Saturday Morning Travesty: A Few Notes on Organized Religion

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The religion of my youth was highly organized in the sense that my time had to be organized around it. The basic schedule was as follows:  Arrive at the church, a bunker-like facility on the frontage road of the 101 freeway, at around 9:45 a.m. on Sunday morning. Wearing a suit and tie, hair slicked, highly presentable as one of the family's three boys.  Endure about one hour of instruction in an "age-group" Sunday school class, taught usually by a hardware store salesman or other learned man of letters.  The curriculum was not particularly organized.  We were as likely to hear the story of the parting of the Red Sea as we were to listen to another account of Jesus turning the water to wine at Cana. Were you aware that the guests at Cana were amazed that the host had saved the best wine for last, contrary to the usual practice of bringing out the swill after the celebrants were already blotto? The hardware store salesman never explained this episode in full because, you see, along with dancing, smoking, gambling, swearing, fornication and instrumental accompaniment to our singing, drinking was strictly off-limits.

Sunday school lasted about an hour, and there was then a brief recess before taking our places in the lightly-populated pews in the auditorium. The church service then began. There were two main preachers who presided over the religion of my youth, Clint L____ and Noah H____.  Clint was an older Okie and Noah was a younger, somewhat sketchy cornball.  Morning service lasted about an hour, and consisted of a few hymns (a capella, as noted), a few prayers, communion (Welch's grape juice and matzoh bread passed along the pews in round wooden trays), and then the offering. These events killed about a half hour.  Then the preacher took his place at the rostrum and delivered his sermon, which tended to last close to 25 minutes.  I think that the tendency of my mind to wander during any sort of oral presentation was probably firmly inculcated during these sessions. In about twelve years of sitting through such homilies, I only remember one brief snatch of sermon from one of Clint L's classics.  He was confronted with some cosmological number in his notes.  Let's just make one up for the sake of explanation.  It was 112, 358, 987, 354, 235, 098.  The 112 corresponds to the quadrillion's place.  I don't think Clint was familiar with such numbers, and it was a mistake to wade in thus unprepared.  So he read the number as "million," and the whole number was read out as follows:  "One hundred twelve million, three hundred fifty-eight thousand, nine hundred eighty-seven million, three hundred fifty-four thousand, two hundred thirty-five..."  (Emphases in the original sermon.)

The ellipsis indicates the point at which Clint L___ realized he was stuck.  Given his method, one would expect that two hundred thirty-five would again be followed by "million," but Clint said "thousand" (twice in a row, so to speak) and then finished nicely with "ninety-eight," bringing it all back (down) home.  As I listened to this astonishing passage, a frisson of fear passed up and down my spine.  Four hours per week, fifty-two weeks per year for twelve years, not counting Vacation Bible School (and I'd rather not think about that).  The Sunday morning service, you see, was repeated in its entirety Sunday evening, and then on Wednesday night an indoctrination session was held (mostly in the class rooms, but preceded and followed by songs and prayers).  Over 12 years that adds up to 2,496 hours of tedium.  I won't call it wasted time; life is really mostly about wasting time, although we seldom admit to ourselves that's what we're doing.

Each of the three weekly sessions was brought to a close with the "invitation."  Generally speaking, during the Sunday and Sunday evening sermons I was glad to hear the preacher begin edging into his buildup.  A mention of the tragedy of being "almost persuaded" to accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior, and then the tri-partite invitation itself.  Come forward to be baptized (the Big Enchilada), confess wrongs (second-rate, but usually the most titillating), or place membership with the congregation (small-bore administrative stuff).

As I say, I was mostly glad to hear the denouement of the sermon except for that brief period of vulnerability we called the Age of Accountability.  Generally, you knew you were in this danger zone when girls began causing funny feelings within your body on a regular and uncontrollable basis.  Let's say this is around 13 or 14 years old, corresponding to the age of bar or bat mitzvah in Judaism. In the Fundie cult sect in which I was trained, there were expectations but no strong Jewish parents to make sure it happened.  You had to make the call yourself, walk down the aisle in response to the "invitation" to be baptized, get dunked and get it over with.

