Adventures in Church: Sunday services

Seth MacFarlane's Family Guy on religion; Serpentza (YouTube) on China; Dhr. Seven, Ashley Wells, Ananda (Dharma Buddhist Meditation), Wisdom Quarterly

What does the holy spirit (prana) have in store?

I always imagined that if I were to have a kid, I would take srim (she/her/him) to all the churches and temples so as to give the child a good basis for making an informed decision about which religion, if any, to adopt in this life.

I, of course, would be a Buddhist (and a non-Judeo-Christian one at that), but I wouldn't want to impose that on the personality born to me as my newfound "family." Yes, like all parents I imagine I would like the developing child to one day say, "You know, Parent, you were right: Buddhism is the best one!" But I wouldn't hold my breath. Kids have to rebel. But they usually come around after that phase.

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  Take me to temples, Brian. - I'm not your dad.

  Having been raised Catholic, the best of all religions BECAUSE it's the easiest one to reject in your youth. Why? It's so preposterous and fitted to imperialism, guilt, fear, exploitation, and egregious sinfulness and making excuses for everything. If, when you're reborn and you don't want to be a Christian like everyone else, get reborn into a Catholic family. First of all, it should be easy, as there are more Catholics than anything else other than, perhaps, Chinese animists who subscribe to an admixture of Taoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism, Capitalism, and Communism as the sort of state religion of police state mass surveillance as is found on other planets. If there's anything that matters more than anything else in China today, it has got to be the almighty Yuan (money). Think America's bad? See how desperate they are for cash and coin on the streets of China, where Winston once lived:

(Serpentza) Jan. 31, 2024: The Chinese economy really is this bad!

We can only model a spiritual tradition or religion, inspire, and hope for the best from Fate, Kismet, and Karma (knowing that past deeds really rule the underlying tendencies of newly reborn beings more than present actions, words, or ideas).

Then I remembered. I do have a kid! Well, of sorts, that little Shiznit, me. I have to raise myself. It's a lifelong project, extending over many lives in my case. Inner-child, outer-adult, Peter Pan Syndrome human being, what do I know? So where am I going to learn it? At the feet of gurus, as a chela (disciple), on a heroic journey into the woods like Bela in Poor Things or HCE in Finnegans Wake, the woods of course being a metaphor for the Big Bad World out there or the Sick Sad one on Daria's TV.

My friend, Coby, invited me to a Quaker Meeting this morning for the regular meditation and potluck and to pitch an idea he had to them. Sounds good. There aren't many Meeting Houses, so we arranged to meet there. Only I got lost after a nearly-late start because today is National Time Change Day when we spring forward after months of having bounced back.

The first church

Why are Irish novels more interesting?

I made it in time, showed myself in, where congregants were already seated. A very nice female preacher passed and said hello, giving me a personal welcome. Then she introduced today's guest preacher from Hawaii, a Wayne Dyer of a man, bad, bloated, barefoot and wearing a Hawaiian shirt unbuttoned down to his hairy navel. "Nice," I thought, "very relaxing." The singing by the choir was great, very catchy as they got up, accompanied by piano.

So I took out my notebook and began to compose a new opening scene for my Irish novel. I was in the middle of it when I texted my friend, realizing I had just become the 'ayhole who texts in church.

The preacher at the Church of Truth (Pasadena Church of Truth, Center for Awakening Consciousness | Facebook) bounced between Protestant Evangelism and Hawaiian spirituality and the "heavenly light," which I thought he translated from da kine. But he was using another term. Indigenous Hawaiians believed in "heaven"? Certainly, there's a celestial sphere they could look up and see, and "kings" may have come down to rule them, take their mana, and leave rules for them to follow not exactly knowing why.

There's was no reply, so I searched the address and realized I was three blocks from the correct church building. What are the chances? It goes to figure. They're a lot alike, and Coby doesn't let details like exact addresses stand in his way.

I waited for an opening, a pause in the preacher's homily, then bolted for the door, raced to the right religious building, a beautiful old house, not unlike the Craftsman architecture the City of Pasadena is famous for.

