Sailing To Oblivium: July 9, 2017

 Back in my day, many, if not most, kids like me regarded Sunday mornings as consisting of two hours of torture designed to make you appreciate the rest of the week. It could only get better from there.

Of course, we were giving up things on Sunday morning, things like playing sports, picking guitars, building hideouts, stealing and smoking our father’s cigarettes, telling naughty jokes, tormenting other kids, exploring old barns, pilfering, fishing, climbing trees, and learning about “it,” while hoping someday we might understand why grownups considered “it” so appealing.

In short, our dream activities consisted of a duality: the refreshing aspects of activity and discovery nestled into the warm, soft, welcoming bosom of sin. Church offered none of these, with one exception: the music.

Wow! You find an old-timey bouncing pianist who had perfected the “Baptist-Drag” on an old upright piano, coax her into “At the cross, at the cross where I first saw the light,” and you could get the attention of a bunch of boys right away. We joined right in those joyous times.

The adults appreciated our participation, even though many enlightened ones, such as my sainted mother, knew that when we boys got to the hideout that afternoon, and had lighted up, it would be “At the bar, at the bar where I smoked my first cigar ….”

Hell yes, she knew. She taught it to me.

Our unconscionable lyric-swapping aside, those old hymns, bellowed out in a little white Baptist church, with no air-conditioning, really did the job. It was the only religious ecstasy most of our gang ever experienced.

Fast forward to modern times and what one wag referred to as this “Jesus is my boyfriend” music. Couple that with the fact that modern teenagers sacrifice nothing by attending church on Sunday morn. They wear the same clothes and do the same thing there they would be doing if set free. (Hint: It involves cell phones). Add some rock-and-roll music and a feel-good motivational talk, and you have the modern cult church. It ain’t no big thing to sit through that.

There will be no long, hour-an-a-half sermons about how if a bird flew over Mount Everest once every million years and eventually the shadow of that bird’s wings on the mountain wore it away to nothing, the time involved for all that would be a “drop in the bucket” compared to the eternity in which our little bodies would be burning if we didn't straighten up right away.

Oh hell. Let’s sing that one called “Gladly, The Cross-eyed Bear,” and erase that awful image.

I still wonder how such joyous, beautiful music could grow from such a doctrinal garden. I also wonder about the ability of modern church music to elevate the soul. Comparing the old hymns to the new music is like, as one radio pundit on PBS, said, “comparing a Shakespearian sonnet to a Hallmark greeting card.”

As for me and religion, I don’t care what Pat Robertson, or Franklin Graham, says, I just can’t see Donald Trump singing “I’ll fly away.”

Off-key? Who cares?