SIR, WOULD YOU LIKE YOUR RECEIPT IN THE BAG OR SQUISHED DOWN BETWEEN THE SEATS IN YOUR CAR?

I was listening to something on the car radio yesterday and desperately wanted to write it down so that I would remember. I found a pen readily enough but nowhere (whilst I was driving – only try that at home kids) could I find a piece of paper. Reaching down between the seats I snatch up (among other things) an old receipt from a pizza parlor in New York that already had a bunch of things scribbled on it. Well, I might as well get some of those scribbling out of the way and so here are a few of them.

This was written by John Updike and was read on the show Prairie Home Companion. Scribbled on my note was “Updyke (sic) Why miss church?” After a little surfing I found what had piqued my interested that day. Here is “Going to Church.”

"There was a time when I wondered why more people did not go to church. Taken purely as a human recreation, what could be more delightful, more unexpected than to enter a
venerable and lavishly scaled building kept warm and clean for us one or two hours a week and to sit and stand in unison and sing and recite creeds and petitions that are like paths worn smooth in the raw terrain of our hearts? To listen, or not listen, as a poorly paid but resplendently robed man strives to console us with scraps of ancient epistles and halting accounts, hopelessly compromised by words, of those intimations of divine joy that are like pain in that, their instant gone, the mind cannot remember or believe them; to witness the windows donated by departed patrons and the altar flowers arranged by withdrawn hands and the whole considered spectacle lustrous beneath its patina of inheritance; to pay, for all this, no more than we are moved to give—surely in all democracy there is nothing like it. Indeed, it is the most available democratic experience. We vote less than once a year. Only in church and at the polls are we actually given our supposed value, the soul-unit of one, with its noumenal arithmetic of equality: one equals one equals one."

The second scribbled note was, “Trumpet – Taps!” I had left a graveyard (this was in Chicago) where we had just buried a relative. He served in the air force during WWII. As such he was afforded a military funeral. There was an honor guard, the folding and presenting of the flag, and the gun salute. Then a man picked up a trumpet to play taps.

Now, I’ve been at such events when all that was available was a boom box, a man would break from formation, bend over like one of those “Lady working in her garden” cut outs that were so popular in the 90s while trying to find the button that said, “PLAY.” Later they installed a big red button on the side of the chapel that a lady would go up and punch like the “Emergency Stop” button in a machine shop and a recorded trumpeter would sound.

Well, here we were again at a cemetery. The man went and picked up his trumpet. I remember thinking it an odd looking instrument – something between a flugelhorn and a bugle. He fiddled with the bell in a very military and professional manner for a moment and then put the instrument to his lips. It sounded a bit off to me but I marked it up to being a rather unique instrument . The man did not seem to be breathing very deeply for someone playing a trumpet-like instrument. In fact, he was breathing IN as sound was coming OUT. And what was that odd mute in the bell of his instrument? That was no mute! It was a speaker!

I know I’ve written about this before but when do we get to the point when we say, “You know what? We don’t have the talent to do this for real so we will skip this part of the ceremony? (Let’s not restrict this playing taps but apply it even to the Mass.) Many people would argue that no one can tell the difference between a real organ or fake one, real bells or fake bells, an actual organist or a prerecorded one, electric candles or real ones, real masonry or plastic, etc. But how far is too far? If we are going artificial should we be bold about it and not try to play as if it were real? Should we at least be genuine in our artificiality? Did man every have this problem before?

And why does it bother me so – and not others?

More receipt notes some other day! God bless.