Eid al Adha: Stone the devil and slay your son.

When I got home late one evening this week, my housemate Jennine was in the kitchen with the remaining guests from a dinner party she had hosted, and everyone was taking turns washing the dishes.

Our mutual friend Mohammed had been one of the guests, and he stood at the sink, wrist-deep in suds. The remnant of guests was a bit past tipsy, and they were talking about sex. There were groans and disagreements when I tried to change the subject to ask Mohammed about Eid al-Adha and the recent Hajj, so I combined the subjects and asked him if he had a story that could combine content about the Hajj with content about sex. As it turned out, he did.

Mohammed told us all about one of his several visits to Mecca during the Hajj from while he was living in Saudi Arabia.

As I learned back in September, the men and women worship together in Mecca during the Hajj, and Mohammed's story had to do with both the traditional gender-mixing and the type of clothing that Muslims wear during the Hajj. He explained how he was dressed in a seamless garment on his Hajj visits, an outfit that felt like nothing more than a couple of towels wrapped around his body. He described how packed-together the millions of pilgrims are as they circumambulate the Ka'aba, and he told a story of being pushed so close to the woman in front of him that he felt his penis slot snugly into the cleft of her behind. He wasn't sure how to correct the situation before before the thronging masses solved the dilemma for him by knocking him to the ground and trampling him.

Mohammed, bloodied, escaped the inner courtyard near the Ka'aba and made his way to the outer reaches of the Grand Mosque to tend to his wounds. From this entire startling story, my primary take-away was the new-to-me fact that the Grand Mosque contains escalators, which Mohammed described ascending to escape the hoards of pilgrims and nurse his injuries.

The conversation pleased me, because Eid al Adha was more than one week ago, and I did nothing to commemorate it, which means I have been struggling about what to write about for this blog. I finished reading a book about Islam, No god but God, by Reza Aslan, if that counts, but I guess overall you could say I sacrificed my project for Eid.

I did look for a way to celebrate, but all of the local Eid sermons that I found were scheduled to be delivered in the morning on a Monday when I had to be at work and couldn't get away. I couldn't get away for the following Friday's sermons either, and that was that. Eid was gone.

Eid is the holiday most closely connected with the Hajj pilgrimages, so I rationalized that since I certainly couldn't get to Mecca, missing the holiday was okay. I'd already had my Hajj to San Francisco, to Saratoga, to Berkeley, to Kentucky. I did consider how to treat Eid as I had treated Rosh Hashannah, with a private acknowledgement, like the tearing of the bread into the creek, and yet the honest truth is I did and do not feel so compelled by two of the primary activities of Eid: commemorations of the stoning of Satan and Abraham's willingness to slay his son on God's command.

I get it that stoning Satan means rejection of temptation to evil. I get it that the message is positive. But do I feel moved to recreate for myself the experience of a mob of religionists hurling rocks? Not really. That's just fucking scary.

I considered that it might be cathartic to go to the park and hurl rocks at trees or something to vent my rage. Perhaps it represents an appropriate role of religion to offer humans the chance to express agression in a controlled, designated space. And yet people get trampled during the Hajj regularly, and I feel like coming together with millions of people to throw rocks is a recipe for certain disaster. Aren't there other avenues that humans have for acceptably venting our rage? Sports? Sex? Art?

Over the summer, I acted in a play that required me to punch another man in the stomach and scream in his face. It was my most difficult scene and the most cathartic. Also, there's this: during last week, I went out drinking late with colleagues and found myself devolving into a shouty drunk. I embarrassed myself with my aggression (which is out of character when I am drunk), but quite frankly I woke up the next day quite refreshed. So, maybe that sad episode substitutes for my own rock-hurling for this year. It wasn't exactly a rejection of temptation, of course, because I wasn't very nice while I was a shouty drunk... but perhaps religion should offer a way to channel rage, so that we don't end up expressing it rudely and with a lack of compassion in a public setting.

As for the sacrifice of Ishmael (as the Muslims have it), or Isasc (as the Jews and Christians have it), I am at a loss.

Yes, I get it that sacrifice is a good thing too. Selfishness is bad, while sacrifice for the greater good helps us recognize that we as individuals are not the center of the universe. Fair enough.

Maybe my purchase last week of a cow from Heifer International as a Christmas present counts for this?

Perhaps. Otherwise, there's just no way I can replicate, meaningfully, for myself the story of a father willing to murder his son for his god. This story has been found to be compelling to all three groups of "people of the book," and connects with a bright line to the primary mythology of the religion of my upbringing, and yet I find it perverse. Not only do I find it perverse, but I fail to understand how any modern human can find meaning and motivation in it.

Sacrifice, yes, fine, theoretically. But murder?

