Losing My Religion - Not In The Mood For Sunday This Week

Below are the raw journal entries from my iPad which were taken in church the other day while everyone thought I was paying attention and making notes about the sermon. Sorry. I was bored.

Before you start, you probably need to know some of The Players:

JF The BobbleHead
Fires Up The Crowd

JF, a man bound to find joy in service to God if he must saw a limb off to do it. Maybe even preferably sawing off a limb. The lead bobble-head, bright-eyed with the madness of conviction and double-ended candle-burning, mostly spends his time nodding at every word from the pulpit and grinning like an over-medicated mental patient (see: bobble-head.). A song-leader without a single discernible shred of musical talent, he has an unerring knack for picking obscure Huck Finn era songs with about 18 verses that no one has ever heard of from the hymnbook and ramrodding the congregation through every single verse and atonal note while periodically exhorting the audience to "Listen To The Words!"

RM, an up-front singer who actually DOES have a bit of talent, not to mention a (braying? is "braying" too harsh?) megaphone-level voice, and who is a leading light of the congregation, usually as hyper as a chihuahua if you can imagine a chihuahua who's a fair-sized dumpling of flaming red hair and burbling bonhomie, who is partial to flowing clothing and who is not happy if she isn't running everything around her.

Creaky Elders: Raggedly old farts who spend most of their time counting the house, praying as directed, and standing around the rear of the church in a small huddle, waiting for JF to get done haranguing the congregation with obscure music so they can get on with taking up the collection.

The Preacher:  Built like a chunky fire-plug, country as a chicken-coop, but still seems way too smart for this scam. The degree of compromise that surely must exist in his life in order to be a True Believer is in fact a miracle to behold, a real one, none of that cheesy walking on water business. He once referred to me as a "spirit of dissension"  after a prayer-group meeting in which I confronted some particularly idiotic ideology extracted from the reading of a chunk of 3000-year-old mistranslation out of the King James Version.

Raw Journal Notes From The Pew, 06/30/2013

Back in bobble-head city. JF is amening, chuckling and occasionally laughing deep booming laughs at tedious pulpit-issued "jokes" which tend to find their way into the morning announcements. His laughs are as realistic as trailer-park yard flamingos. He sounds like a hambone stage actor. He's practically standing there with his fists on his hips gazing off into some horizon only he can see, radiating a quivering desire to Serve The Lord.

JF and RM are now up and competing in the "who can be most voluminous and expansive" song leader. RM is into transports of translating whatever she's singing into sign language, making her look oddly spastic, while JF is singing at the top of his lungs while spreading his arms and looking up at God who, contrary to my previous belief, is apparently located somewhere at the apex of the vaulted ceiling near an air conditioner vent.

Four creaky elders finally get their turn and are up praying over the collection plates. Got one of them in tears banging on about the 4th of July and the sacrifices of the veterans. I can't for the life of me sort out why they ask him to pray about anything. He's widely known as being pretty horrible at it and always sounds like some ill-prepared kid trying to wing it at a grade-school recital. And he's so nervous that he grinds on and on, apparently trying to not skip over any slightest problem in the church, city, state, or world that God might be cajoled into interfering with. Bound to fail of course.

Wonder what watching evening news with him must be like:

TV: "And from ABC News correspondent Bobby Putzlock, a new story about children starving in Monrovia."
Prayin' Paul: "Oh,crap! MONROVIA! Honey, I forgot Monrovia in today's prayer! (Addresses TV) Sorry kids! My bad!"

But for now, he seems to be winding down, which process is not at all assisted by JF punctuating with frequent "Yes Lord!" and "Praise Jesus!" ejaculations now and again in order to increase all our sufferings enough to be acceptable while incidentally highlighting his own piety.

Now the preacher makes his way to the pulpit and begins his spiel. Ramming his rhetoric through a blizzard of "Amens" and "Yes!" and "Halleluiahs!" emanating from JF's front-row seat he finally makes his point about how the world's going to shit in a handbasket because faggots and dykes get to enter into legal contracts with one another.

Hard-handed, sunburned men, in from farms and fields and ditches and auto shops shake their heads disgustedly while their bright eyed women, usually chipper as rictus-smiled Bambi-style Disney furries, darken as the end-times import of Satan running the Supreme Court registers with them.

Never fear, frantically joyful and determined to make painful, grey lives the will of the Lord, they'll be back chittering like squirrels and planning the Wednesday evening church pot-luck chicken dinner before noon. The end of civilization as they know it being boomed from the pulpit scarcely raises a ripple in their real lives.

Sigh. Just not in the mood for it today.
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And if you think you have a clue what my religious beliefs are from this little screed, you probably couldn't be more wrong.