Bed, Sabbath, and beyond

NEW YORK, New York – Sunday morning. An ungodly hour. The phone rings."Aud-rey!! Go to church!" This telephonic drama would play out from across the Atlantic and the Pacific, almost every week for as long as I have lived and partied in another zip code. My mother calls, and she compels me to the Lord.

But unless she can part the sheets from miles away, she can’t always make me go to church, especially if I had just crawled into bed mere hours before. Sunday mornings are hostage, unfortunately reserved for laying prone and being nursed by a hangover as evil as Charles Cullen, the RN-gel of Death.

Yet that nagging, lagging Christian guilt would occasionally catch up with me, and I would find myself trying out different churches, like shoes to coordinate with a certain mood or outfit. But nothing really fit – one was too smiley, another was too ragingly political, and one, well, I just didn’t like the songs they sang. Unlike wardrobes, you couldn’t really mix and match, layer, or alter the hymn lines. You had to take what was given to you, and that usually consisted of more than a building and a congregation – it was an entire tradition. Sometimes it just seems like a major inconvenience not worth giving up one’s mandated day of rest for.

In the information head rush of the anything-goes ’90s, religion and spirituality for many people became a sort of postmodern mash-up of trendy Eastern philosophies, new age hoodoo, fuzzy vegetarianism, and the deep existential yearning for that perfect yoga butt. The galaxy was guided by backpackers, and freedom of religion meant the freedom to splice and mix your own personal brand of belief. It was the era (thank God, it’s over) of DJ as uber-metaphor. Indeed, God Himself was a DJ.

Something exploded early into the millennium and as the rubble cleared and the dust kicked into the sky, we realized that now more than ever, ye old-time religion was still an abundant, powerful and exquisitely destructive force. After September 11, church attendance rose, and in other climates more women chose to put on the veil. Which are rather odd responses, when you think about it. More and more, opposing forces of fundamentalism are competing for the hearts and minds of the media, like contestants on a reality show called That Organized Religion, and it’s not a fight between good or bad, just hideous.

When a Danish newspaper thought it would be a lark to put an Islamic spin to the popular conscience-burning question, "What would Jesus do?" by depicting the undepictable Prophet Muhammad in satirical cartoons, many Muslim nations rioted violently and declared a fatwa against Scandinavian breakfast pastries. But our fellow Christians are no less histrionic over offensive, heretical material – less murderous, perhaps (that element had been diluted over centuries… like a recessive gene) but the frenzy of feeling is still there, gilded beneath self-righteous compassion.

I was forwarded an article about the moral heinousness of Brokeback Mountain (a movie which I loved, LOVED by the way) written by J. Lee Grady, a so-called award-winning journalist. In his own charming words: "I never considered going to see the film because I don’t believe the Holy Spirit approves of my watching two men have sex with each other in a pup tent. I don’t care how beautiful the Wyoming scenery is… God help us…What bothers me most about the movie is that Christians who want to be relevant to society – and who don’t want to appear judgmental – will shell out $8.75 each to support this ‘artistic’ film. Besides polluting their souls with images and sounds we shouldn’t see or hear, they’ll pump millions more dollars into a film company so it can launch another moral assault on the country"; he then concludes by strongly urging the public to boycott the film; he probably considers his prayers partly answered with the Oscars’ recent denial for Best Picture.

And what exactly is the relevance of religion in a rational society? This is the controversial question the writer Sam Harris purports to answer in his best-selling religion-dissing treatise, The End of Faith. Harris essentially says that religious faith breeds lunacy (like suicide bombers and edicts on what gets taught in Bio class) and that a lot of history’s stupendous atrocities can be blamed on irrational, unsubstantiated belief, from the Inquisition to the Holocaust. The author insists that the only way our world can progress (and stop wars) is to relinquish ancient hand-me-down myths based on fusty and unreliable holy books, the same way we stopped believing the world is flat or that platform shoes were ever a good idea.

While Harris makes a point, the little mystic in me still refuses to give up my world of questioning belief for one of unquestioning non-belief. Religious extremism in any form is surely a sign of ignorance, and militant atheism is sadly quite boring when posed against the inexhaustible wonder of the world. Another book beautifully illustrates the importance of kindling hope, faith and imagination within the black organs of an oppressive totalitarian regime. The secret book club Azar Nafisi formed in Reading Lolita in Tehran was her and her female students’ way of subverting the system, or at least circumventing it. Sharia law took away almost every liberty a woman had, including the right to bare arms, ankles, and your whole head of hair.

Literature, particularly from authors like Vladimir Nabokov, Henry James and F. Scott Fitzgerald, gave them the escape velocity needed to overcome their tormentors, whether mentally or materially. Novels in general offered a vision of a different, possible reality, novels gave them an uncensurable lens through which to view and understand their own reality. Many of these books were banned in revolutionary Iran for allegedly promoting Western decadence, exemplified by outrageously foreign things like flirtatious garden parties where guests cavorted in white and ditzes were named Daisy. Yet usually that which is banned is that which people are simply afraid to understand, too lazy to burn the extra bit of brain carb. While extremism is obviously a downer to any society, the intangible, tiny faiths people ferociously enfold in their hearts can actually be a weapon against the heavy, burdensome faith of Big Religion, even if it is of the same religion.

I recently found a church in New York that I’ve been attending with sporadic regularity. OK, I admit this was initially because it offered early evening services, which didn’t impinge on the meatier part of my weekend. But I noticed a recurring theme in the speaker’s sermons: he was, insanely, against religion as well. He spoke one Sunday, in fact, on the futility of religion, while at the same time name-checking the Bible, CS Lewis and The New York Times, and there was nothing contradictory or ironic about this, or the fact that this was almost a mega-church and not some fringe sect with some sci-faux leader in white sneakers or a cinevangelist with a girlfriend named Katie. The moral law of religion, with its hard and fast rules, becomes a burden rather than a blessing; and so your Jesus Christ poseurs, the jihads and had-nots, holier-than-Tao attitudes become the stuff of hungry Pharisites: spiritual party poopers who miss the forest for the trees, or if you will, this life for the next.

So perhaps one has to lose one’s religion in order to truly find God. After all, He isn’t contained in a few verses, chants, commandments or rituals, so why should we be? It’s not really a formula, but it is quite simple – when we see love, we know it. And when we give love, we get it.

Cue swell of violins, theme from Brokeback Mountain… ta na na naaa naaaa naa….