look out, churchies, i am tania

Sunday, we tried to go to another church.

Maybe Church is in our rearview mirror, forever known to us now as Not On Your Life Church.

But it was the Sunday before Christmas and when I woke up that morning, it suddenly hit me that we had nowhere to go. No church “home.” So I bolted up in bed and started to blub with the horrible horrible angst of it all and MB, lucky man, consoled me, which is just what every man wants to do in bed with his wife first thing in the morning on the Sunday before Christmas.

We discussed a couple of Christmas church possibilities. Places we “might” go. I just wailed some more and stared at the socks on floor. I told MB I might want to go to Maybe Church one last time because “It’s Christmas,” ran my tearful logic,” so maybe Outing Person will see me and say he’s very sorry for everything because,” I hiccupped, “of baby Jesus.”

Sure, Trace. That’s gonna happen.

I mention this telling detail lest any of you ever for a fleeting moment think I am the least bit intelligent.

I am not.

“I want to wear my ‘I am Tania’ outfit and go to Maybe Church and scare them all because I look like a brainwashed bank robber and then sit back and wait for everyone to apologize.”

MB stroked my back. I didn’t look at him because I was pretty sure he was trying hard to arrange his face into the “yeah, she’s TOTALLY normal” look and I just couldn’t bear to see him struggle. So I stared at the overdue library book on the floor next to the socks I’d already stared at.

“So ….. that’s what you want to do?”

“Kind of.” I wiped my runny nose on the back of my hand. Sexy. I should have used the socks.

“Babe …… uh …… yeah, we’re not doing that. Just get dressed and let’s get some coffee.”

He’s so reasonable. Why must I always be overruled? I hate him.

But I dressed in my ‘I am Tania’ outfit anyway: jeans, a tank top, an army surplus shirt of MB’s that fits me like a jacket, a black beret. Basically, in that get-up, I am Tania meets Che and, look, I ain’t messing around, baby Jesus. I look like I could march into that manger with a machine gun and demand our Lord and Savior hand over the frankincense, tout de suite, which he would understand because, sure, he’s a baby, but he’s God, for pity’s sake, and God can speak French if he wants to even though he probably doesn’t. On the Sunday before Christmas, I think it’s important to dress as if you remember the real meaning of Christmas — which, as we all know, is looking like a brainwashed bank robber and blurting out your demands to the baby Jesus in French.

I stomped into the living room in this outfit and MB rolled his eyes.

“All right. Let’s get coffee.”

“Okay, Tania.”

He is not easily intimidated by me. It’s frustrating. He really should take me more seriously.

Standing in line for coffee, you will be shocked to hear, I got some furtive, worried looks. I think I caught an old man rolling his eyes at me, but maybe he had a medical condition, like his eyes get stuck from the desiccation of old age and he needs to roll them regularly or they’ll never move again, and then he’ll go blind and won’t be able to see women who like to walk around looking like brainwashed bank robbers on the Sunday before Christmas.

Growing old sure does suck.

Back in the car with our coffees, we drove around aimlessly for a bit.

“I just want to hear a whole sanctuary of people singing O Holy Night. That’s all I want.”

“Okay,” said MB. “Well, we can go to X or Y. You decide.”

Hm.

X was our old church.

Y was this megachurch some friends of ours attend.

I dithered back and forth on my options for a couple of freeway miles. Tania is not too decisive, despite appearances. The exit was coming up and these places were in opposite directions. Choose now or smash us into the median, dummy.

“Oh, screw it. Let’s be invisible. Let’s go to Y.”

MB swept his eyes over me, up, down. Yeah, she’s gonna be invisible. I wish I was invisible. He sighed a small sigh.

Megachurch Y is kind of a joke to me because I hate megachurches. The whole idea of “mega” anything annoys me unless it’s someone knocking on my door with giant check telling me I’ve just won the lottery and become a megamillionaire even though I don’t even play the lottery because I think it’s stupid. But I hate the commercialization of church, which is what megachurches are. Product placement. Power couples. Corporate churches with “cool” one-word names. Well, sometimes with “The” in front of them; sometimes not. You know, names like:

“The Fusion.”

“Refuge.”

“The Flood.”

Ugh. I think “The Wankers” would be a good church name. At least it’s honest.

“Where do you go to church, Trace?”

“Oh, I go to The Wankers. Wanna come?”

Still, that’s where my split-second choice had us headed — to the megachurch with the cool one-word name and 23 services on Sunday, one every 7 minutes, and 15 services on Saturday, and 493,720 members. Or something like that.

We pulled into the parking lot only to find it was actually a labyrinth of parking lots, one spilling into another and another and another, all of them “FULL” said the signs, and all designed, apparently, to FORCE you to go to this church or die in the parking lot because there is simply NO WAY OUT of this unholy maze.

Tania was getting ticked.

You know, perhaps Maybe Church didn’t need to go to all the trouble of those manic parking police MAKING YOU FEEL WELCOME and those incessant Perky Bob lunch invitations and the outing of this blog for its vicious anonymous slander just to win us over to the “sovereign” graciousness of their church. All just a waste of energy, really, compared to Megachurch Y’s straightforward but brilliant strategy to simply trap you forever their endless Escher-like parking lots.

