CHURCH
Sunday I went to church, partly because Kathe, my wife, who died two years ago and who liked to sing in the choir liked to go to church so much, I also went partly because it would get me out of the house and I would connect with someone, which is probably a reason that many people go to church.
There were about 40 people there, with room for 500, almost all of the people over 60. We sang hymns and repeated ritual readings. The sermon was about the call to respond to a painfully chaotic world through committing ourselves to making a difference through doing God‘s will. For an hour I was made to listen and to wonder and decided that it was a good thing for me to do and I was glad I went.
I thought about the church services that I sat through in Greece which were all sing songy chanting by elaborately dressed priests who sounded exactly like the chanting priests in orange lungis naked to the waist in Gujurat or the calls to worship five times a day from the towers of mosques in Morocco, all calling us to be our best selves and wondered how such intense calls to worship world wide, calls to do what is most fundamentally good and true can lead to the terrible violent tension between people who are sure they are right and doing God‘s will in the United States or in Palestine or in India where fundamentalists feel under threat.
I wondered why there were so few young people in the church, here or in the Greek Orthodox Church in Naousa, why I am so often reluctant to go to church? I wondered as I always do about what changes in the world are leading to the slipping and sliding of those not attending services and the constant backlash of people who feel their churches and way of worship is being threatened. I don‘t know what to make of any of this.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 