church on time - terrifies me

[freckles_and_doubt]

Weekend of Busyness, that was, what with the mad socialising and all. mac1235 and tngr_spacecadet are now safely married, and presumably resting the well-earned rest of the post-wedding-stress traumatised even as I type. Apart from exceptionally good food and freely-flowing champagne, I also scored two Decemberists albums courtesy of short_mort and strawberryfrog, who took pity on my benighted South African disorganisation. (It is a tragic fact that I went into Look and Listen the other day specifically to buy Decemberists, and wandered lostly for about fifteen minutes while absolutely, totally and completely blanking on the name of the band. I had a sort of vague conviction their name began with a 'P'. In my confusion and dread I bought more Bowie instead. That's my excuse, and I'm sticking to it). Decemberists make me happy, their lyrics tend to the quirky and every now and then a song hits the necessary levels of catchiness to groove my ploons completely.

The wedding was lovely in a lot of ways, a close family feel, but it brought me hard up against my own damned hang-ups because it was a church service, and one with a fairly evangelical bent. This is difficult for me, given the following:

1. While I do not in any way share any religious belief with anyone at all, I share with Voltaire the impulse to defend to the hilt their right to believe it, as long as it's not interfering with anyone's equal and opposite right not to share that belief.

2. I definitely want to be part of such an important occasion as the wedding of friends.

3. Being in a church raises my hackles. Being in a church during a religious service makes me wriggle in discomfort. I feel like a hypocritical intruder.

You can see how a certain cognitive dissonance might result. Discussing this with friends (possibly ad nauseam, sorry, people), I realise that this bugs me a lot more than it bugs a lot of my fellow cheerful and committed atheists. I'm not sure why: perhaps it's because I feel that religious belief is important, I can't just shrug and assume it doesn't matter. I arrived in my own atheist position after some fairly wide meanderings through evangelical Christianity, traditional Christianity and some random neo-paganism, and I'm quite willing to assume that anyone espousing a position on religion has their own valid reasons for doing so, which gives their mental landscape the same validity as mine. Given this, for me to be hanging out within the confines of their religious expression feels basically wrong.

This is even more pronounced a feeling in the case of evangelical religion, since I think the conventional church is more restrained in its expression of belief, and doesn't go for quite the emotional outpouring represented by evangelical music, preaching or prayer. Also, given the long-established traditions of the conventional church I tend to feel that there's more space in it for people who adhere to its teachings out of a social or moral impulse, or in fact sheer habit, rather than a spiritual impulse, and who thus might be sitting in said church in a similar mental space to mine. The evangelical church traditions get a lot more personal, and a lot less restrained in the expressions they expect from you. Thus a traditional church service makes me twitch, but not as much as an evangelical one.

I am also, of course, continually bitten in the butt by my own feminist and analytic impulses, which cause me to (a) roll my eyes at the more traditionalist views of gender roles embedded in the service, and (b) to sit there sternly oppressing an impulse to say, in tones of enlightenment, "Gosh! basically the wedding service is about sex, isn't it?" Because it is. All that one-flesh and united in spirit and procreation of children stuff is dripping with symbol and subtext and what have you. As this is basically the only legitimate point at which you can think about sex in a Christian context, I suppose it's inevitable it should become a bit overcoded.

Last Night I Dreamed: I was the lead singer in a fairly amateur rock band, mostly standard young gothy males, performing in a huge basement music shop. Despite the classic dream feeling of unpreparedness I found myself singing the first number confidently, and I actually had a good voice. (I don't, in real life. I can hold a tune. Tone or volume, not so much). But for some reason I was not only singing but playing the drums, and I managed to break one of the drumsticks halfway through the song. For the second song they took away the drums, and I tried to provide a rhythm backing by tapping on my music stand with the broken drumstick while singing. For the third song another band member took over lead vocals, and I ended up feeling a bit embarrassed and marginalised and putting in occasional harmonies. Then I looked around and realised that the basement shop was jam-packed with hundreds of beautiful little teenage girls, all dressed to the nines and watching in polite incomprehension as we belted out what were clearly classic rock numbers from the 60s and 70s, which were thus completely incomprehensible to Today's Youff. Fortunately at that point the book I'd left on my nightstand fell abruptly and noisily off the pile, which will teach me to leave it open and precariously face down for maximum spine breakage, and I woke up with a hell of a jump. Bit of a relief, really. Thin White Duke fixations notwithstanding, I've never had any actual desire to perform in a rock band.