If I were writing a foundational story for a religion, the story would be the absolute opposite. Abraham would tell his god to go fuck himself, and yet the result, god's promise to Abraham that he will become the father of great nations, would likely be the same. But Abraham's reward would be for the strength of character to reject a horrific command, even from a god. God would tell Abraham that he has passed a test, and his future generations would not have to wrestle with the hideousness of a foundational story involving such an inappropriate relationship between a father and a son.

The Five Pillars: Hajj (Pilgrimage)

It has been almost one month since I posted on my blog, because I have been on a four-way Hajj.

My primary Mecca was San Francisco, where my work sends me every year in November. Whenever I can, I stay afterward to enjoy some free time in the Bay Area, and also to make a secondary pilgrimage, to the home of my cousin Doris, who lives on top of a mountain in Saratoga. My third destination this year was Berkeley, where one of my old housemates lives, and finally, I paused in Kentucky on my way back to the East Coast, to celebrate the holiday of Thanksgiving with my family.

My travels and my work and my inattention to this blog project meant that I skipped four Bahai holidays in November, and overlooked the beginning of Advent for liturgical Christians on Sunday, November 29. The moon waxed full on the first day of my travels on the West Coast, and it was new again by the time of Thanksgiving in Kentucky. This new moon brought with it the beginning of the Jewish month of Kislev, which will end with Hannukah; the Hindu month of Agrahayana; and the Islamic month of Dhu al-Hijjah, the final month of the Muslim year, and the month of the Hajj.

HAJJ #1: SAN FRANCISCO

My trip to the Bay Area coincided, uh, by the grace of God, with the nationwide protest against California's passing of Proposition 8, the anti-gay-marriage constitutional amendment. For me, and my Hajj, the gilded dome of San Francisco City Hall stood in for the Ka'aba, and two handsome local activists kissing behind the speakers' podium stood in for an imam's call to prayer.

The fight in California, of course, was not irrelevant to the subject of religion, with the "yes" side arguing strenuously that gay marriage leads to religious discrimination and sanction for punishment against denominations that preach against homosexuality. Personally, I don't think these arguments wash, of course, and yet pro-gay-marriage advocates don't always do all they can to disabuse the evangelicals and the Mormons of these false notions. There were protesters at the rally carrying signs that said: "Destroy the Mormon church," "Fuck Mormons," and the word "mormons," with a slash through the second "m."

Other protesters took on the religionists much more tactfully and intelligently, by praising the Biblical relationships between David and Jonathan or Naomi and Ruth, for example, or pointing out what traditional marriage really means for those inclined to read the Bible literally. These signs reminded us of Jacob and his two wives, or King Solomon and his 700 wives, supplemented with 300 concubines (1 Kings 11:3). If I had brought sign-making supplies with me, I might have followed this theme and condensed a story told in the book of 1 Samuel about how King David added to his harem of 12 wives by slaying 200 Philistines and slicing off their foreskins as a dowry presentation for his new wife's father.

HAJJ #2: DORIS

Eighty-four years old, widowed, energetic, thoughtful, passionate, creative, and kind, my cousin Doris lives alone in a house on a mountain overlooking the village of Saratoga, and -- in the distance -- San Francisco Bay. She has oranges and avocados growing around her house, and when she found a dead deer on her property a year ago, she enlisted a neighbor to help her with the task of dragging its carcass into the woods. She is independent and fierce, and I look up to her the way I never have to one of my elders since I was a child. She sent regular birthday letters to me in Kentucky until I was 18, and then we lost touch until I started making regular trips to the West Coast in my thirties.

Doris founded the first Presbyterian church in Saratoga, and has been one of its elders for more than 40 years. She attends church every Sunday, makes food baskets for the poor, and recently lamented to me that she does not think she should go on her church's upcoming mission trip to Guatamala because of her age. Also, Doris voted against Prop 8. When I first came out as gay to her, she told me she thinks I am wonderful, and then she asked me why I don't have a partner yet. She asks me that every time she sees me, just like a Grandmother who wants a grandson to settle down with a nice woman and start a family. It's not annoying. It's kind of a pleasure.

Like me, Doris has differences with the religion she was raised to believe. She has strong words for Southern Baptists (her parents' denomination), and she doesn't shy away from her vocal opinion that my Fundamentalist Christian parents, in their late fifties, are too old to change their views. She and I disagree on that point. Her liberal attitude and free spirit and mistrust of Baptists notwithstanding, Doris also continues to speak the language of the Christian church. She places dilemmas "in God's hands," talks about "God's will" for her future, and when she is at her most outraged about the church's disapproval of homosexuals, her hands begin to shake as her eyes flash and she shouts: "Jesus died for all of us! He died for all of us!"

HAJJ #3: DAVID

Ah, beautiful David, with that energy, that smile, those legs, that way around a kitchen, that joy of living (and that long-distance girlfriend who remains in Washington, DC). Doesn't he need a concubine to complete that picture? Doesn't he know that's traditional? The shared source-text for our two faith traditions says so!

