Really, we tried

We tried to go to St. Jonah's this past Sunday, really we did. Since the step-daughters are now way too old and sophisticated to be willing to be counselors, we'd forgotten that the prior week had been the week of Going Medieval camp for kiddies. (The eldest is off on her jaunt of Germany and the 15-year-old would rather spend her week on facebook and text messaging and getting ready for her sleep away camp. Can't really say I blame her.) If we remembered about the camp and that the kids would be more than participating in the main service we might have gone to the early service or else to that outpost in a neighboring industrial city that we discovered a couple weeks ago. Both would have required waking up early, but we were up late enjoying Lucinda Williams at the Green River Festival. And we didn't even make it at 10:30 on the dot. I knew we were rather late since I didn't even hear the organ as we walked up the side street by the flower garden. The first lesson was in progress: we could hear a voice speaking. But what we saw was a child placing a ladder beside the altar table. Wha? I recognized the words as telling of Jacob's dream and understood the ladder but Mr. Crackles hovered in the doorway, gesturing to me. Psst, let's go. He'd been worried about the heat in the church anyway, and this was just the last straw. If you don't want to believe the altar is sacred space, then don't tell me it matters if I go to the service or not, sayeth he. Turning it into a jungle gym. He really hates what he calls "child worship." Of course it pervades St. Jonah's since all the up and coming families with potentially large incomes for a good number of years have kiddies. I can see how allowing the children to take over one service in the summer is a useful teaching exercise for them, even if it does subject the adults to listening to their prayers for their pets and their echoings of politically correct oversimplifications about how we shouldn't bomb nice people who are different from us. I can also see how for Mr. Crackles, who is so alienated from his children that worship of them does not reflect his glory the way it does for other parents, it is a painful thing to watch, as it is for me as well. So, we left. We went to the beach and worshipped with our bodies the God who made the vast seas and Leviathan, just for the sport of it.