Visiting churches: California and Arizona
For the first fortnight of February, I visited my friend Dann Dempsey in the great City of Monrovia, California; and the following places of worship:
- First Congregational Church, Long Beach
- Saint Basil’s Catholic Church, Los Angeles
- Central Christian Church of the East Valley
- Historic First Presbyterian Church of Phoenix
- the chapel at Phoenix Sky Harbor airport
- La Placita Church at the Mission of Our Lady, Queen of the Angels
- Pasadena Presbyterian Church
- the chapel at London Heathrow airport
I took Communion and participated in the imposition of ashes at First Congregational; Communion and witnessed a baptism at CCCEV; participated in an elder/deacon ordination at Historic First; caught the last of the Mass at La Placita.
First Congregational is a self-described liberal church. Seldom have I visited a church which is more liberal than I. Here, people do not say “Lord” except when singing in Latin; there has been some trouble decades ago about the divinity of Jesus not preached from the pulpit. “Blessed be”, an imperative without a noun, seemed to be enough for this congregation. There was a banner in the front of the sanctuary with a quote by Martin Luther King Junior: “The principal objective of all nations must be the total abolition of war.” I was generally pleased, but I did wonder what they have to say ultimately, when all has been stripped away like this?
On the other end of the “spectrum” is CCCEV. It felt like a theatre with no natural light, but dry-ice smoke-throwers and air-conditioning. The sermon – or shall I call it the one-man theatrical monologue? – delivered from a swivel-chair, was full of popular-culture references (even a sitcom clip on the projection screen!), complete with fill-in-the-blank sermon sheets. The preacher dissed Kanye West, ignoring that he is one of the most influential Christian artist these days, who is biasedly-committed to the Poor, and can get his Jesus Walks played on the radio. Who are you to diss Kanye, man? The whole thing fit snugly in a critical analysis of the Spectacle in the Situationist school. The bookstore had about a hundred copies of the Bible, but only in three versions: dominantly NIV, NLT, and The Message. Suitably, we went to Wal-Mart later that evening.
I note curiously that neither of these two churches actually let the Holy Communion work itself out well enough, sad to say.
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Oh man, you should have swung by and said hi… I work at City Hall in downtown L.A.
Good points on the strangeness left behind when many things are stripped away. Perhaps this article featuring another old Caltech scholar can help elucidate?
http://www.alternet.org/democracy/77498/?page=entire
Great to see that Dann is (on the evidence of his Flickr stream) doing OK.
>Who are you to diss Kanye, man?
That’s right. Did he have any specific West-related concerns?
> I note curiously that neither of these two churches actually let the Holy Communion work itself out well enough, sad to say.
I’m not sure what you mean by this. Can you elaborate?
To Mike:
The minister Cal Jernigan’s concerns were mainly about Kanye’s hubris. He quoted Kanye saying that the MTV Music Awards will lose credibility if he did not get it, and that if the Bible were to be written today he would be in it.
First Congregational kept saying that it is non-credal etc. Interestingly, the only words I could find after the phrase “We believe” were these highly-qualified ones (by the minister Jerry Stinson in a leaflet Our Liberal Theology): “We believe death brings absolute cessation of mind and body, but acknowledging mystery and the limits of human knowledge, we also affirm that that does not rule out possibilities of something beyond death, ranging from the immortality of the soul to reincarnation.” Personally, I prefer “I believe in [...] the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting”, or the Nicene formulation of “we look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come”.
In lieu of pointing out what is absent from the experiences at the two churches, let me point out what Holy Communion should be, in the words of the Misa Campesina Nicaragüense (recently celebrated in Oxford): “La comunión no es un mito intrascendente y vanal – es compromiso y vivencia toma de consciencia de la cristiandad. Es comulgar con la lucha de la colectividad. Es decir ‘yo soy cristiano’ y conmigo, hermano, vos podes contar.” (In Rachel Stringfellow’s translation: “The communion is not a trivial and irrelevant ritual – it’s a promise and a reality, a Christian waking of conscience, when we receive the Host, we are receiving the struggle of our people – which means that when I say that I’m a Christian, be sure, my brother [sic], that you can count on me.”)
In re Kanye, here’s what Christgau said about Public Enemy’s Chuck D back in 1987: “It may seem redundant to accuse a rapper of arrogance, like accusing a politician of seeking power . . . .”
Let me say that at both First Congregational and East Valley, the Words of Institution were either not said, went past so fast that there was neither the sense of occasion nor the time for them to be noticed, let alone to sink in.