this was funny to me, in a nostalgic way

an atheist goes to church (easter)

copying the text here just in case it gets pulled at some point. words from the link above

an atheist goes to church
17 JUN/09

I loved church when I was a kid. Not that I ever found any sort of sanctuary there, or ever really believed that I had a relationship with God (though I can’t say I ever tried — prayer time was usually spent pressing my fingers against my closed eyelids and pretending I was shooting through space). The real reason I loved going to church was I really loved hearing the stories. Who doesn’t like tales of great whales, fiery pits, and a vengeful God who would burn down the world on a whim?

By the time I was sixteen, I’d heard all the stories and decided that the whole church thing was a bunch of crap. I still maintain this stance. In fact, this Easter marked the first time I’d been in a church in fifteen years, and I really didn’t want to be there. As with many things I don’t want to do, I was there because my wife forced asked me to go.

We arrived at the church at ten o’ clock, thirty minutes before the service started. I remember enough about church to know that it’s always packed on Easter Sunday, and if I had to be at church the last thing I wanted to do was be stuck in the back in the standing room section. As it turned out, I had no need to worry. We were the first ones in the sanctuary and snagged the best seats in the house, beating out all the poor saps who were still in Sunday school.

As I sat on the hard pew, bored and fidgety, my eyes wandered to a simple sign hung in an adjoining room. It pointed towards the room we were sitting in. It read Sanctuary.

My mind immediately turned to Faulkner’s Sanctuary, to Temple Drake, the corncob, and the shucks. Then, as my mind was on the verge of going to a really dark place, I caught myself and I realized something: In the five minutes I’d been in church I’d a) stolen a good Christian’s seat and b) imagined the Virgin Mary in the manger, about to take it with a corn cob. Well, if it turns out God is real, I have to say, I’ve really screwed myself here.

Slowly the sanctuary filled, and at 10:30 it was time to sing. As we stood, I turned my gaze to the back of the room and I was glad we’d had the foresight to get there early because they’d run out of pews. Fifty or more people had to stand in the back. The heathens, it seemed, had robbed the regular churchgoers of seats on Easter Sunday. There was something deeply fulfilling about that.

I opened my hymnal to the proper page, but I didn’t sing because I couldn’t take my eyes off the old lady in front of me with the yellow hair. Her voice drowned out every other voice within a five pew radius, which wouldn’t have been so bad if she didn’t sound like a cat taking it in the ass with a corn cob damnit not that again. I will never get credit for the restraint I showed by not popping her in the back of the head. I diverted my attention elsewhere, to the cross at the back of the stage. I thought about the resurrection story, and I started to wonder:

How much did Jesus stink when he was raised from the dead? He’d been dead for three days, so there was definitely some funk. But when he came back to life, did the death stink go away immediately? Or did it linger for awhile before dissipating, fading slowly over time like new car smell? And if he went back to heaven before the smell wore off would he smell for all eternity?

My thoughts were broken when the hymn ended. As I sat down, I looked at my bulletin and saw that a baptism was next on the schedule.

The holy dunking tank was installed just below a big stained glass rendering of Jesus. The art was rather ambiguous in that I couldn’t tell if Jesus was being baptized or if he was walking on water. I thought how cool it would have been if Jesus had walked on water at his baptism as if to say say ‘you think you can dunk me? Do ya? Punk?’ I might have been a believer if Jesus was that cool.

The baptism tank was built into the wall, and could only be accessed from an area behind the stage. I found it mildly depressing that, as an atheist, I would never be able to see the room behind the tank. I wondered what kind of secret preparations were performed back there, and I decided that I would try to find out after the service. Maybe they didn’t lock the door…

The pastor lowered himself into the water from the back room. Behind him followed an eighty-year-old lady. The pastor told us a little bit about the lady, how she was eighty and just getting to know God. I thought how she got a pretty sweet deal, getting to live in sin for eighty years and then only turning towards God when her body was too old to do anything sinful anymore. She screamed when the pastor dunked her backwards under the water, as if the last bit of devil in her was fighting to stay alive.

I laughed when the eighty-year-old woman screamed, and when I did, the old lady with the lady hair scolded me with her eyes. Church is no place for laughing, she seemed to say. I am 99% sure I did not flick her off.

The pastor talked about the book of Mark, and how the ending really sucks. He said that the resurrection is really lame in that book, because it’s just about some ladies going to clean up Jesus’ body in the tomb and then he isn’t there. That’s a cliffhanger, not a climax!

I agreed with the pastor that the ending sucks and I thought it was pretty cool of him to say so. Then he said we can tell a story is true because it sucks. His reasoning was that if Mark had free reign to create his own story then he would have made it much more dramatic.

I wanted to suggest that maybe Mark was just a crappy writer.

The line out of the sanctuary was long; I had to push my way into the aisle. I was getting impatient at this point, tired of being in church and desperately wanting a cigarette. Off to the side, away from the flow of the crowd, I saw a couple boys playing. One of the boys reminded me of myself as a kid, and I had a moment where my childhood felt very real and very present. I realized how much the ritual and repetition of church had shaped my life, even though I don’t believe in God now. Watching the boys play in the church, I remembered what it felt like to be a kid. To not give a shit.

I tried to hold onto that sentiment. Not giving a shit.

One memory drifted back to another, and then to another. Soon I was in the parking lot of the church, realizing that I’d forgotten to check out the back room by the dunk tank.

Damn.

I may have to go back next year.