I have a complicated relationship with this holiday. It began simply enough, with trick-or-treating country-style while we lived at a rural parsonage. The Halloween of my kindergarten year was marked by my dressing in a cat costume and piling into a car with some other church kids (One of whom, Becky, was dressed as a bag of garbage if I recall correctly and I sincerely doubt that I do) and driving around the range roads of northern Alberta where each farmyard would net us a full-size chocolate bar or several tasty Kool-Aid-infused popcorn balls.

We moved to a city the next year and I still trick-or-treated, but in the urban fashion, i.e. on foot. I was a (pink) rabbit.

But then, things changed. I don’t know what the impetus was, but my parents converted to the school of thought that Christians ought not celebrate Halloween in any manner, least of all gallavanting around the neighbourhood ringing doorbells. In later years, my mother explained to me that Halloween was quite a get for the devil: “It’s the two things kids love best: dressing up, and candy!”

To be fair, my brother and I did still get the candy; half an ice-cream pail each, not a bad haul for not having to leave the basement. Which is where we hung out, every Halloween, with all the upstairs lights turned out so as not to alert any trick-or-treaters to our residence. All the upstairs lights, that is, except one: the oven light, the door left ajar so it cast a ghoulish blue glow over the kitchen (but not down the hallway, where I skittered on my way to the bathroom only the most desperate of pee-breaks). And that, of course, was the most cutting irony. On the night in question, we the family who didn’t celebrate Halloween, had the creepiest house on the block.

I did have a few opportunities to dress up during my elementary years, even after the trick-or-treating ban. There was occasionally an alterna-Halloween party at the church, where costumes and candy were permitted but any mention of pumpkins or witches was not. One year I was a princess in a blue gown with a sparkly cape that was continually choking me as other party-goers stepped on it. Another year I was (and how’s this for Evangelical cred?) an Israellite. In a pink-and-white striped robe and matching headdress. Probably the less said about that, the better.

My parents’ aversion to Halloween was so instilled in me that even once I was ostensibly able to make my own decisions about celebrating the holiday I still responded to it with an overwhelming “meh.” Only in the past few years have I begun to tentatively embrace it. Because mom was right: if there’s two things kids like, it’s costumes and candy. And since I still think of myself as a kid, there are two things I like: costumes and candy.

This year I celebrated with a Saturday-night dance party. I went as Olive Hoover from the movie Little Miss Sunshine and had a great time. I have also eaten massive amounts of candy, which has now formed an extra layer of protective padding around my belly.

I’m not entirely unsympathetic to my mom’s plight. Christian culture does a lot to demonize (ha) anything remotely pagan. In the face of peer and liturgical pressure, what’s a believing parent to do? I don’t know. I do wish they had just let us go trick-or-treating. I know I felt pretty awkward and generally dreaded the end of October, especially since we’d usually get pulled out of school for the afternoon of Halloween when there was usually an assembly and whatnot. I mean, most kids don’t mind staying home from school, but on the funnest day of the year? That’s just mean.

Is shutting your kid away from Halloween festivities really going to shield them from the “evils” of paganism? Christmas has deep pagan roots, but you don’t see any Christians boycotting its celebration (for obvious reasons, but it seems kinda double-standardy). Is the adrenaline rush of a kid-friendly “haunted house” constructed in the gymnasium of an elementary school really going to throw a Christian worldview into question, our counteract some fundamental tenet?

Like I said, I don’t know, and in the end all parents are just trying to do the best they can, whether they’re Christian or Pagan. All I know is, I have a lot of Halloweening to make up for, so I’m already thinking about next year’s costume…

I’ve talked before about how throughout my young life, I found the spiritual, worshipful “feelings” elusive. I’ve also said that I’ve had far more religious experiences in a smoky club listening to a band or rapper as I have had in a service or a Bible study.

So when the beginning of July rolls around and with it the Winnipeg Folk Festival, I get pretty excited. I get excited knowing that I’ll get a taste of that intangible, ethereal zeitgeist that results when thousands of like-minded people gather in one place in a spirit of celebration. Ostensibly that is what one could/should get in church, but we all know it rarely works out that way.

