Whip My Hair, Jesus

Well I tried the nearest New Thought church again this a.m. and it was even more excruciating this time. Without really Getting Into It? I come from the Be still and know that I am God school of totally austere Quaker-meeting type of silence thing. These people have amps. They sing Stevie Wonder and Michael Beckwith and "Wonderful World" and had a fat lady in about five yards of white satin get up and sing the same "Ave Maria" she was singing before the service started. Last I checked neither "Ave Maria" nor "Wonderful World" were at the top of the Calvinist hit parade. I won't even go into how amped it is, for an audience of maybe 125, and how, uh, completely oh-God-please-just-shoot-me-now the "Ave Maria" was. I was literally blushing with shame. No, maybe it was the jazz hands. Or the comedy workshop they were touting in the middle of it all. Or the $200 starter classes in the foundations of Science of Mind (I perceive that this is the Ernest Holmes, LA permutation of the movement. Kaching). I also come from a long long long tradition -- Jesus was a Presbyterian, you know -- of free public literacy so's you can read your own --

Whatever. All the practitioners -- lay ministers -- have albs made of silver and semi-precious stones by the fattest and the oldest one, long open-ended necklaces worth about $300, I'd say. This is part of the Episcopalian/Anglican heritage, capice? Where God's grace flows to you in the form of country club membership and the appalling kind of jewelry they sell in the quarter ads in the back of the New Yorker. With a Georgia O'Keeffe/Calvin Klein/ca. 1984 twist.

Mainly it's the comedy workshop. The idea that God's grace is demo'd by jazz hands and microphones. And the Namastes and Navajo piety. And the wearing of skin tight designer jeans to church, dude. And the ear-splitting secular and sacred music. God's grace flows to me to the extent I behave like a rockstar.

I'm sure it does. But not to me.