Last Sunday I was in New Orleans for a conference. As much as I love the volunteer work I do every Sunday as the primary chorister (children’s music leader, for those of you who don’t speak Mormonese), I love the 3-4 times a year that I have to be gone on a Sunday for work. It makes me feel kinda sneaky. (You gotta love Mormonism. Where else can you feel rebellious if you skip church 3 times a year or wear pants to Sunday services?)
So I got up Sunday morning and headed towards the St. Louis Cathedral in the French Quarter to get my church fix (and, I confess, to snap some pictures for a Ride to Church post). The first thing I noticed was all the revelers gearing up for a day of good music, good food, and beer at the French Quarter Festival. I saw groups of college students, young couples, older couples, and lots of families pushing strollers with sweaty, red-faced babies and toddlers. I smelled cigar smoke, beer, urine, sweat, body odor, perfume, red beans and rice, and coffee. I heard talking, laughing, carousing, merrymaking, music (both live and piped from inside bars)-even a guy in a scooter with a bullhorn, calling everyone to repentance. When I got to Jackson Square, I saw paintings and used shoes for sale and tables set up where people were looking into glass balls and reading people’s palms and doing whatever one does with tarot cards. I was amused by the sign right outside the cathedral that said, “Church Quiet Zone.”
I stood outside the cathedral for a few minutes and just tried to take it all in. Then I stepped inside the cathedral and expected to be transformed into a quiet, sacred space. I was in a church after all, right?
In a way, I was. There were people kneeling on benches and candles glowing in the entryway. They were in between masses, so nothing official was going on. I wondered what it must be like to be a parishioner and actually worship in this building-right in the middle of the French Quarter in New Orleans (surely the site of about as much debauchery as can be found anywhere). My first reaction-as a life-long Mormon-was surprise and disappointment. There I was, in this beautiful building built in 1789, trying to be worshipful on a Sunday morning . . . and there was someone standing at the back of the church with a plastic cup of beer (gasp!) You could hear live music-from more than one source-coming from the square right outside. Tourists and merrymakers were coming in and out (it was cool inside the church and warm and muggy outside). It felt disrespectful. A little Church Lady voice inside my head scolded, “These people aren’t being reverent.”
I reflected on my own experiences attending Sunday services at a Mormon church or temple. Part of the beauty of Mormon temples is that when you go there, you feel like you are transported to another world. When you walk into a Mormon temple, everything is clean and white (or maybe a pastel). It smells nice (or, actually, it smells like nothing). There is no food or noise anywhere. If you talk (which you really shouldn’t do), you whisper. You wait your turn. Order prevails. Everyone is dressed in white. It feels peaceful to be away from the world. No one can reach you. There are no intrusions or interruptions from the outside world. That is what 37 years as a Mormon has taught me to equate with the highest form of worship.
So as I stood in the St. Louis Cathedral in New Orleans, I turned my initial reaction on its head and saw my morning walk to church as an opportunity to be right in the world with all those sights and sounds and smells and bodies. And I imagined how worshipping in a building like that might change my perspective on what it means to worship and to be worshipful.
So much of what we do as Mormons turns us towards each other and away from the world-and this includes more than just the buildings we worship in. I’ve often heard it said that we take care of our own, and I think we do that fairly well (at least I hope we do). But what about those who are not “our own”? What about all those people out in the world who are not Mormon? Those who are not in our church buildings with us on Sundays? Those who are not in our temples as we go there to spend a quiet two hours worshipping away from them and turning away from the very real and immediate problems of the world to reflect on the afterlife?
While our sterile, isolated worship practices might keep us “unspotted before the world,” we might need to jump right on into that world and get our hands dirty. Maybe worship means something entirely different than what we think it does. Maybe it means taking in some of those smells and sights and sounds and feeling the press of bodies all around us. Maybe worship means being in the world that we typically seem all too eager to escape from. Maybe it means buying a used pair of shoes from a street vendor or sitting at a table and letting another human being-one not like us in observable ways-read our tea leaves.
What say ye?
A little Church Lady voice inside my head scolded, “These people aren’t being reverent.”
Ha! I loved this line.
Thanks for telling us about this experience. I have had moments in my life where I’ve realized my conditioning is taking over…. that I react a certain way because I was taught to react that way. I remember going to a funeral of a friend’s mother in a black protestant church here in Atlanta. They had a very ornately decorated church with a baptismal font right up front and center. It was lovely. But my first reaction was that it was ostentatious…. that maybe people got baptized ‘for show’ and that perhaps the baptisms weren’t very ‘reverent.’ UGH- so judgmental. Making too many things into a MORAL issue- when they don’t have to be. This was a baptist church- baptism was very central to their doctrines, and it that showed in how they designed their building and how they conducted their services. What’s so wrong about that?
Joseph Smith said this:
“A man [or woman] filled with the love of God, is not content with blessing his family alone, but ranges through the whole world, anxious to bless the whole human race.”
And: “[We are] to feed the hungry, to clothe the naked, to provide for the widow, to dry up the tear of the orphan, to comfort the afflicted, whether in this church, or in any other, or in no church at all, wherever he finds them.”
I think the sometimes insular nature of our Mormon subculture may be related, at least in part, to our difficult history. And the test–for me–of whether we live up to what I think God intends us to be, specifically in reaching outside of ourselves, really lies in what each of us chooses to do every day.
Great quotes, Karin. You are right about what we choose to do every day. Sometimes I wish the church would help us reach outside of our ward boundaries more. It seems that we equate “service” with our callings. So I “serve” every Sunday when I play the organ, and I service as the primary chorister, and I serve as the ward organist, and I serve as a visiting teacher, and yes–those things are service. I don’t want to discount the good work that people do within our congregations.
But we don’t seem to do a very good job reaching outSIDE of ourselves. I suppose it’s my own fault for thinking the church should help me find those opportunities. I guess I need to find them on my own.
But then I see other churches that seem to do a much better job of this. And sometimes collective action is so much bigger/better than what just one individual can do . . .