Today I had probably the best festival day I’ve ever had. I actually hoisted myself out of bed (I was up late shaking booty to the Refugee All Stars of Sierra Leone) and arrived in time for the annual gospel workshop. “Workshops” are concerts at the festival where two, three or more artists/bands gather on the same stage, under the umbrella of some theme (some titles are “Old Songs, New Songs,” “Percussion Junction,” “One Fiddle to Rule Them All”). Ideally, the participants of the workshop will join in on harmonies and guitar parts of each others’ songs, sometimes jamming and creating entirely new tunes, or adding a bassline or a beat where otherwise there would be none.

“Working on a Building (Gospel Workshop)” featured American bluesmen the Holmes Brothers, local Mennonite bluegrass quartet House of Doc, and my personal favourite, Austin singer-songwriter/guitarist Ruthie Foster. Ruthie was raised singing and playing in the church in central Texas, and there really aren’t words to describe the magic she is on stage. Her voice is so massive and effortless, she really does merit comparisons to the great ladies of song (those comparisons are tossed around so often. This time I mean it). You listen to her voice and you just believe that everything is going to be OK. She’ll raise the roof even if there isn’t one, like at an outdoor festival when the only roof is the sky and so she’ll just raise that. In the workshop following the gospel one, she shared the stage with Bruce Cockburn and Richard Thompson and completely held her own. That’s how good she is.

She sang a song she wrote inspired by her mother, who, when Ruthie was in college, told her that education was fine but “you’ve got a soul to save.” She sang the song she sang at her grandmother’s funeral, two weeks ago. “It’s alright,” she said, “She’s fine. She’s here today… she’s everywhere.” And then she went on to sing a variation of Amazing Grace, about how God saw past her faults and saw her needs.

It’s stuff like that that can almost make a girl believe.

I mentioned Bruce Cockburn, who is well-known for being a “secular” Christian artist. I ranted and whined last week about Christian music, and Bruce indeed is one of those rare artists who manages to be Christian and also good. He sang “All the Diamonds” today, and… well, it was just really beautiful. Go read the lyrics if you’re not familiar. He also did “Lovers in a Dangerous Time,” which was also beautiful.

I’m not sure what my point is here. Maybe to say that I can understand why so many people are so attached to the church, because there are so many qualities of church in a festival like this: the fellowship, the transcendence of music (which I have come to believe is inherent to music itself, in some sort of magical, unknowable way, and not at all unique to Christian musicians, as a former choir director of mine actually claimed), the knowledge that you can go to this one place and be rewarded for your efforts with this amazing feeling.

Or maybe that inspiration can be found in many places. That one woman’s voice can be a salve, just as a few lines of poetry in the Old Testament can be. That dancing in the sun is what we should have been doing all along.

technorati tags: folk, music, bruce+cockburn, ruthie+foster, christianity, religion, church

Today is the day we remember the day our Lord Jesus Christ died a terrible death. I personally remembered it by sleeping ’til 1 p.m. And I didn’t even do anything naughty on Bad Thursday night! It’s for the best. Some friends of mine, aging hipsters all, spent a truncated and despondent evening at Mod Night, surrounded by underclothed, eighteen-year-old, Fabu-Tanned flesh.

As evidenced by my behaviour, I’m still not much for church services these days. Especially not for Good Friday services, which are typically too bizarre for my taste. (I mean, bizarre is usually my cut of tea, as they say, but in this case it’s not the good kind of bizarre.) I will go to the service on Sunday like any good tourist, of course, then gorge myself on candy and roast leg of lamb of God.*

My mood has been greatly ameliorated, however, by the emergence of spring in our northern clime. There’s always this day in spring when you get up in the morning and leave the house and are all, “Woah, where did all these people come from?!” Everyone’s outside these days, even me. It’s nice.

What else is new? The new Geez is out. If you check the letters section there’s a little quotation from this very blog! Used with permission, don’t worry.

