Talk to the Animals / Mass Lunacy
Bawer, Bruce
TALK TO THE ANIMALS MASS LUNACY by Bruce Bawer I 'd never seen a church so crowded. The right aisle—which was separated from the cavernous nave by a long row of massive stone columns—was as packed...
...They're supposed to have healing properties...
...Shabbily dressed men carrying videotape cameras and recording equipment continually moved by in packs of three and four, hunched over like Marines storming a beachhead...
...ple but dozens of cats and dogs, the felines squirming in their owners' arms, the canines padding nervously underfoot, getting their leashes tangled together and winding them around the legs of strangers...
...Eliot are fighting back—and it's giving the liberals fits...
...The right aisle—which was separated from the cavernous nave by a long row of massive stone columns—was as packed as the A train at rush hour...
...The Solemnity of St...
...Francis's vow of poverty...
...Ushers moved constantly up and down the central corridor, walkieSpearheading The Recovery Of Traditional Values If you think mindless radicalism has made a mess of society, schools, the economy, and our political institutions, you should see what it's doing to our churches...
...But it wasn't just any Protestant church...
...When, after ten minutes or so of creeping slowly toward the door, my friend and I finally made it out of the church, it was cold and windy but had stopped raining...
...It was not till the animals had all arrived at the altar, and the congregation was in the middle of a "Prayer of Thanksgiving for the Animal Kingdom," that it occurred to me what this scene reminded me of: an ancient pagan ceremony of animal sacrifice (only without the actual sacrifice...
...Periodically, in the apse and transept and up and down the nave's central corridor, the dancers, twenty or so in number and wearing white tights, frolicked to the reedy, hypnotic strains of the Consort's unmelodic hymns and chants...
...While we sang this, we were supposed to raise and lower our arms—rather like Moslems, except that we weren't groveling on the floor but standing upright...
...Small children, some alone and some in groups of two and three, ran all over the place throughout the service, laughing and yelling...
...Finally Bishop Moore took the mike, and reminded us (just in case we'd forgotten since Brother Michael's sermon) to pray for suffering and captive peoples, especially those in Nicaragua and South Africa...
...Earth Mass, which a friend of mine had attended last year (a friend of his, who sign-language interpreted for the deaf con-gregants seated in the transept, had in turn introduced him to it) and which he'd insisted I join him at this year: "You've got to see this to believe it," he'd said...
...Francis, a.k.a...
...The composer's credits for the "Sanctus and Benedictus Qui Venit" reads "Humpback Whale, Castro-Neves, Hailey, Winter...
...The idea of the Earth Mass, he'd explained, was to celebrate the beautiful Earth that God had blessed us with, and all its appurtenances—the trees, rocks, oceans, what-have-you...
...I whispered to my friend...
...With the elephant, llama, et al...
...And these weren't poor people, either, who couldn't afford good clothing...
...some of these musical pieces were hauntingly enhanced by the recorded sounds (mating THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1988 31 bodies and everything on them were our family: All praise be yours thru Brother Sun, All praise be yours thru Sister Moon, By Mother Earth my lord be praised, By Brother Mountain, Sister Sea, Thru Brother Wind and Brother Air, Thru Sister Water, Brother Fire The Stars above give thanks to Thee...
...This attitude would explain not only the adults' garb but the children's lack of discipline...
...What matters is that God believes in you...
...I'd arrived forty-five minutes late, to be sure, and in the middle of the sermon, but I was here...
...a man carried a small bird...
...A charitable 13 friend suggested afterwards that perhaps they had all been dressing down in tribute to St...
...Francis loved—and also of wolves, who were not, Brother Michael informed us, nice at all...
...This was not only bad, it seemed, but blasphemous, because, according to the "Canticle of the Sun" (I'd missed it, but the words were printed in the missal), the celestial D ut not to church...
...Perfect teeth and beautiful complexions abounded...