On the walk from the BART to his apartment, David told me about his first Yom Kippur experience in Berkeley. "It was so different from what I was used to, growing up in Philadelphia," David told me about his Berkeley High Holidays. "Usually, when they talk about the gates closing, it's fearful. You want to make it through, and you're afraid they're going to close on you. But these people out here... whoa! It wasn't like that. They were dancing in the aisles. They were singing at the top of their lungs. It's like the gates were closing, but they didn't care. They were going to storm those gates."

I thought of asking him if he'd be interested in going there for Shabbat while I was staying with him, but we both ended up having other plans Friday night. Still, on Saturday, with David I had the most religious experience of my West Coast journey, as we spent the day in the beautiful natural diversity of Marin County. We started the day in the tidepools, investingating the orange and rust-colored starfish and the crabs and mussels and snails. We climbed rocks to watch the waves crash, and then we climbed a mountain up into a redwood forest. By the end of the day we emerged on a bald hill overlooking the ocean, from which we could scan a 270-degree panorama, watch the fog roll in, and witness the sun sinking fast into the Pacific.


HAJJ #4: THANKSGIVING

My mother sat at the head of the table, and announced the Thanksgiving tradition of going around the table and naming one thing for which we are thankful. This tradition began when Thanksgiving was just me and my sister and my parents as a group of four. In recent years, we've morphed into more of a motley collection of single or widowed cousins or friends of my parents -- compensation for the fact that my grandparents are dead, my parents are both only children, and my sister and I are childless.

This year, we had ten people around the table, including my sister's new boyfriend, who had never gathered for Thanksgiving before. The "thanks" that each of us spoke aloud largely centered on being thankful for the group of people assembled, and for the health of a hospitalized cousin who just beat prostate cancer. On my turn, I followed suit, naming the same things. I had other ideas in my head, such as thanks for all the workers involved in getting the food to our plates, praise for my mother's work in the kitchen, thanks for the turkey who gave its life, a recognition of the white settlers' unfairness to the native people, and gratitude for the Obama win -- but I tend to censor myself in my parents' home.

At the end of the go-around, my father concluded with a formal prayer to God, in Jesus' name. He repeated the thanks for the cousin's cancer dodge (my dad had a cancer scare of his own this summer that he didn't mention), and for the family members who had gathered. He thanked God for the food that God had set before us, and he asked God to be with those who do not have enough to eat. He asked that God's will be done in all things, and he compared us to the food with favorite phrase of his asking God to "bless this food for the nourishment of our bodies, and us for your service. All these things we ask in Jesus' holy name, Amen." This is the way he prays.

Samhain, part two: When the Veil is Thinnest

The entrance to the worship space was flanked by two shoulder-high candlesticks with fat pillars burning in them, and twinkling jack-o-lanterns at their bases. By the left candlestick stood a woman in a black cloak with the hood pulled up. In one hand, she held a skull, and in the other hand, burning incense, which she waved as the congegants filed past her into the space.

One half of the stone circle was bounded by 33 huge, flat stones standing up on end and embedded into the dirt. The stones stood higher than the people, and at the base of each sat a flickering candle in a paper bag. The other half of the circle was bounded by bagged candles, but no stones. The space had not been completely cleared of trees, which grew from the dirt at random intervals. In the middle of the space sat a waist-high stone table crowded with objects: papers, candles, a chalice, trays with small paper cups.

I made my way into the space in single file with the others, curving around to form a circle around the crowded table. Also within our circle sat a low metal drum with logs burning inside, and a second, much lower and wider stone table where a few more dripping candles sat embedded in their own wax. Off to the side sat an altar with a sculpture of a man's head on it, its mouth and eyes opened wide in shapes that mirrored the curls of his hair and beard.

Four figures, two men and two women, stood waiting in the space when we arrived, each representing one of the four directions.

The woman with the cauldron entered the center of the circle we had formed, and urged us to pull in tighter.

She and the woman with the skull joined a third woman in a black dress and no hat around the central stone table, though only the cauldron woman spoke. She began the ceremony with a prayer to the crone goddess and the horned god. She invoked the ancestors and then as a group we began to call the corners.

The four people who were waiting in the space when we arrived led this part of the service. We started with East/Air, then South/Fire, West/Water, and North/Earth, and each invocation somehow acknowledged the ancestors. East asked for the air to bear our ancestors' messages on the wind, for example, and North acknowledged that the Earth holds the bones of our ancestors and will one day hold our bones as well. We called the ancestors into our space from each direction with a hearty “Hail, and welcome,” spoken by the entire congregation.

Then the cauldron woman began to talk about the new year. (Yes, Samhain is the new year too. This is the third new year since the beginning of September.)

