PARKING LOT THEOLOGY

Meaning is where you find it... or take it where you can get it... or “This makes about as much sense and anything else.” 

On my way to meet friends at Starbucks just before seven o’clock, I hurried my bike past a couple of stragglers going into St. Vincent’s Church for early morning mass.  A few minutes later I followed a pick-up (Hey!  Hey! Don’t go there...  I’m talking here about a Dodge truck) with BAD RELIGION stenciled on the back window. Dave and Clyde told me “Bad Religion” is the name of a punk rock band. It got me looking around and thinking about how and where religion happens.  Why not a Parking Lot!

All the elements are there. It’s October, and a grocery store has built an altar of pumpkins and flowers with an effigy which I guess is supposed to represent the great American deity around which the goblin and ghoul Halloween saints can be adored by old and young children who want more than anything to be frightened by the supernatural, the unreal, the otherworldly.  I imagined a worship service with genuine supplicants and pretenders.  In my fantasy there they were... gathered with Charlie Brown in front of the display waiting for the altar call.  Surely the Great Pumpkin will appear this year.

Don’t get me wrong.  I like Halloween.  I’ve always liked Halloween.  When I was a kid in Glenwood, Arkansas, the Halloween Carnival was one of the biggest events of the year.  A ten-year-old boy with mischief on his mind most of the time couldn’t find anything at the Methodist Church or the Baptist Church or the Presbyterian Church to compare with a Halloween Carnival.  I remember mostly that the jack-o-lanterns carved from huge pumpkins delighted everybody but scared nobody.  A plastic jack-o-lantern would have been as out of place at the carnival as a cheap plastic Jesus-on-the-half-shell would have been at the Baptist Church.  Only the real, the natural stuff, would satisfy.  And costumes:  You made your own.  None of the store-bought wigs and capes and fake fangs.  People in those days knew how to do religion.  

Now, I think I’m on to something here.  That’s obviously what “Gimme that Ole Time Religion” is all about.  Apparently we’ve got to believe people at some other time in the past, hopefully the near past that was clearly build on a memory of an even longer-ago past which could be revised and improved without changing anything, knew how to do religion; and all people who want to get it right and be true believers have got to do is try, try to understand and believe and at the right moment finally say so...  So why not find the old time religion in a parking lot...

After Dave went to work, Clyde and I got into a deep conversation about the difference between spirituality and religion... at the Starbucks at the edge of the parking lot. I think we agreed that sometimes the dividing line between spirituality and religion is thin and also that the gulf between religion and spirituality is sometimes very wide.  As Clyde talked with me about his hummingbird paintings, he put his hands together in a way that I liked; so as I often do when I see something that I like, I snapped the picture of his hands with my phone.  Now there’s something you couldn’t do a long time ago... take a picture with a phone.  Some of us are old enough to remember a time when the place where you’d find a phone was hanging on a wall... maybe in your grandmother’s house where you only answered it when it signaled that someone was calling someone at her house with two shorts and one long ring. If it was only two shorts, you didn’t answer because it was for somebody down the road... and you didn’t listen in on phone conversations between two other people even though you could because it was somehow not right.  (I was just about to launch into a tangent about Facebook and listening in on other people’s thoughts, but I’m going to save that for another day.) Same thing with religion.  You didn’t do some things even when you could because it wouldn’t have been right.  Of course, you did some things you shouldn’t do... just because you could, hoping to get away with it... which is a lot the way religion works today.  Not so much if the intent is to be spiritual. I can’t even imagine what she or my grandfather would have said if someone had suggested that one day a person would we able to walk away from home with a phone in the pocket from which you could talk with Moscow, Idaho, or Russia, if you wanted to, or you could take a picture of a friend’s hands in a coffee shop. Wow.  That’s deep... and if you look closely to the picture, you’ll see that my Phone picked up the word HOLY in the background. That wasn’t even intended, so it much be a religious thing.

So I rode my bike around the parking lot looking for other things with theological meaning.  It’s amazing how easy it is to gather stuff that might come in handy if you should want to make a religion.  Whoooah.  That’s not what I want to do.  We’ve got enough religion already.  Theology is something I’m still working on... even in parking lots.  I’m going to concentrate on finding things out in the world that encourage me to be more positively helpful and spiritual.

My Feet... My Bike...

Some would say,

"My religion."