I Was a Religious Icon (Part 1)
I was ten or eleven years old the first time I wore a frock in public. My parents had pushed me to join the choir at an Episcopalian cathedral in Hartford, Connecticut, and I finally agreed because I could use the choir stipend to save up for a Nintendo.
Christ Church Cathedral was pretty high church: We wore big purple cassocks with frilly white collars, and we were drilled on how to sit and stand, and how to enter and exit, with just the right kind of beatific reverence. This was the beginning of a dozen or so years of me singing in church choirs, during which I learned a ton of European choral music by heart and gained a serious appreciation for the beauty of religion, which I still have to this day.
Christ Church Cathedral was a gorgeous building, with Gothic Revival architecture made out of sandy reddish-brown stone. But it was also an important nexus in a very divided city. At this time, Hartford was both the richest place and the poorest place in the United States. It was known as "the Insurance Capital of the World," because every major insurance company was based there, and thus it had some incredibly wealthy suburbs, but it was also one of the poorest cities in the United States, with a ton of people trapped in horrendous poverty. The Dean of the cathedral at the time was passionate about bringing together these two sides of Hartford — a policy which I could tell was not a very popular decision among some of the more well-heeled churchgoers, and was opposed pretty vocally by some of the other ministers.
But this meant that the choir I was singing in came half from wealthy suburbs like West Hartford and half from the majority-Black and Puerto Rican neighborhoods that had been starved for resources for decades — along with a few kids who came in from the countryside like me. (I rode to choir practice with the choirmaster, who lived out in the boonies near my parents' place.) Growing up in rural Connecticut, I had never had any Black friends before, and I ended up learning just as much about Black music as I did about Bach and Schütz — this choir was where I got my lifelong love of old school R&B and funk. I learned to at least hold my own when some of my fellow choirboys were playing the Dozens, trading funny insults until someone gave up.
Come to think of it, I hadn't had a lot of friends before this, full stop. I'd been bullied a lot, and I'd occasionally found another weirdo to hang out with in elementary school or middle school, but being a choirboy meant joining a whole crew. (And yeah, there was hazing, especially at first.) Us choirboys pulled pranks together, we made too much noise, we were endlessly rowdy — when we weren't standing with perfect posture, our eyes cast upward in an imitation of spiritual rapture. Seriously, it was like flipping a switch — we would all go from rowdy kids to perfect angels, right before we started our processional.
Every year, we schemed to get our hands on the Bishop's infamous spiked punch, which (legend had it) had been fermenting for years and was at least 10,000 proof.
Here's what I remember about being an avowed atheist in a church choir. On the one hand, I was vividly aware that we were putting on a performance. Everything we were doing, with the music and the incense and the organ and the choreography, was intended to create a mood, and it worked. Every move was carefully planned, and inside the gorgeous cathedral with the stained glass, the high vaulted ceilings, and the lovely acoustics, it all created a mood perfectly. Our voices filled up the space, and I could feel the beauty of the music, even as I was keenly aware of being part of manufacturing a spectacle. It was easy to be a little bit cynical, especially when you were privy to all of the worst and sketchiest stuff the church staff were getting up to. (Let's just say there were certain adults working in and around the church that all of us choirboys warned each other never to be alone with.)
On the other hand, I came to really cherish a lot of parts of the service, and not just because we got to sing some of the most beautiful music ever composed. My favorite parts usually involved celebrating community — like the moment in every service where the minister would say, "The Peace of the Lord be always with you," and we all responded, "And also with you," and then everybody shook hands. This group handshake always felt an incredibly beautiful to me. There was a, for lack of a better word, fellowship that all of the call-and-response and ritual verbiage conjured up, even though — or maybe because — so much of the liturgy was gibberish designed to resolve some old theological controversy. ("Begotten not made.")
And at the same time, the Dean of the Cathedral really seemed to seem to take seriously the duty of caring for vulnerable people — I always saw unhoused people around, in the middle of getting food or supplies or some other help. And my favorite sermons were the ones that had to do with the importance of caring for others.
Over a dozen or so years of singing in church choirs, I heard a lot of sermons. Most of them were just pretty okay, and there was the occasional nightmare where the minister tried to weave in an elaborate allegory out of a sitcom episode he had just watched. (Seriously.) Occasionally, you would hear a sermon that would get all the way inside you and fill you with an urgency and awe and make you think about how you were living your life. As I got older, I started chatting with various ministers at various churches, and I learned more about the sermon-writing process. I remember one minister told me that she really liked writing sermons based on certain Bible passages that were slated to be read during a particular service, but there were others that always posed a huge problem for her. Like, what do you do with the Parable of the Unjust Steward, in which Jesus basically says that embezzlement is awesome? I ended up with a feeling that Scripture is complicated and messy, and full of translated wisdom, and it was up to these flawed individuals to make it live and speak to us today.
I still miss that feeling of rapture and awe that comes from sitting in a beautiful space full of mostly silent people contemplating a great mystery. I felt it also when I lived at a Buddhist temple in my late teens and when I went to a Quaker service with a friend, and I've since felt it very occasionally at spoken word events and music shows. But this was one of the purest hits you could get.
Next week, I'll tell a bit about singing in church choirs as a college student and young adult, including my encounters with two of the most famous rebel theologians of all time.
Something I Love Right Now
A couple of shows on Netflix have been knocking my socks off lately. Heartbreak High is a reboot of a 1990s Australian soap opera, but the new version has also garnered some comparisons to HBO's Euphoria. Honestly, the new Heartbreak High feels a lot sweeter than Euphoria, though there are some messed-up parts for sure — and it has an incredibly queer cast of characters, plus a strong focus on friendship over romance. Also, I'm finally watching The Bastard Son and the Devil Himself, a show that was already cancelled, and I'm loving its witchy worldbuilding and put-upon protagonist. It's the perfect cocktail of young adult angst and urban-fantasy action.
My Stuff
My short story collection Even Greater Mistakes is $2.99 in all the ebook formats right now. Kindle, Kobo, Nook, you name it! This is eighteen stories from throughout the past twenty years of my fiction-writing career, which run the gamut from gonzo comedy to extremely dark horror. If there was one book I wish people would read to get a sense of what my writing is about, it's this one. So if you've got a few bucks burning a hole in your digital wallet, I highly encourage you to pick up Even Greater Mistakes in the next few days.
Also! Today is the release date for New Mutants #33, which is the end of a storyline that began in issue #31. (Although in many ways, the story really began in Marvel Voices Pride #1 back in June.) Escapade, the trans mutant superhero, is doomed to cause the death of her best friend Morgan... or is she? And meanwhile, John Sublime and his U-Men have Escapade and their friends cornered, and it's just the beginning of a scheme that could hurt all mutants everywhere. I'm super proud of how this story turned out, thanks to artist Alberto J. Alburquerque, colorist Carlos Lopez, and of course Ted Brandt, Ro Stein and Tamra Bonvillain, who contributed some newspaper strips showing Escapade and Morgan as kids. I'm intensely grateful to editor Sarah Brunstad for letting me include some of those newspaper strips in these issues — I managed to do something pretty sneaky with them in this latest issue, and I can't wait for y'all to see. My local comic book store, Comix Experience, still has copies of 31 and 32, so maybe yours does too!
And in case you missed it... Escapade, Morgan, Cerebella, Wolfsbane and the others will be back in a miniseries that I'm writing called New Mutants: Lethal Legion, which starts in March. (But you can pre-order it right now!!!)