She walked around the circle, encouraging us all to learn from the past and to do better in the future. She told us to think about the message on our papers, and about what we need to leave behind in order to move forward and to grow. She listed the various messages from the cauldron, the printed suggestions of abstractions we might wish to leave behind: judgments, addictions, regret, expectations, and the need to control others.

She spoke about each of these things in turn, giving a sermon not all that different from some of the new year messages I heard from the stage at Diwali between the dancers' segments, or at Yom Kippur, when the congregants named the sins they wanted to leave behind them. At two points, the cauldron woman summoned the attendants representing the four corners into the circle to help her.

The attendants divided the circle into quarters. First, they handed out stones, each of them approaching one quarter of the people in the circle. North managed my portion of the circle. He was a young man a little shorter than I am, wearing gold-colored robes, a long blond wig, and horns.

The cauldron woman told us to place our fears into the stones.

Next the attendants made their way around the circle with chalices of water. They dribbled water over our outstretched hands as we held the stones, washing away the fears we might have about letting go. The cauldron woman was still talking about judgments, regrets, and all the rest.

"You should be more afraid of holding onto these things than of letting them go," said the cauldron woman, walking again around the circle.

She began to repeat herself, walking faster with her step and with more determination in her voice. "You should be afraid of holding on."

"You should be afraid of holding on."

"You should be AFRAID of holding on."

Then someone else spoke:

"Enough!"

A woman in a white blouse and white skirt, with a white net over her hair, stepped out from the circle and addressed the cauldron woman.

"They know what they have to do," said the white-clothed woman, gesturing theatrically around the circle. "You have your own work to do; back to the outer circle with you!"

The cauldron woman joined the circle, and the white-clothed woman offered words of hope for growth, change, and the future. When the white-clothed woman allowed the cauldron woman to rejoin the center of the circle, together they walked the circuit past each worshiper with a large, round basket. We placed our papers and our rocks in the basket, and just when I thought the cauldron woman would turn over the basket and empty the papers into the fire, she dropped the entire basket onto the logs and it was consumed.

As the flames licked up the sides, and the basket sunk inward, losing its shape, the group began to sing:

The blood of the ancients
Runs in our veins
The forms change
But the circle of life remains.

We repeated this chorus maybe 25 times, so it was easy for me to pick up the melody and sing boldly.

At the end of the song, it was time to toast the new year, so the attendants returned, each picking up one tray covered with paper cups from the stone table. The horned and bewigged attendant served me, and I held the cup until the cauldron woman spoke the toast. I sipped cautiously, not sure what was in the cup, and found it to be apple juice.

Next, all of those who had lost relatives within the past year were invited to step forward and leave a talisman on the altar with the sculpture of the man's head.

Finally, we were all invited to pull a rune from a basket to learn what's coming next in the new year. My rune looks like an X, with the top and bottom closed, and I do not know what it means.

We closed by uncasting the circle, meaning we moved backward from north to east and said our goodbyes to the spirits we had conjured earlier.

"Go if you must,” we said to them. “Stay if you will… hail and farewell."

Samhain, part one: The Day of the Dead

Last year, in 2007, over Memorial Day weekend, I went on a gay men's spiritual retreat with a friend of mine who objects when I call him Buddhist.

"I practice Shambhala," is his preferred formulation, but whichever way, on retreat, most of the men were neither Buddhists nor Shambhala-practitioners. They were mostly pagans, Wiccans, or nothing in particular, like me. There was one Jewish couple, and an older man of Ukrainian descent who identified all at once as pagan, and also with both the Jewish and Eastern Orthodox halves of his ancestry.

When I set out to find a Samhain service to attend in DC, I looked up one of the pagan-leaning men from the retreat who lives here in town, to see if he might point me toward a local group. He suggested instead that I hit the road and observe the holiday at Four Quarters, an "Interfaith Sanctuary of Earth Religion" in south central Pennsylvania.

So, I called up Four Quarters and reserved myself a spot. They had a whole weekend of activities planned, and I carved out time for the Dumb Feast of the Dead on Saturday evening, followed by the main Samhain service itself. A snafu with my Zipcar reservation delayed my departure from the city, but I still managed to arrive at Four Quarters in time for the meal.

Legally organized as a church, Four Quarters is physically laid out like a large camp, located on 150 acres in the Alleghenies, bounded on three sides by a hairpin curve in a mountain stream. Visitors access the camp down a dirt road lined with cow pastures and orchards and McCain-Palin yard signs. I signed in at the farmhouse at the entrance to the property, where the man at the desk verified my payment, and then I drove further in to a grassy parking area a short walk from the dinner tent and the stone circle for the Samhain service.

I noticed in the parking lot that the celebrants drawn by Samhain seemed more attracted to multiple bumper stickers than perhaps your average motorist:

"God wants spiritual fruits, not religious nuts."
"Conform, go crazy, or become an artist."
"She who laughs lasts."
"Polyamory: Love shared is love multiplied."

