WHY I DON’T GO TO CHURCH

Excerpt:

The silence is palpable. Oh, I hear everything. Within. Without. It is all there. What did my mother hear with her deafness, her dizziness? What does my sweetheart hear with her dizziness? Ah. Ai. Sigh. I have been on an editing tear. You see, a few years ago the notion of triadic philosophy dropped into my lap. I grow backwards. Had it been there when I was a boy, my life would have (maybe) been entirely changed. I do not try to figure it out anymore. I made triadic philosophy out of the following mix — the encounter with Charles Sanders Peirce, the growing result of a decision a few years back to make Twitter the center of my online doings and the evolving stages of my own thinking from the time I stood in my driveway in Stockbridge in the late 1970s and concluded that what Jesus was up to could be summarized in the words tolerance, democracy, helpfulness and non-idolatry.

You don’t want to hear all this. You want truth. We all do. Back in that time, many lives ago, I craved that too. Honesty. But it’s slippery. One could write a whole book and it would be a lie. A wonderful lie and the opposite be true. Truth skitters around like a grounded minnow. I will press on. Like Dylan. I am older than he and hardly as agile. My Lord, the man continues strong as ever. If you want to put your finger on a creative life, go no farther. Back in another life, Lois Olson gave me a little postcard. It was postmarked Hibbing, Minnesota. I stood by her desk in the offices of “Renewal” — the magazine I had evolved in 1962. I read the short message. “Please send me a copy of your article on my son ‘Bob Dylan’.” It was signed Abe Zimmerman. The quote was his. The article was about Bob being a theologian, owing to songs like “It’s alright, Ma” and “The Gates of Eden”. The only reference to the article is in a book called “Absolutely Dylan” by Patrick Humphries and John Bauldie. There it is:

“1965 Bibliography. Bob Dylan as Theologian, Renewal (Chicago) Oct/Nov.”

Those were days when I was going to church. My ex and I were singing Saturday nights to a packed basement at St. James United Church of Christ in the exact center of Old Town. George Ralph and I were improvising comedy. Back then, it looked as though there was a future for the church. Today we are left with Ralph Reed and Pope Francis. Time marches, stumbles, on.