|
|
|
secular Sunday
Sunday, June 10 2007
I live a secular life, and for me today was a fairly normal secular Sunday. It's normal for me to have a business meeting off Route 212 just east of Woodstock early on Sunday afternoons, and it's then normal for me to drive from there out to Route 9W north of Kingston on the way home, even though it's somewhat out of the way. When I do this, I always take a series of back roads, beginning with Glasgo Turnpike, then heading south on the Old Kings Highway (Route 31) to Seremma Court, and then to 9W on something called Grant Avenue. There's a big ugly new evangelical church near the intersection of Seremma and Grant, and back when it was under construction there had been a big sign telling passers by to "Look What the Lord is Doing." If I had looked, though, I would have seen a bunch of carpenters building a big white building that looks more like an enormous raised ranch than it does the Hagia Sophia, and had I forced all of the carpenters to exhale into a breathalyzer, I would have discovered that some of them like to get a little hammered before they do their hammering. Meanwhile, the things that the Lord actually does are of a type that, more often than not, tends to undo the work of carpenters, hammered or otherwise. It's a pretty straightforward challenge to faith, it seems, and it's a testament to the ubiquity of human delusion that so many of us go on believing in the existence of a benevolent almighty deity in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
Since getting their 1994 CD Fairytales of Slavery in the mail, been listening to a music group called Miranda Sex Garden, a female choral group that started out singing ancient English folk songs a capella but gradually added modern rock instruments, giving their music a brooding gothic quality. I like this later phase, particularly songs like "Cover My Face" and "Peep Show." Some of the other songs on this album are either a bit too industrial for my tastes or (in the case of songs such as "Havana Lied") they sound like vaudeville done in Middle English.
We're getting older and many of our friends have procreated and are raising their little replacements. For these and perhaps other reasons, it doesn't seem like we've been as social as we used to be. Few people have been stopping by, our guest rooms have gone mostly unused, and we haven't had a real party in well over a year. Tonight, though, our friends the photogenic vegan Buddhists came over and we served as dinner hosts for the first time in months. They surprised us mostly with their ability to consume wine, which was (among our lightweight friends at least) unprecedented.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?070610 feedback
previous | next |