Men and women, some of them in cloaks, were walking down the dirt road toward the dinner tent. A long-grey-haired man in a T-shirt and jeans pulled his SUV in next to my Zipcar. He made an ashamed comment about his choice of vehicle and its impact on the environment, and he praised my car-sharing when he saw the Zipcar logo on the passenger door. A group of women with a guitar sat in a circle by the side of the road singing "Down to the River to Pray," a song I have sung at the Unitarian Church before. Their next song began with the lyric, “We all come from goddess, and to her we return…”

Feeling needy of food and light-headed from the drive, I walked down to get in line for a hot plate from the commercially outfitted on-site kitchen. Dinner consisted of salad with vinaigrette dressing, applesauce, a black-bean side dish, colcannon (cabbage and potatoes together), yeasted rolls, ginger-stuffed pork loin for the omnivores, and a choice of vegan or non-vegan squash soup. I chose everything except the pork loin and balanced my vegan squash soup bowl over my mulled wine cup on my way to find a seat.

At the entrance to the dinner tent a woman in a black dress with a pentagram necklace said to me: "Please observe our silence in memory of our Honored Dead."

I entered a two-room tent with seating for maybe 250 and took a place on one of the benches. The tables were set with tea lights inside tiny carved-out pumpkins, which provided the only light. Not only was everyone completely silent, but they seemed to be avoiding all eye contact as well, with me and with each other.

Some people blessed their food with a waving of their hands over the plate and bowl before they began to eat. Some wore cloaks and some did not. Men tended toward beards and long-hair, tattoos were prevalent, and ages ranged from infant to elderly. I noticed no obvious gay couples, though there had been lesbian bumper stickers in the parking lot.

I felt that the silence made me eat more slowly. I found myself mostly singing songs in my head when I wasn’t observing the downcast faces or thinking about the food. The songs in my head were upbeat, so I felt off-center, as if I wasn’t connecting to the common purpose which felt very somber.

As the dinner drew to a close, an unseen woman outside the tent read a plaintive and wistful poem that began with the words "I miss you most upon each Samhain, when the boundary turns to sheer..."

She invited the spirits of our ancestors to walk among us throughout the evening. By now, the sun had gone down, and there was to be a gap of maybe 30 to 45 minutes between dinner and the worship service. After exiting the dinner tent, I chose to take a walk down the gravel road looking upward at the stars, shining bright in the clear, warm night, as they do not do in the city. The sliver of moon must have been low in the sky, hidden by the surrounding mountains.

I walked past tents and fire pits and parked RVs. Some people were staying at Four Quarters for the weekend; others who are members of the church itself camp there for longer periods of time.

By the time I turned around and walked back toward the stone circle where the ceremony would be held, night had fallen hard and it was very dark. I could hear other footsteps in the stones on the gravelly road, but could not see any other walkers until I was close upon them.

I passed single walkers and walkers in pairs, and up ahead, I heard voices talking in low tones. I could not see how many people or where they were, but I guessed maybe ten or twelve, and then suddenly I was upon the group.

We were standing directly outside the stone circle, and as I stepped into the crowd, their dark shapes took form before my eyes, revealing people who were very tall and shaped like cones. I realized with a start that I was the only person I could see who was not wearing a voluminous, long, black cloak and a very tall pointed hat. Most were also carrying a staff.

Wow! I had never felt out of place for not being dressed like a witch before!

The feeling actually hit me really hard, as I registered two kinds of sharp fear, each followed by shame.

The first was a completely shocking fear of witches. I am not afraid of witches. I have known and associated with self-described witches before. But something about the darkness and the cultural associations with the hats and cloaks and the feeling of being surrounded produced an unbidden panic I could not have anticipated.

It subsided as quickly as it came, but I felt properly and terribly ashamed.

The second fear was the fear of standing out for not being properly dressed. I was wearing two T-shirts, short-sleeved over long, blue jeans, and green canvas sneakers -- and feeling a little like a slob.

My fears about my appearance, then, triggered shame for not having prepared correctly to observe the cultural norm. If I remove my shoes at the Hindu temple, and cover my head when required at the synagogue, then I should be prepared with a cloak at Samhain. I overheard one woman walk up bemoaning that she had left her cloak at home, so I knew soon enough that I would not be the only one, which was some comfort. Then, as others gathered on the road to wait for services to begin, it became clear that street clothes were going to be in the majority, and that the full-dress witches were the early-birds. I breathed something of a sigh of relief.

Shortly, a woman in a black dress and pointed hat began threading her way through the crowd with a an iron pot in one hand and a flashlight in the other.

"Reach into my cauldron and find out what you need to leave behind tonight," she said to each of us, before shining her light on the small printed papers we withdrew.

Mine said: Let go of your judgments.

When we all had a paper, someone rang a bell somewhere, and the woman with the cauldron told us to take a deep breath.