Life can be weird, can't it?  How did we ever come up with that one?  John the Baptist baptized Jesus in the Jordan River, and now I'm supposed to take the plunge with Clint L___ in a walk-in hot tub behind a curtain up behind the rostrum in a Northern California town during the early stages of the Kennedy Administration.  Two thousand years later.  This tends to demonstrate that humans have never managed to come up with anything.  We're still completely clueless. We're stuck within a universe the physical laws of which seal us off from ultimate enlightenment; thus, we are left only with the shit we can make up.

Anyway, moral suasion, peer-group pressure, fear of parental wrath - they all worked together one Sunday evening in late January, 1961.  I was running out of time.  I was bar mitzvah age, I was Accountable, one false move and it was the hot flames lickin' my ass forever and ever, amen.  With roaring in my ears, with the plaintive strains of "Almost Persuaded" gently lifted on high in the characteristic off-key way by the sparse audience to this momentous event, I stepped out from my aisle seat in the second pew (this had all been carefully choreographed for maximum down-low exposure), I stepped the two feet to the front into the waiting mitts of Clint L____.

My late cousin, the novelist James D. Houston, described his own more-or-less identical experience in his novel A Native Son of the Golden West.  (TJR is moving and he found the book I had loaned him years ago.)  It's inscribed, "all good wishes - us Native Sons got to stick together, Jim May 22, 1971."
I bought the book at Jim's reading at Cody's Books, Haste & Telegraph in Berkeley.  I had finished my "higher" education at Berkeley, majoring in existentialism and heathen studies.  I was very proud to sit in the audience and listen to Jim read.

Jim's maternal grandmother was the older sister of my maternal grandmother.  His mother and mine were first cousins and best friends.  In a sense they spent their entire lives together.  They were both devoutly faithful to the Old Time Religion.  They both married taciturn Southerners of exceptional intellect who were not religiously observant if religious at all.  Both died of cancer at fairly young ages. 

In his novel, Jim becomes Hooper Dunlap (the sounds and letters of the names can be unscrambled to derive their origins), and he grows up in Glendale, California.  The old Fundie religion is clearly recognizable, but Hooper's parents are both faithful attendees, unlike Jim's real life.  Hooper is in the Danger Zone and he has to make the call.  The congregation is singing "Almost Persuaded" on a Sunday morning (Jim was always a more standup guy than I have been). So here he goes:

"Head expanding where round notes tingle, he imagines it's his own voice filling the hall and he never decides to step into the aisle.  Later he can't remember walking down. One moment he's singing, the next the light is blinding him, the stage is cracked and tilted bending through the wet he tries to blink away.

"Brother Dailey's old face is right in front of Hooper's, tears streaming, smiling, broken-voiced. He takes Hooper's hand in both of his and whispers, 'Are you coming forward to be baptized?'

"Scarlet nod. 

" 'God bless you, boy.'

"He asks Hooper to sit.  The last notes fade. Brother Dailey announces, eyes brimming, that someone has come forward.  Hooper's face is feverish again.  The preacher takes his hand, helps him stand.

" 'Do you believe with all your heart that Jesus Christ is the son of God?'

"Hooper had forgotten about that. The main reason he waited this long in the first place, and he'd forgotten it entirely. He doesn't see how anyone his age can believe that. "

I think the sentence, "Hooper had forgotten about that" is one of the funniest lines Jim ever wrote, and he wrote a lot of them.  It captures the sense of utter craziness in ritualized behavior in general, and the madness of religious conditioning in particular.  Ten years before Jim inscribed the book to me near the godless sidewalks of Telegraph Avenue, I had been asked the same question, and I think maybe I had forgotten about that, too.  I was up there to get submerged, take the pressure off and move on to the increasing pleasures of all those girls in school. I reasoned there were only about four years left in my sentence, and good behavior usually helps to make the stretch run more smoothly. Very few of us, I guess, ever get through life without impersonating someone else entirely, at least from time to time.