The second church

I saw Coby leading the kids in some singalongs in the back, remembered I was told the meditation was in the main hall, and figured the front door must be the way in. Quite a deduction. Little did I know that behind that door was it, 50 people, 99% white, in pensive silence, shoegazing.

I had soft soles, so I was able to take a seat without further disruption, only the door didn't quite close. Someone had to get up to close it. Finally, the preacher got up, walked to the center of the room (the pews being arranged in a squared circle), and began to tell an interesting anecdote about how his female relative in the 1800s went to Korea (called Chosun) as a missionary and taught medicine.

She didn't speak the language nor know the culture. But she did write about the experience, and much to his surprise, the Korean government published her observations in six volumes now available on Amazon. He bought them, read them, and was bored to tears by their mundane and very undescriptive contents. They were all about her and her days, with next to nothing about the country, the people there, their habits, customs, odd ticks.

She didn't seem concerned with that, so she started teaching Western medicine and soon trained three Korean nurses to help as her assistants. The catch was they had to convert to Christianity, presumably Quakerism, to be eligible. They were willing.

So she moved to Pyongyang (or some similar sounding place north of Seoul). There she founded the country's first Western medical school, where a young female Korean developed a girl-crush on her. What became of this lesbianism we are not told, but that youth took her crush all the way to the top, becoming Korea's first Western-trained doctor.

Then the "preacher" stopped, who it turned out was just a parishioner (because there are only parishioners in the Quaker tradition) took his seat again, and everyone fell into silence.

This was the oddest Sunday service I'd ever seen, not a mass, not a singalong except for the kids in the garden. Then I remembered the time change. (Today, March 11, 2024, is when time sprang forward).

I could not have arrived on time. That could not have been the start of the service. And, no, it was not. For someone else stood up and gave a spicy testimony. Actually, she just talked about her wardrobe and how long it took her to choose it earlier that morning. Then she sat down.

Protestantism

I started to understand the Protestant movement from what a young Presbyterian -- a gorgeous blond shooting instructor with a twin sister -- had explained to me. She in her twenties became a "right honorable pastor" before they booted her out of the pulpit. The presbyters are elders, but they're ordinary people, part of a "church" of people, a Christian community.

They were strangely beautiful Norwegians, one slightly more beautiful than the otherwise identical twin because one smiled a lot, and this one not so much. Boy, she was cold and anxious, laconic, not much given to speech. It's like what they say about cold climate Scandinavians. What do they say? "Did you hear about the Norwegian man who loved his wife so much, he almost told her?"

"Church" is not a building. It's more a verb. If one is going to church, one is going to do something, and doing something is not a noun. One who attends a communing communes with the community, the "church," because church is churching -- communing with those who commune. Just about everything is at its root a verb, as Buddhist teachers like Alan Watts famously explain.

• In fact, in Buddhism, one of the reasons "nirvana" is so hard to understand as not nothingness, not annihilation, not a void, not oblivion, yet it's not anything we can readily grasp without experiencing it. It's not a noun, not a person, place, or thing. (If it were a thing, it would have constituent factors that condition it, but it is the "unconditioned element." There's no sense in trying to think about it to figure it out. Our thinking will only mislead us. It is a verb that one might translate as "nirvanering" (quenching, slaking, cooling, bringing all suffering to cessation).
  

Watts makes this point nicely. Take your hand. Look at it. Extend all the fingers. What's it doing? It's handing (being a hand). Now wave it. What's it doing? It's waving; it's a wave. Now ball it into a fist. What's it doing? It's fisting. What is it? A fist when it fists, a wave when it waves, a hand when it hands things over. We call it by its function.

Actually, Watts doesn't mention the waving. It's a hand when it's open, a fist when it's closed, and they are not two separate things. By calling them at one moment a "hand" about to shake another (gladhanding someone) then a "fist" about to punch someone, we hallucinate two things into existence. 

But there isn't. It's just this five-factored thing (or six factors or as many factors as anyone cares to analyze, dissect, and deconstruct).