"You all have hard work to do tonight," she said, and started walking off the dirt road toward the stone circle. “Follow me.”

Halloween: What Are You Supposed to Be?

My friend Samm held a giant party with her housemates on Halloween.

I had planned ahead for this, purchasing my costume well ahead of time. The Monday after I attended The United Church, I was feeling inspired by the clerical collars of Rev. DeGroote and his younger colleague. I had needed to purchase a black suit for myself back in June, when I served as an attendant in a friend’s wedding, so I thought I could easily add a black shirt with the square patch of white showing at its collar, and I would have an instant priest's costume.

I looked online and discovered that I could purchase a relatively inexpensive short-sleeved official priest's shirt from a company in Maine. Because some of the fields were optional on the online order form, I did not have to name my “seminary” or “congregation,” but the denomination field was mandatory, so I checked "other."

At Samm's party, most everyone assumed I was costumed as a Roman Catholic, but in my mind I had clothed myself as an Episcopalian. I would say this out loud, when someone would make a mistake and ask me how many "Hail Marys" I wanted them to say, or (more often) approach me and ask, "What are you supposed to be? A child molester?"

Mohammed was at the party, dressed in traditional Arab garb -- a long, floor-length tunic, sandals, and Saudi headdress. I demanded that he teach me the Arabic phonetics for the Shahada so that when party-goers would ask me to pray for them I could mix it up a bit. We got as far as the phonetics for "I attest that there is no god-entity but the Allah god-entity..." before getting distracted and not returning to the task.

Rachel was at the party too, dressed as some kind of product advertisement. She told me I looked strangely "right" in my priest's outfit, and I confessed that it actually felt kind of right -- very comfortable. We were standing in the backyard talking, and shortly I excused myself to go back into the kitchen and refill my glass of wine.

While I was pouring from the bottle I had brought, a drunk milkmaid I had never met before wandered up to me with her tits up to her chin and her empty glass waving back and forth under my nose.

I thought she might have tried to give me a sexy look, or something.

Pausing from my own glass, I quarter-turned and filled her glass for her.

"Thanks," she slurred, "What are you supposed to be?"

Puzzled that it wasn't obvious, I inclined my chin, in case my beard was obscuring my collar. I pointed to the square of white at my throat.

"Oh," she said, "You're a gay priest. That's funny."

Then she walked away.

The idea of me as a man of the cloth wasn't always so preposterous. I didn't grow up in a denomination that employed priests, but I took other types of godly men as my role models when I was a child -- various ministers, or the evangelical missionaries who would visit my church and church camp to talk about their work in Korea or Jamaica or Papua, New Guinea.

One of my earliest long-range forecasts for my future involved me and my best friend from church becoming missionaries together in Africa. I planned this out when I was probably 14, and Jonathan would have been about 16. The way I figured it, we would each marry a girl from the church and then the four of us would work as a team. The girls got swapped around in my imagination, but the idea of doing good work for God together with Jonathan remained a constant.

Missionary work would not be an option for a gay man according to how I grew up. Priests and ministers and missionaries are role models, right? And gay men? We just aren’t.

That’s why we shouldn’t be teachers or Boy Scout leaders or parents either. In fact, it would be hard to imagine a gay man in any role that could be considered admirable. All of our accomplishments are tainted because of our gayness.

The purpose of this life is to follow Jesus, and being gay is not following Jesus, so our lives are doomed until and unless we get serious about repentance and redemption. Who could admire the gays’ stunning refusal to address their sin? And who could want someone like that in a leadership position in a church?

Moses’ commandment to stone the gays to death doesn’t apply anymore, said my church, because Jesus brought the new covenant and freed us from the total insanity of Jewish law. But read Leviticus again, they would say. It definitely shows what God thinks of the gay folk, if under the old law He wanted us dead, right away, with impunity for the community that drives us out of the camp, pelting our bodies to pulp in the desert sand.

Moreover, though Jesus was silent on the gay menace, the New Testament nonetheless backs up the Old, with Paul assuring the Romans that men who flame with lust for one another will receive in their bodies the due penalties for their perversions.

In a letter to the Corinthians, Paul supposedly condemns gay men a second time, but as with Koheleth’s musing on his or her ephemeral life, the shades of meaning change depending on the translation you read. Of the four versions of the Bible on my shelf, you can choose between condemnation of:

1. The effeminate and abusers of themselves with mankind,
2. Male prostitutes and homosexual offenders,
3. Adulterers and homosexual perverts, or
4. Those who use and abuse each other and those who use and abuse sex.

At Christmastime, in 2003, after Massachusetts became the first state in the nation to recognize same-sex marriages, I sat in the pew at my parents’ church in Kentucky.

The preacher read Paul’s verse from Romans about the due penalty for perversion, and then he compared the situation for Christians in first-century Rome with the situation for Christians in 21st-century America.

