arms on our neighbors shoulders and say three times, You are everlastingly loved. When, with varying degrees of squeamishness, grown men fawned on one another in this way, the Bishop came on again in full pantomime mode and said, Not loud enough! Againlouder! Not one word from the Book of Common Prayer throughout the three-day conference or indeed from any source that might be identified as religious in the traditional sense.
I swear to God, if someone made me put my arms around a stranger’s shoulders and shout “You are everlastingly loved” at them, three times, I would walk out. Don’t shout at me, Vicar. For God’s sake, that is so fucking ridiculous. I don’t even know what I’m really reacting to – and why it grosses me out so much … Maybe because that encounter group stuff turns me off? But it doesn’t really … I mean, not just because it’s encounter group-ish. It’s just … First of all, it has a groupthink aspect to it – and a peer pressure aspect to it (“Why aren’t you shouting as loudly as that man over there? You must not REALLY mean it, you’re not trying hard enough…”) that I find abusive and disturbing.
To have a priest scream “louder” at you? Fuck. You. As though your VOLUME is some indicator of the sincerity in your heart. What a total misunderstanding of not only spirituality and religion but of humanity itself. We all know that the loudest people are often the biggest assholes on the face of the fucking planet, and the people who are quiet, and humble, and shut the fuck UP are the ones doing the real good deeds.
It reminds me of acting classes I’ve been in – doing certain relaxation exercises – where the person who starts bawling first is roundly congratulated and held up as the good example. As though tears on face = good acting. Many charlatan acting teachers make it their GOAL to produce tears on the faces of their students … they’re all about “catharsis” – but in the end, that has nothing to do with acting, and it’s just fucking phony. And so someone like myself – who is a good actress but who isn’t necessarily a big “cry-er” would be pushed and pushed to get tears on my face. This has nothing to do with acting. This has to do with a stupid teacher who gets some ego boost out of making people cry because it makes her feel like a good teacher. So I’d be lying there on my yoga mat, listening to the weeping and wailing around me, the room filling with sounds of ululations … thinking: “Uhm … okay … if I just CRY then this class will be over much quicker.”
So much for sincerity in acting. I can squeeze out a few tears, sure I can. Here are the tears. Where’s my prize? It turns acting in the phoniest of enterprises, phony mcphony, man.
So that’s what it is. “You are everlastingly loved” strikes me as fucking PHONY and I’m with Holden Caulfield on this one: there is nothing I have more contempt for than people who are fucking phonies.
And I just … listen to this:
the giggling theological colleges are run like childrens television.
wow. hahahahaha It actually is a very humorously written article, although quite a sad indictment of the church itself.
And so we come back to the real question:
Tea and cake, or death?
Tea and cake or death. Tea and cake or death. Little red cookbook, little red cookbook, Tea and cake … orrrrrrr deaaaaaaath???
Uhm … cake, please?
(If you don’t know who Eddie Izzard is, then I have a couple things to say. First of all: What the hell is your problem??? Second of all: that entire last section is from his HBO special Dress to Kill.)
In addition to that, talking about the CofE also always reminds me of the episode of Yes, Prime Minister in which Jim Hacker, now PM, has to appoint a bishop. The Church Commissioners have presented him with two candidates: a disestablishmentarian, and an atheist. The deliciously fiendish and manipulative Cabinet Secretary, Sir Humphrey Appleby, portrayed by Nigel Hawthorne so wonderfully that “Sir Humphrey” is now shorthand for all British civil servants, is pushing the atheist, and the dialogue, as I remember goes something like this…
SIR HUMPHREY: Prime Minister, the Church of England is not a religion; it is a social institution. It’s like the Times or the Bank: most people have nothing to do with them, but it still comforts them to know they exist. The Church without the Queen is simply unthinkable.
HACKER: What about God?
SIR HUMPHREY: I think He’s what they call an “optional extra.”
Your reaction reminds me of something my wife said. She was raised as a Catholic, and attended Catholic schools. After the revelations(no pun intended)about Priest abuses, etc., my wife had a crisis of faith in the Catholic Church. She began to attend a large, suburban Lutheran Church. After several months of feel-good, emotion-laden services, she went back to her Catholic beginnings. She said, “I am a Catholic. We are supposed to sit there, feel guilty, and be quiet about it.”
Dave J – hahahahaha Exactly!
DBW – hahahahaha I know just what she means. :)
I like to feel good in church, too, but I don’t like to shout about everlasting love at a complete stranger and hope it will bring me closer to God.
