So we may have to temporarily merge the “I’m drunk” threads and religion threads. Santa Maria, my Mexican relatives can drink. I mean, to be fair, their culture invented tequila, which is the perfect shot. And you do not refuse a shot from a Grieving Mexican. As the 6’4" 240 lb white guy they assumed I could drink them all under the table. 20 Mexicans vs. ElGuapo, 20 Mexicans win.
So the rosary seemed like a normal wake to me. Talking and socializing and whatnot. But the funeral was entirely different. A very formalized affair. Mass is crazy! Not crazy, but anthropologically intriguing. There was basically no mention of the deceased, just supplications she be not tortured and welcomed into heaven. It was a mix of English and L.A. Spanish which was cool. I didn’t know there were all kinds of hand gestures to go along with the praying. Lots of holy water was spashed and at the gravesite they even squirted a contact lens solution container of holy water on various relics, icons and symbols.
Speaking of holy water, I almost made a huge mistake. At the church I was thirsty and went looking for a drinking fountain. Outside of the restrooms were these stainless steel basins I took for drinking fountains. I was perched over one looking for the spigot and couldn’t find it. It appeared to have no spigot. I thought maybe it was some fancy contemporary design and was going to scoop it up with my hands but then thought … Wait, is this holy water? Turns out it was holy water. Glad I didn’t sip it.
All in all while the sermon had nothing to do with the dearly departed it was culturally interesting. Two other observations:
There as a fully size, super realistic wooden sculpture of Jesus in the cross in front of the church. I mean nails in hands and feet, blood dripping, everything. It came across as weird Halloween level gruesome to me. Really strange juxtaposition of the somberness of the event and torture porn victim up front.
The Mexican Catholic cemetery we went to had literally thousands of tiny Christmas trees in the graves. Not exaggerating, they went as far as the eye could see. Must have been ten thousand tiny Christmas trees in sight. Really impressive but surreal. It was like a Christmas tree orchard.
Ah yes, that’s Catholic. Suffering of Christ is not to be whitewashed. Look at some Italian and Spanish Barroque paintings to get the full treatment. Holy Week (pre-easter) in Spain is pretty awesome in that way too.
Y’all giving me hardcore flashbacks to my paternal grandfather’s funeral years back. He hadn’t been to church in decades when ALS finally took the grim, gaunt old man down at long last, but they gave his body the full dog and pony show, and I sat through all of it in the sweltering Louisiana heat, surrounded by sweating old women who were all introduced as Mrs Picou this and Aunt Beauchamp that. It was a very special kind of hell.
Every Christmas, I suck it up and attend Mass for mom’s sake, but talk about a waste of a goddamn hour.
In the UK Churchs are used for weddings and funerals. A max of 30 mins. Yay for Church of England winning Henrys Divorce Wars.
I have in-laws who sit through inordinate amounts of boring Catholic church stuff due to “practising Catholic” being a requirement to send the kid to the chav-free Catholic school as they want him to leave school with qualifications not scars. Only a Catholic school would include a way to ensure the parents have to suffer too. Gotta laugh.
I was raised by southern Protestants and taught that the Church was the greatest evil on earth and that the anti-christ would be some future pope. I’m agnostic now and no longer believe in any of it, though I still think the church is f’n evil as shit.
Visited St Peter’s back in the summer of 1982 while Rome, very hot day, and like a good little Protestant washed up in one of those really big urns of holy water along the nave. Sistine Chapel was beautiful though.
Through history religion has been a solid source of money for artist. If you like art, you somehow have to deal with that. When I am on a religious building, my passtime is looking at the art.
I was raised Christian non-denomination, but I am myself now more an agnostic. I still retain my core moral values I learned growing up. My only gribe is how everyone, everywhere, seems to demonize each other, mostly through media, from left to right and so forth. It is so discouraging.
I grew up a Baha’i in the 70s and 80s after my dad joined in 1975 when I was a toddler, and my mother followed suit in 1981. I still consider myself one but I’m not in regular contact with the local community here.
I grew up Catholic, and while I’ve always been agnostic/atheist for as long as I can remember sentience, I went to church until my mom let me off the hook, at around age 15. Catholic church for me was always long, droning and dull.
Skip forward to present day when we realized the best way to procure our toddler a spot in the Church of England school around the corner was to start going to church again. I resigned myself to going every other sunday, with the silver lining that at least I would get an hour to zone out, meditate, inspire myself with creative thoughts while the minutes went by. Well, turn out this Church of England can be a very vicar-centric affair… he’s hooked up his sermons to loud speakers, large screen TV’s, random songs all over the place, no real routine, and was an all-out assault on my senses. I thought I’d have trouble on ideological grounds by attending, turns out instead I had a defensive reaction to the attempt to modernize, and left me thinking, why can’t they be more traditional like the good ol’ Catholic service of my day, for chrissakes! So we stopped going. Kiddo can get in by public allowance, or we go somewhere else.