He shouted: “It was a wicked world in ancient Rome. Wicked! Idolatry! Christian persecution! All manner of perversion! But with this thing in Massachusetts, it's just dark here in America. I don’t see how it could have been any worse in Rome than it is right here, right now.”

This was met with a chorus of amens from the men, and judgmental tsking sounds from the women, which was and is typical there -- but at least my parents’ church doesn’t produce a Hell House.

What's a Hell House? Hell Houses are the evangelical alternative to haunted houses on Halloween.

They work like this: Instead of witches stirring pots or zombies popping out of coffins, the scenes played out inside a Hell House depict all kinds of modern blasphemies and affronts to the evangelicals’ god -- as well as the tortured afterlife that the perpetrators of such blasphemies and affronts can expect to suffer for eternity. The theory (sort of a one-night reduction of what a lifetime of Sundays can teach you as an evangelical) is that if you are terrorized enough, that sometime before the end of the walk-through, you will have resolved to accept Jesus Christ and avoid the torment.

The Hell House model as an evangelical alternative to a possibly-Satanic Halloween has gotten popular enough to support a cottage industry by the New Destiny Christian Center in Colorado, which continues every year to sell its pre-packaged version of a Hell House kit to churches across the country.

The kit includes props, instructions, and scripts for the actors to follow. And it's not just the useless, futile, tragic lives of gay men that are depicted. New Destiny encourages including young women who choose abortion, drunk drivers, domestic abusers, and teenaged ravers on drugs. Visitors watch the tragic consequences of the wasted lives -- women bleeding to death after killing their babies, promiscuous girls getting raped and committing suicide, and gay couples wasting together of AIDS -- all while being mocked by the demons who are transporting them to Hell.

"We don't do it to scare people,” one pastor at a church in Texas told his local CBS affiliate last week. “The scary part about the Hell House is the reality that we portray. That is the scary part."

That’s not what’s scary to me.

Diwali: Atman (The Light Within)

My friend and I separated on a drizzly, windy corner of Howard St. in Baltimore. She boarded a bus back toward her house in Hampden, and I considered running back to Mariner Arena to find out what the printed program had meant by substituting the traditional Diwali fireworks with what the program called "virtual fireworks." They were scheduled to start at 9PM, but I was a long way from DC and dependent upon public transportation, so I bought my light-rail ticket and waited in the light rain.

The headlights of three different light-rail trains illuminated the mist and passed me by before the train I was waiting for squeaked to a halt and opened its doors for me.

Inside, I pulled the printed program out of my backpack and leafed through its pages, sounding out the names of the Indian oncologists, dentists, and real estate agents, whose business-card-sized ads sat stacked inside text reminding celebrants of the meaning of Diwali.

The days leading up to Diwali all have a special meaning. Five days before Diwali, it is a good day to go shopping. Four days before marks Krishna's slaying of Narakasura. Three days before is the day of Lakshmi Puja, and two days before is Govardhan Puja. Puja simply means "worship," roughly, and Govardhan is not a god or goddess, but a holy mountain. The day before Diwali is a holiday for celebrating the relationship between brothers and sisters.

Overall, the celebration of Diwali is meant as a celebration of good over evil, as symbolized by the lights.

Paging through the program, I lingered over a full-page ad for the temple I'd attended for Navaratri. Here I learned that all of the Deities in the temple are modeled after other existing Deities, so that, the temple claims, a walk through the worship space is "equivalent to visiting several temples in India."

Turning the page, I happened upon an essay about Vedanta written by Vijay Kumar, a self-described "disciple of Swami Chinmayananda," which was printed opposite an ad offering best wishes for the contestants of the 14th Annual Miss India-DC Pageant.

Swami Chinmayananda? That was the name printed on the banner at the Vedanta table. I skimmed the rest of Kumar's biography: organizer of Vedanta discussion groups, member of the Washington Interfaith Association, IT Engineer for the Pentagon.

Interesting. I began to read his essay.

Kumar: Vedanta affirms the oneness of existence, the divinity of the soul, and the harmony of religions.

The lights flickered inside the train car whenever the driver blew her horn for us to cross an intersection.

A few seats behind me, a group of young women gossiped loudly about another woman who was not present, mocking her weight and appearance. They used coarse language to speculate that the woman – who rarely dates men – is probably a lesbian, and a really slutty one too.

The noisy women carved up the missing woman's body and described each part to each other – her bad teeth, her damaged hair, her stretch marks, her skin.

Kumar: Vedanta asserts that you are essentially divine. God dwells within our own hearts as the Supreme Self.

In front of me, a man boasted on his cell phone about cheating on his girlfriend.

He laughed that the girlfriend has no idea what he's up to. He called her ugly names, pridefully describing how he fulfills her highest (and only) worth by using her body for sex.

