Belief
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I watched the live stream of a requiem mass on Saturday, for a friend who died at age 92 last month in Los Angeles. We both served as lectors—laypeople who read scriptural passages as part of the liturgy—at a smoky Episcopal church in Hollywood. Helen had become a prolific screen actor in the late decades of her life, after many years of stage work. “She was not a conventional believer,” her son said in his eulogy, “and did not like to explain what church meant to her.”
When I went to Saint Thomas the Apostle Hollywood for the first time, in August 2006, I carried what I would call a vacancy of belief. This was a couple of years before the apotheosis of militant institutional Mormon homophobia, when the church-backed passage of Proposition 8 ended a period of marriage equality in California. But I had already left behind that institution and belief system, with no intention of finding a replacement—no sense that it was necessary.
I missed singing, though—hymns in four-part harmony. My strengths as a musician are hit or miss, but I can sight-read a bass line and switch on my diaphragm. I suppose I think some aspects of our embodiment have no equivalent in anything else; they’re hard-wired to our consciousness in a proprietary way. And singing is one of these. (It has something in common with the physical practice of yoga—vigilance around posture, regulation of breath—and is often part of it.)
So that first Sunday morning I fumbled my way into Saint Thomas right as the processional was starting, the organ pumping full blast and the whole choir marching down the aisle as the censer flung out clouds of burning resin. I remember the flowers around the altar, lush and saturated, and the way that people stood at attention to receive the first of many physical blessings—a splash of water from the celebrant’s wand.
It’s hard to explain how different this style of worship was from what I grew up with. Joseph Smith was a sensualist and a devoted musician, a wrestler; but the latter-day claimants to his legacy are more sedentary, and the churches they use for ordinary worship have become notoriously generic. Mormons in their main service on Sunday do not ordinarily stand up once they have sat down. In the bodily vigor of the Anglo-Catholic liturgy, I found a whole new genre of reverence.
It was maybe a year or two before I joined the parish’s lector corps, which was made up largely of actors—people who’d worked steadily in the business for decades. “She told stories using her whole body, voice, mind, and heart,” Helen’s son said on Saturday. And that was the animating spirit of the place: All of us—the priests and acolytes, the choir and choirmaster, the congregation who stood and sat and kneeled and came to the altar rail for communion, the people who cleaned the pews and arranged the flowers and spent years restoring the organ pipes, the volunteers who drew a cross of holy oil on your forehead and pronounced yet another blessing in the side chapel after communion—were telling a story with our bodies, one that was distinctly not always synchronous with our words, one that did not make us conventional believers. I realized this on some level then, and I understood the significance of a community that included so many performers, its effect on the way we occupied a room together. But only in that language from Helen’s eulogy—“She told stories using her whole body”—have I understood what perfect sense it makes that both of us ended up at Saint Thomas.
Kindly send me your thoughts, questions, and provocations: dmichaelowen@gmail.com. And say hi on Instagram, or let’s Peloton together: @leggy_blond.