Vigils 'n' Sigils: Join The Gang!

This post isn't the beginning of the thread -- not quite.

I have a (Roman) Catholic friend who, when he seeks to wound me, will stretch and yawn and drawl, "Well, yeah -- Mennonites. I mean, I understand the impulse toward 'perfect community,' I truly do. But honestly, your 'orthodoxy,' such as it is, combined with the almost complete absence of tradition . . . etc, etc"

I have another who says his exposure to Protestant worship leaves him with the impression we're just making things up as we go along. He's mostly amused, a posture that nettles me more than his contempt does. In the latter attitude, his is particularly acute for the Presbyterians and Anglicans, etc., who, because they've carried over liturgies and the like, fall not into the improvisational category but into that of pale imitation.

A Jewish friend (Orthodox) keen to keep up ecumenical dialogue is under the unshakable impression that all Christianity is improvisational -- some of which she appreciates (gay marriage, surprisingly), and a great deal more which merely elicits the dreaded Jewish Shrug.

Man, I won't go to the mat over anyone's orthodoxy -- though I might, depending, occasionally recommend Chesterton's, despite never having finished the slender book.

This business of community, however -- pondering that for any length of time raises a host of troubling questions.

An example: Leaving Westboro -- I'd heard this story before, via a CBC interview with Megan Phelps-Roper and her sister Grace. The CBC angle, as with NPR and The New Yorker's Adrian Chen, is to explore the triumph of dramatic conversion as a result of extraordinarily patient and dogged dialogue (another less overt but certainly present element of persuasion: deep sexual attraction). One leaves these conversations tempted to think that had we but world enough and time, the entire nation could turn from and possibly counter the brute appeal of 45's monologue-via-Twitter.

I was left with other thoughts, however, and the big stumbling point for my buy-in to this rosy "I'd like to buy the world a Coke" scenario was this: post-Westboro life will have, by necessity, stretches of unimaginable loneliness.

What's the big deal? We're all lonely, right?

No argument from me -- that is indeed the day-to-day reality for most of us. But if you've ever experienced not-lonely -- if you've ever experienced the assurance of deep community -- the later experience of genuine lonely is truly Hell.

Again, no sweeping "This is what MUST be done!" conclusion from Yours Truly -- only an admission that one significant reason why I still throw-in with my fellow "Dwarfs" is to fend off genuine lonely, a reason only the materially swaddled could find contemptible.

Also, a link re-posted for further pondering:

"I'd forgotten that social life could be so easy. I'd forgotten that things most Americans do alone, ordinary things like watching television or listening to music or sweeping a floor, could also be done in numbers, pleasantly."   Ex-Mormon Walter Kirn confesses.

"Dick, dick, dick, dick, dick!"

Next: You can dance, if you want to.