In other thrilling events, Tony Jones commented on my blog. Tony, the next time I’m in the Twin Cities I will not buy you coffee — I will buy you beer, and perhaps make a donation to the Tony Jones Beer Fund.

*One of two tasteless jokes in this entry. Can you find the other?!

technorati tags: geez magazine, tony jones, emergent church, easter

It’s been a good weekend so far. I spent some time with some people I love and had some good conversations, about which I’d like to post, but later. I think good conversations come about when you don’t lie. Like, when you see a friend and you haven’t seen him or her in a long time and they ask you how you are and what you’ve been doing, you tell them, actually things are pretty crappy for me on many levels right now and the thing that keeps me busy most is reading theology and writing in my religion blog.

NB — People are more likely to open up re: religion and spirituality while drinking.

What I want to write about right now is communion, that essential Christian sacrament. Even I, who is willing to toss out many things concerning Christian tradition, will call the sacrament of communion “essential.”

The thing is, I really hate how it’s done at my church. We do it in the ultra-sanitized way, with silver trays of tiny plastic cups filled with Welch’s (the Official Juice of Communion). The bread comes on silver trays as well — carefully cubed morsels of tasteless, nutrient-free white bread. Communion is, and indeed always has been, the only time I eat white bread. (As a child, I was raised on whole wheat, and as a nutrition-obsessed adult I eschew all products of the oven that are not whole-grain and heavy enough to be used as a blunt object weapon in case of burglery). For a while in the ’90s we had little pieces of matzoh bread, but some time during my sojourn away from church they switched back.

The pastor always makes a statement before the cup is served to the effect of, “Don’t take communion unless you have a Personal Relationship with Jesus Christ™,” as though if you do take communion without a PRwJC™ something very bad will happen to you, like the bread will expand in your stomach as it would when it’s fed to the ducks at the park, and you’ll die.

I’m exaggerating. The pastor actually always makes the statement in a very nonchalant, casual style, but it always sticks in my brain. Especially because I never really know if I’m a Christian or not.

I’ve written earlier about how Gail Ramshaw’s book Under the Tree of Life spoke to much of my experience in terms of many aspects of religious life and practice. This passage about communion was no different:

The single-swallow shot glasses prefilled with wine that one encounters at some communion services these days are an American God-for-me invention that shrinks the communal largess into a dose of medicine for me: one tablespoonful once a week, and my devil will vanish. Rather, the point of God-for-us is that my access to God is communal, my reception of God is communal, my participation in the divine life is communal. (71)

I don’t know how my fellow churchgoers feel look at communion on an individual level; actually, I don’t know how the senior pastor really feels about it. Maybe we just do it this way because it’s the way we’ve always done it. I’m certainly not assuming that the people in my church look at communion as a tonic, as Ramshaw, perhaps too cynically, describes. I sincerely doubt it, actually.

I wonder sometimes if I should go back to the way I did things during my unChristian phase, on the rare occasions when I would attend a service. I would pass the dishes long without taking. I can honestly say I don’t care what the people around me think, so that’s no burden to me. (If they’re watching to see who takes from the plate and who doesn’t, that’s their own problem.)

But that wouldn’t solve anything at all. I believe, as Ramshaw does, that communion isn’t something you can do by yourself. It’s group activity. And maybe that’s what I’m frustrated with — that the single-serving juice-and-bread is diluting the aspect and keeping me from experiencing the true reality and meaning of communion in the way I would like to.

I’d consider asking people in my Bible study to take communion with me, but that’s the kind of thing that can get folks in the church really riled up. In my experience, if you do things like communion or baptism outside of the conventional contexts, you get in trouble. A youth pastor I know (who will remain nameless unless he chooses otherwise) got in trouble for serving communion to his youth group with the only available foodstuffs at the time, Doritos and Coca-Cola. On one level I can empathize with the church leaders’ freakout. On the other hand, Doritos and Coca-Cola are to 21st century teenagers what bread and wine were to first century disciples.

For me this isn’t an aesthetic issue. I just want a little more authenticity.

technorati tags: communion, youth, gail ramshaw, christianity, religion, sacraments, jesus