...He frothed at the mouth for a while about those wolves, whom he clearly considered to be among mankind's greatest enemies, and in closing asked us to pray for all suffering and victimized people, especially those in Nicaragua and Northern Ireland...
...It was hard to concentrate on the sermon for all the activity around me...
...To these parents, apparently, taking the kids to God's House was like taking them to visit an indulgent Grandpa: here you simply had to let them get away with more than you did at home...
...Almost everyone went along, obediently imitating the dancers, all of whom were now synchronously waving brightly colored flags up, down, up, down...
...fter the prayer came a sort of finale...
...And he reminded us that our beautiful God-given earth is being despoiled by air and water pollution and overdevelopment, and threatened by the existence of nuclear weapons...
...I'd expected things to be less chaotic in the nave than in the aisle, but such was not the case...
...People were wearing sweatshirts, jogging suits, T-shirts bearing the names of rock groups and soft drinks...
...nobody tried to shut them up or make them sit down...
...The dancers swayed a little, too, and so did the crowd...
...The ceremony's climax came afterthe communion: the big bronze doors at the back of the church were opened and there began what the missal referred to as a "silent procession of representative animals...
...What made it harder to get anywhere was that while some people were moving, others were standing stock still, scanning the faces of the passersby, of the animals, and (though some of them had to stand on tiptoe to manage it) of the hundreds of congregants seated in the nave...
...One by one, an elephant, a camel, a llama, a horse were led down the aisle toward the altar...
...The event...
...It was to witness a manifestation of the New Wave that I had come, on this cold, rainy fall morning, to Bishop Moore's cathedral...
...Moving forward in the aisle, I was finally able to glimpse the distant pulpit and, in it, the speaker of the sermon...
...for the "Agnus Dei," "Harp Seals, Scott, Winter...
...some took out cameras and snapped flash pictures as the animals filed past...
...The "representative animals" filed out, and then the priests, the choir, a half dozen or so Tibetan monks whom I hadn't seen before, and the Paul Winter instrumentalists, who in their seedy habiliments (e.g., dirty dungaree jackets and no-longer-white T-shirts) looked like a sixties acid-rock group after too much acid...
...no, although we were on the fringes of Harlem here at Amsterdam Avenue and 112th Street, the congregation was overwhelmingly white, Anglo-Saxon, and affluent-looking...
...A middle-aged woman stood near me, raising her right hand the way the Pope does when he's blessing people...
...his tone suddenly tinged with saeva indignatio, Brother Michael warned us that there were, as a matter of fact, wolves among us today in this very city: "Wall Street wolves," he growled, " . . . real estate wolves...
...Lewis, Dorothy L. Sayers, and T.S...
...The combination of the chantlike music, the pagan lyrics, the white-garbed dancers, and the churchful of supplicatory arm gestures made it look as if this congregation were worshipping not Jehovah but Ra, the Egyptian sun god...
...But their extremely casual attire seemed, to me, to reflect a distinctly different notion: namely, that it just wasn't proper to get all formal with God...
...And you can read all about it in the liveliest, most outspoken journal of religious news, commentary, and criticism ever published...
...She's blessing the animals...
...Washington, D.C...
...Formerly dignified and beautiful, America's major religious bodies are being run into the ground by middle-aged hippies who don't care what their vanishing parishioners think...
...There were not only hundreds of peoBruce Bawer is The American Spectator's movie reviewer...
...My second thought was that this Brit, whoever he was, had just blithely dismissed the doctrine of salvation by faith, upon which the entire Protestant religion happens to be founded...
...for the revivalist Sister Sharon Falconer (played by Jean Simmons) had spoken almost the exact same words in that film to the agnostic newspaperman Jim Lefferts (Arthur Kennedy...
...Much of it was 'the work of the Paul Winter Consort, a group of avant-garde instrumentalists and modern dancers (and one big-voiced blues singer who, we were told, had just left the cast of Big River) that, along with the church choir and organist, provided the music for the Mass...