I think we were in Tijuana when we finally parked. We climbed out of the car, glanced around to make sure no TJ drug lord was about to behead us, and suddenly found ourselves lost in the swell of other churchies faithfully trudging to the compound entrance where Jesus was some 20 miles away. We’d never been there. We didn’t know where anything was. We just followed the flow, walking and walking, carrying our coffee, snarking under our breath. The beret pressing on my forehead furrowed my grumpy brow even more.

We made it to the entrance alive despite the fact that there was no one along this marathon route offering us Dixie cups of water or Gatorade or anything to ensure that we would live to tithe again. It was sheer grit on our part, obviously. Up the sweeping stairway we climbed, into the building and, yamahama, the place was massive. It overwhelmed. It made me embarrassed somehow. Glowing flagstone tile, vaulted ceilings, sky lights, spiritual wall art, everything earth tones and soothing yet grand, just the kind of giant tony headquarters you’d expect if Jesus CEO ran the world and wanted to show off how much he wasn’t showing off. To the right, tables with product. T-shirts, mugs, bumper stickers so people can know that the wanker who just cut them off is a Christian and they can find that wanker here, at the church conveniently mentioned on this sticker. Directly ahead of us was some kind of giant information center, spilling over with computers and flyers and people who seemed to pointedly ignore the people who needed information.

I hissed to MB.

“Oh, no. This will never be our church. This is a one-time deal.”

To the left were entrances into the sanctuary, half a dozen of them, like a sports arena. Crazy. From behind those doors, I could hear the singing.

The very end of O Holy Night.

Ah, crap.

We didn’t know what time the service started. We didn’t know anything. I marched up to the information center.

“What time is the next service?”

“Noon.”

It was 10:30.

“Okay. Thanks.”

“Do you want to go in?” said MB.

I shrugged. Whatever. “Okay.”

Maybe they’d sing O Holy Night again at the end. Of course, they would, Tania.

The doors were closed with a security person in each doorway. We approached the dude at Door #1.

He barked at us.

“No coffee in the sanctuary.”

Translation: Welcome to our church!

“Okay,” said MB. “Can we go in?”

“No. Downstairs is full.”

We walked away.

Tania was pissed and muttered, “Thanks for making us feel welcome.”

For a fleeting second, I missed the doggedness of Perky Bob.

We were turned away at the next door, too, so it wasn’t just a personality problem with the first guy. They either really didn’t want us in the downstairs area or all their volunteers were psychos. We were Mary and Joseph, I tell you, being turned away time after time. Except Mary was pregnant and a virgin and not dressed like a brainwashed bank robber. One assumes.

The second guy pointed skyward and told us there was room in the balcony level. The way he said it, we could tell it wasn’t ideal. That it was where the undesirables sat or something. You know, the manger of the church. We rode the — ahem — elevator to the third floor, hid our coffee inside our coats, take that, security, and entered the church arena just in time to hear the pastor — a former NFL player — punctuating what he’d just said by saying “word!” and the congregation echoing him with “word!”

Annnd …. that was it. We entered through one door, heard that, and immediately exited through the very next door 10 feet away. We were in; we were out.

Nope. Can’t hang with that.

“Word.”

We shared the elevator down with a little black kid. He looked about 11, leaning against the elevator wall with his backpack slung over his shoulder. I decided Tania would talk to him and wouldn’t we have a nice little exchange because I looked so normal in my beret and army surplus shirt and huge sunglasses I was still wearing.

“So do you go to this church every Sunday?”

The kid looked a little startled. The thing with the blonde hair and the Sleestak eyes was talking to him.

“Uh, yeah.”

“Do you like it?”

He did the so-so motion with his hand.

“Well, lots of people here, huh?”

Suddenly, the floodgates opened.

“The security people here are DUMB! They told me I couldn’t go into the service I was supposed to serve in!”

The way he emphasized dumb, I almost lost it, but we were having a moment, I thought, Tania and the kid, so I didn’t want to blow it by laughing, in addition to looking like a freak.

“That is whacked,” I said.

“Whacked,” MB said.

The kid just looked at us. White people are weird. Moment over.

On the ground floor, we nearly sprinted. Out the massive front doors we flew, past the information center, past the product table, past the mega-lomania of everything.

Outside, I could breathe again, see straight, and something caught my eye.

“Hey, there’s a Trader Joe’s over there! Let’s go. I need to pick up some things.”

“Okay.”

We had church at Trader Joe’s.

When we left a while later, we couldn’t help but notice just how many cars with Christian fish or Christian bumpers stickers were parked in the Trader Joe’s lot.

The lot that had big signs at the end of every row:

No Church Parking.

So I spent the Sunday before Christmas at Trader Joe’s. No, I didn’t hear a choir singing O Holy Night, but I did hear Olivia Newton-John singing Have You Never Been Mellow? while I shopped for chicken strips in the frozen food.

And no. No, honestly, I have never been mellow.

I am Tania.