But intellectually, I lilke the idea of a community hub, where all ages and occupations mix. I just wish it could be an hour of people mingling and talking and exchanging ideas, organized or not, rather than public lecture about old stories.
I once was invited to sing in the temple in Chicago, many years ago. One of the more gorgeous buildings I’ve seen, and a fascinating faith.
As for myself, I’m more Jewish than anything (my son’s bar mitzvah was one of my prouder moments), but have a mix of views thanks to my “celebrate and venerate a little bit of everything” upbringing. Yeah, my mother was a flower child.
As I said above I was raised in the Episcopal Church but I have been to many Catholic affairs. I too get a uneasy feeling when I am in a church with no “traditional” trappings. I mentioned that to the Priest who married the wife and I and he very simply said any building could house God. Sure, but I guess I want a pretty one with the traditional stuff I guess. If I was God that’s where I would be.
After 6 years of marriage, and going to my wife’s church for the last 2 consistently, I finally formally joined the church. I think it was because we got a new pastor this year, and watching her interact with my daughters made me realize how important this was to my family.
Since I’ve been going to this church on and off since I started dating my wife 10 years ago, many members were surprised that I hadn’t been a member yet. Considering how often I got volunteered by my wife for things, and helped out with youth services, I can understand their surprise.
This is one of many reasons that I’m no longer Catholic, despite being raised that way and going to private Catholic school through HS. So much money is wasted on churches and it’s so unnecessary. I doubt the Bible says that gold must be everywhere, that expensive stained glass windows must adorn the walls, etc. A plain gathering hall with whatever additional facilities are needed makes a hell of a lot more sense to me.
Yeah, my wife usually gets me to church with our kids on Christmas Eve and Easter and I still can’t get used to it. I’m looking around the whole place thinking it’s like freakin’ Graceland, there’s so much gold. I mean not literal gold, but there’s just this general golden hue to everything. And stained glass everywhere. It just looks gaudy to me.
“Peter Pumpkinhead came to town
Spreading wisdom and cash around
Fed the starving and housed the poor
Showed the Vatican what gold’s for.”
There is a church not to far from me that my wife dragged me to for one Christmas. It was large, but very plain, almost like a circular school auditorium plain. But she didn’t go to that church for very long, because they kept asking for money, lots of money. That church has now built a larger church, an educational wing, and a coffee shop. Yea, a coffee shop.
This church is on a street that now features a couple non-denominational churches, a Sikh temple and a Mormon church.
That’s really interesting. I left the Catholic Church decades ago, but overly-ornate churches were not something I remember running into too often.
I mean, sure, in Europe there are plenty of old, super-ornate churches and they are lots of fun to look at as a tourist. But US Catholic churches tend to mirror the society and times they were built in… and that’s not particularly, er, “Trumpian”. As a caveat, I never really went to church in the old-school Catholic areas like Boston or New York; this was all in the more Protestant regions (Virginia, Nevada, California, etc.).
My folks’ Parish down in central Virginia has two churches that share a single priest. One is the very-typical US church-house that you’ll find anywhere on the East Coast: a one-room building constructed just before the Civil War with a steeple, a small choir-loft, and an altar area. It’s pretty plain with white-painted wood paneling and a wooden altar. There are stained-glass windows, but nothing too gaudy.
The second building (miles away) was built in the 1970s and is fairly typical of most modern Catholic church buildings that I went to as a kid, no matter the region of the US. A big, airy, central room where the altar is surrounded on three sides by the pews rather than the traditional long, narrow nave with two rows of pews. No gold or stained glass in the architecture at all. No life-like Jesus either; just an abstract crucifix.
Yea, that if I remember right is the main church for the LA Diocese, or whatever Catholics may call it. And I think it has been called out for being over the top. But I also think it was built at a time when other LA area churches were also spending millions.
The Crystal Cathedral, somewhere in the LA area, was built by a TV evangelist and cost about a 1/3 of that. I think that church recently was dissolved and I have no idea what the church building is used for know.
But most Catholic churches, at least in California, are fairly modest in the world of modern churches.
The Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove Orange County was purchased by the Roman Catholic Diocese of Orange. It is being renamed “Christ Cathedral” and will become the seat for the diocese later this year.
