Religion

When I was 11 years old, I told Rev. Boland that I didn't believe in God. He replied without criticism that "You're not the first one." I concluded that Rev. Boland didn't believe in God, either. He was a good minister who people listened to and admired. A couple years later, he quit our congregation and moved to the Apostle Islands in Lake Superior. Quite beautiful up there and almost no Germans. I don't remember the replacement minister's name, but he wanted to build a new concrete block building for social activities, and he fired my mother, who played the organ in church a dozen years somewhat badly. God eventually caught up with him, disbanded his elderly debt-laden congregation, and later destroyed the historic Friedens church with a bolt of lightning that ignited its steeple and gutted the interior.

In college, I went to a splendid old Catholic church and asked the priest how it was possible to perform rituals that were obviously crazy? He said it was important for social control, to keep people from doing wrong. Made no sense. His parish was too rich to do wrong.

In Tripoli, it was almost impossible to shop for food. Minarets blared five times a day, and shops closed for prayers. There was one bookstore in downtown Tripoli. It was jammed with hundreds of Korans, all kinds of fancy bindings, no other books, no foreign newspapers. I pitied the guys who flew to oil rigs in the desert. Pilots in flight knelt and prayed. They used bungie cords lashed to their control column as an autopilot. Allah flew the plane. Muslims actually believe that everything happens according to the Will of Allah. Two plus two equals four because Allah wills it, and Allah could change his mind, make it humanly incalcuable.

I learned to be tolerant of friends and neighbors who attend church. They're good, decent people who have been kind to me, a sort of reverse toleration, which puts me in mind of the Maryland Toleration Act of 1680 or thereabouts (I forget the exact year). Catholic Maryland pledged to tolerate other sects of Christianity, particularly Nonconformists and Anglicans,  and to put atheists to death and burn their homesteads.

In the U.S. Supreme Court case of Engel v Vitale, the court held that we are a religious people and we have Christian symbols and slogans on our money, Congress prays before they begin each session of legislation, and the Supreme Court itself has prominent architectural features that pledge allegiance to the Ten Commandments, and therefore prayer in public schools is unconstitutional. Atheists took this as a cue to tear down public Christmas displays of cows, sheep, and kneeling kings adoring a plastic Baby Jesus in a manger. Reindeer led by Rudolph with an electrified red nose are okay, I think, although strictly speaking, Santa is a religious figure, transmuted from an historic Saint Nicholas who threw gold through a window to save three daughters from imminent sale into slavery by an impoverished father. Santa became a jolly old fat man in red courtesy of Coca Cola advertising art. In Holland, "Sinta Klas" wears a white robe and red bishop's miter, accompanied by a servant, to give gifts on December 6th, unrelated to Christmas, which is a solemn ceremony, although scholars know that Jesus was born in springtime, and the DOB was moved to late December to co-opt pagan winter rites involving little fir trees, burning logs, reindeer meat, heavy drinking, and revelry.

My parents were partly pagan. I was born in late September.

Forgive me, just thought of something. Music is holy. My mind flashed back to Los Angeles in the late 70s. The Blue Note jazz club was on the top floor of a Hollywood office tower. The Baked Potato was on Cahuenga, a stone's throw from Universal. The Lighthouse was in Santa Monica, and there were headliner jazz concerts in Orange County. Over the years, I worked backstage at a bunch of big showrooms in Sydney, London, Lake Tahoe, and the Bay Area, never tired of music, always enjoyed multitrack mixing, working with choreographers and dancers, dozens of superlative musicians and shockingly gifted vocalists.

Amen.

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