...Francis, and of all the nice animals that St...
...Since animals came with the package the celebration was taking place this year, as it had once or twice before, on the Feast of St...
...He was middle-aged, bespectacled, mousy-looking, and clad in a long brown frock...
...On the contrary, it was the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, the seat of the Episcopal diocese of New York and the headquarters of the Reverend Paul Moore, Jr., the Episcopal Bishop of New York, who in many people's minds is the very embodiment of new-wave American Protestantism...
...When, a'few moments later, I miraculously espied my friend in a seat near the middle of the church and managed to slip into the seat he'd saved, I glanced at the missal and noted that the Brit was a Franciscan named Brother Michael...
...20003 Isn't it about time somebody printed how you feel...
...And that was it...
...A priest had one hand inside the carrier and with the other hand was making solemn motions in the gray early afternoon air...
...Fortunately, the spiritual heirs of C.S...
...But I didn't pay attention for long to my, fellow congregants...
...A young boy carried a turtle...
...When we stood for the Nicene Creed, moreover, I noticed for the first time that, in this congregation of several hundred people, I was one of the very few men in a jacket and tie...
...still hovering around the altar, the whole company—all the humans, anyway—took part in a "Hymn of Acclamation": For the Beauty of the Earth, Sing, Oh Sing Today, Of the sky and at our birth, Sing, Oh Sing Always, Nature, Human and Divine, all around us lies, Lord of All to Thee we raise grateful hymns of praise...
...30 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1988 talkies in their hands...
...And a few, remarkably enough, seemed actually to be absorbed in the words of the sermon which, spoken in a man's heavily amplified upper-class British voice, echoed eerily within the stone walls...
...There was too much going on elsewhere...
...Several times, people around me glanced at my tie and jacket with looks of silent reproach...
...Most of the members of the congregation had the collars of their coats pulled up tight and were proceeding quickly, in groups of five and six and seven, in the direction of West End Avenue and Riverside Drive...
...Do the whale and seals belong to ASCAP...
...Here are just a few subjects covered: • Tutu: Christian prelate or terrorist guru...
...a woman carried a kitten...
...Missa Gaia, a.k.a...
...The new cult of cultural illiteracy • Mod liturgies...
...32 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1988...
...Francis, the patron saint of animals...
...I knew that at home, these folks had closets full of Brooks Brothers suits and designer dresses, which they wore to their executive jobs in midtown, to power lunches and dinner parties, to the theater and opera and ballet.calls...
...A small crowd, however, had formed on the front steps around a man who was holding open an expensive-looking cat carrier...
...It matters little whether you believe in God," the seemingly disembodied voice boomed over the hubbub...
...Magic crystals," he said...
...At one point, this novel variation on sacred music served as accompaniment while two of the dancers—a young black man and a young white woman—climbed up into the pulpit and did an erotic pas de deux...
...The congregants watched with fascination, some of them standing on their chairs, or on the waist-high bases of the huge stone pillars, to get a better view...
...And this was, after all, a Protestant church...
...from 200 feet away, he looked rather like Philip Larkin...
...Appropriately enough, Brother Michael was now speaking of St...
...Some of the people were pushing their way, as I was, toward the front of the church, and some were moving just as determinedly toward the back, rather like the fairgoers who stream meaninglessly in both directions at one of those New York street festivals...
...But she had something in her hand...
...What's she holding...
...My first thought was that the speaker must have seen Elmer Gantry recently...
...A parrot rode by on somebody's shoulder...
...of whales and seals...
...literally God-awful • Our Mother Who Art In New Haven: The feminist campaign to rewrite the Bible To learn what's really going on in the Church, send your name and address with a check for $20 for a year to: 6hristianChallenge® The Only Worldwide Voice Of Traditional Anglicanism Department A 1215 Independence Ave...
...He was blessing a pussycat...
...though the sky was still clouded it looked as if the sun might break through shortly...
Vol. 21 • March 1988 • No. 3