• It's the same way with the Five Aggregates clung to as "self." We can analyze the aggregates (heaps, groups), count them, separate out the 50 mental formations or shrink them back to one batch. We can know-and-see them with acute attention. But grasping them the way we do, we hallucinate an ego into being. There are just factors, and they get named. And the solution to the riddle is, If "I" do not have form (a physical body), feeling (sensation), perception (mental sorting), formations (like intention), and consciousness (awareness), then who does? A: No one does. The body has body, feeling has feeling, perception has perception, formations have formations, and consciousness has consciousness. They are processes (verbs) not nouns for anyone to "have." They cling to themselves, and a sense of "self" arises, but it is not what it seems. It's real, just and hand and fist are real, but it is not independent of its constituent factors. It cannot stand apart from those things, and it is not really those things -- all of which are always changing (impermanent), disappointing (suffering), and impersonal (not self).

A hand doesn't really fist (when balled up); it is a fist. Its action is what it is. A fist doesn't really wave;  rather, a hand does another thing, and we give the thing that it's doing a name, make it a noun. In just the same way, rain does not rain down. The very raining down is what we call "rain." Rain is a verb, a function of water, not different from it.

Yet we treat things as nouns and become confused, deluding ourselves that something has come into existence. A fist does not come into existence, an illusion does. A hand (a waver) fists, and so is called a "fist" as if the hand had disappeared and a fist replaced it. It's right there. It hasn't gone anywhere. It's all that's there, useless without a doing, nameless until it does something. It hands, so we first called it a hand. Then the thing that it did got a name. That doing became a noun....

So here we were churching. It's all very different from Catholicism and the priestly ritual of the mass, with its entrancing mumbo-jumbo Latin, Gregorian chanting, sorcery and incantations, echoing off the floor and walls built just so as to create a grand sound effect and amplification.

The candles, costumes, curses, rhetoric, benedictions (bene = bien = good, beneficial + diction = words, utterances, blessings), the mystery and magic of it all, and the molestation and hypocrisy, the paying of indulgences and taking orders from the corporate body's CEO, literally called "the Father," il Papa or Pope. It's a gas.

Berkeley Zen Center, Bay Area, California

Here, now, all of that was stripped away. We were all imams with something to say, something to teach, glory in the ordinary. It was like reading Robert Frost poetry. One doesn't even know it's poetry at first. It's clean, crisp, unornamented. I suddenly understood why all the attendees and residents at the Berkeley Zen Center (BZC) were the way they were, a bunch of disaffected Abrahamic religion types.

I wanted meditation to make sense at BZC. But there were 101 unspoken rules about how everything was done. Everything was a ritual but one stripped of its mystery and meaning. It, to quote Tate McCrae, "is what it is and was it was."

There was no big thing to read into everything. It was all just Everyday Zen, fulfillment in Ordinary Dharma, the love of sparse and empty spaces, unadorned wood, lots of black robes, trees and flowers, German sandals and detachable monastic robes (because no one was a monastic in the Theravada sense of full-time, usually lifelong binding vows and abstentions, as if everyone were a monastic just for the moment and would then take off the uniform and go back to being just a regular Jane and Joe with a regular job going back to a regular home and marriage. I'd return to class with more questions than answers.

It made no sense, all that pretending, but the pretense was that we were dropping all pretenses. Everyone was equal (even though we weren't). And the community had no hierarchy or apparent authorities, just rule by committee and unquestionable customs, by whatever ancient master could be quoted as the authority of why we should have no authorities. "If you meet the Buddha on the road..." they used to say and smile as if they were clever. I would shiver, thinking WTF kind of thing is that to say?

Here now, many cities removed, down south in Pasadena (Hollywood adjacent), where we are far more religious, far more hypocritical, far more into seeking, and far more accepting of the mystical than the practical, unlike the northern climes of the Bay Area, and Berkeley in particular, I found myself in a hall full of familiars. But that was way back on March 11, 2024. How would they be on St. Patrick's Day? I'll have to find out.

• Orange Grove Friends Meeting (ogmm.org) an unprogrammed group of Quakers in Los Angeles