We attend a church that’s perhaps a little more feel-good than I would like. My daughter, who is 18, has mentioned the possibility of her looking for another church to attend. (I did the same at her age and so am not surprised.) She sez she would like to find one that’s a little “stricter”. “At our church it’s all just, ‘Jesus loves you! Whatever!'” I know what she means and would have worried about that but she’s always set fairly high moral standards for herself and has never needed them imposed from outside. If she’d been a different kind of person we probably would have had to look for a “stricter” church.
I really hate manipulative crap wherever I run across it, and if our preacher had ever tried to tell us to go through that everlasting love nonsense we would have left at once and never gone back. I also hate tear-jerking anecdotes that have nothing to do with the sermon. We have noticed a precipitate decline in those over the past year, so presumably somebody besides us doesn’t like them and has said something.
At least we have a really terrific music program. Our music director says that God deserves the best, so we have Bach and Mozart and Schubert as well as spirituals and really good hymn arrangements. Sometimes when I’ve been kind of tired of that church it’s been the music that’s kept me coming back. Now I’m a deacon so I have to go, ha ha.
Oh Laura – “Jesus loves you! Whatever!” Thank you so much for giving me pretty much the only laugh of the day!! hahaha
That’s awesome that you have good music. so many churches (except for black churches it seems) seriously lack in the music area.
This is somewhat of a hot button issue for me.
I am what is generally regarded as Mainline Protestant (Disciples of Christ). There have been some changes in some congregations that bother me a bit.
I don’t like the hugging thing. I’m not a hugger. I don’t like people I don’t know well touching me that much. It creeps me out a little even though I know it’s well-intentioned. (And what’s to say that, perhaps, in some cases, it’s not entirely well-intentioned. I mean, I’m an, ahem, well-built 36 year old woman. I can see some guys going “yeah, I’m gonna go over there and wish HER the ‘peace’.” )
I don’t like the poppy music. It’s banal. It’s treacly. It also can get very very – I don’t know what the word is here, but the theme is “Jesus loves me and I’m saved and it’s me me me and I’m special because Jesus loves me” There’s no grandeur, no sense of any *expectations* that come with the good-feelings of being loved by Jesus. For that matter, little sense of community – it’s all about “me” in those songs. A lot of the “praise songs” feel too much like Top 40 radio for me.
The congregation I currently belong to avoids a lot of this – we mostly use the “classic” hymns along with a fair amount of gospel material. We “pass the peace” at the end of church by shaking hands with other people and, if we are so disposed, using the formula “The peace of God be with you.” “And also with you.” I like that; to me it seems dignified and respectful. I like a little dignity with my worship; to me it speaks of the “otherness” of the experience – it’s not the same as going to work or going to a picnic or just hanging out with your friends; there’s a deeper dimension to it.
But my congregation is mostly composed of people 30 to 40 years my seniors, and it’s dwindling by the day. I fear for the time when my choices in worship are basically the same – I really am not moved by the pop “praise songs” and I’m annoyed by the touchy-feely nature of some congregations. And I admit to being more than a little frightened by the demonstrativeness of some denominations – where people will fall down in the aisles, or will sing while waving their hands over their head. Or breaking into tears regularly in the middle of worship. I cannot do that. I do not think I could learn to worship in that way. I fear strong emotion in myself and work hard to keep strong emotion under control; to me, giving ‘way to it even in worship is not something I am comfortable with.
ricki –
If people need to break down in tears, then that’s fine – but what I don’t like (at least in the article I linked to)is the pressure on everyone to have to worship in the same way. Like – if you don’t break into tears, you’re somehow not as connected to God. Bah.
that’s what I meant but probably didn’t state very well.
I went to a service at another church once and was kind of uncomfortable – people were looking at me like, “You’re sitting there with your hands folded in your lap? What kind of lukewarm Christian are you?”
I don’t like the feeling that people are competing with one another to show how “Spirit-filled” they are and sometimes that’s the sense I get. I could be wrong.
I’m just not a very demonstrative person. It doesn’t mean that I don’t feel things deeply, or have what I consider a real and complex faith. It just means I don’t like feeling like I’m drawing attention to myself.
Oh, I think you stated it perfectly. I couldn’t agree more.
Yeah – the competition thing. That’s why I brought up my bogus acting classes where all the students were competing to see who got the tears on the face first – as thought that meant that they were the best actor in the room. Emotion like that is shallow.