He talked loudly about how much that sex might hurt, because of how aggressively he pursues what he wants. After he paused for a moment for other end of the line to speak, he said, "She better not cheat on me. I'd kill that fucking bitch."

Kumar: The Atman is never born, nor will it ever die. Pure, perfect, free from limitations, the Atman is the Brahman.

And what is the Brahman? Kumar describes it this way: "According to Vedanta, God is infinite existence, infinite consciousness, and infinite bliss. The term for this impersonal, transcendent reality is Brahman. … Who is God? Consciousness. What is Consciousness? You can go on and on."

The conductor blew the horn and the lights dimmed. We had arrived at the end of the line, and I boarded my bus for the next leg of my journey. I had thought I would pass the time by reading an article on "untouchables" in the 21st century that was featured in a copy of the Indian American that I had picked up, but my bus had no overhead lighting. It also had no cruel and noisy passengers, so I sank into my seat in the silence, as if at a Quaker meeting, and reflected on the day.

Diwali celebrates the Atman as the inner light. The victory of good over evil is the victory of Krishna over Narakasura, is the victory of light over darkness, is the victory of the Atman over… what? I do not know a Hindu term for inner darkness.

I do know this: I know that while English-speakers may tend to translate Atman as Self or Soul or Inner Light, the root meaning of Atman in Sanskrit is actually "breath."

And I know that in Sanskrit, Atman is not the only kind of breath. There is also prana, as every student of yoga learns. ("Breathe in, breathe out.") Atman is spiritual, prana is physical.

I thought about how the word for "breath" in Koheleth (“hebel”) has come to mean something hopeless, while the breath of the Atman is deeply hopeful.

I thought about the difference between "breath" and "a breath." I wondered how true scholars of Sanskrit and Hebrew might negotiate the difference between hebel and Atman.

A breath...
a gasp...
a moment…
an eyeblink...
a flash before darkness.

Breath...
inspiration...
animation...
illumination…
light.

Add a character to the short play: The guru says that life is Atman. Now add a character locked in struggle with the new addition. The guru says that life is prana.

Now ask each of the characters: What happens to us when we die?

In my reading, Koheleth says we are finished. My sense is that the teacher, the philosopher, the quester, and especially the preacher would hedge about this, though. They would insist that by viewing the text of Ecclesiastes through the lens of the other 65 books of the Bible, we can find hope for eternal life. The preacher (and others?) would insist that we can only find this hope if we allow ourselves to be born again through Jesus Christ.

The gurus, of course, would say we are born again and again and again.

The Atman never dies. We struggle to break the cycle.

And Jesus has nothing to do with it.

Diwali: Festival of Lights (Lakshmi Puja)

I had celebrated Diwali one time before this year.

Four years ago, a deaf friend of mine who is married to a deaf Indian man (neither of them identifies as Hindu) invited me to a combination Diwali/Ramadan celebration hosted by the Greater Washington Asian Deaf Association.

This was before I was truly competent in ASL (I had a hard time following the details of the skit depicting Krishna's slaying of Narakasura), and also before I understood how the Muslim calendar works. I didn’t get up to speed on the Muslim calendar until last year. I had failed to attend a combination Yom Kippur/Ramadan break-the-fast to which I had been invited, and I thought to myself, "I should have gone, but hopefully I will find a combination celebration next year."

Nope.

While both the Muslim and Jewish calendars follow a lunar cycle, the Jewish calendar adds a leap month every four years or so, to keep roughly aligned with the Gregorian calendar. The Muslim calendar does not do this, and loses therefore about 11 days per year, sliding backward along the Gregorian calendar, spiraling its holidays throughout all of the seasons. Though Yom Kippur and Ramadan overlapped last year, this year is a Jewish leap year, so the holidays separated. They will not again overlap until 2038, when I will be 64 years old.

When I attended the Diwali/Ramadan four years ago, the new moon that meant Diwali had arrived was the same new moon that signaled the end of Ramadan, but since the Hindu calendar also follows a leap-month strategy, the two holidays won't be linked again for another 27 years. In 2035, Diwali’s new moon will fall on Halloween, and will trigger the beginning of Ramadan the next day, on Samhain/All Saint's Day.

This year, Diwali’s new moon happens this coming Tuesday, October 28. We'll be entering into the Hindu month of Karttika, the Muslim month of Dhu al-Q'idah, and the Jewish month of Chechvan. Also, Diwali and the new moon mark the Hindu new year, so... Happy New Year... again.

When I started looking for a Diwali celebration this year, I discovered that the Hindu (and some Jain) temples in my area were all cooperating together on a collective Diwali Mela, to be held on the Saturday before Diwali (yesterday) at Mariner Arena in Baltimore. The event was scheduled from noon to 10PM, so I decided to attend in the afternoon, and then use my Diwali trip as an excuse to visit a Baltimore friend in the evening.

I caught a combination of Metro, bus, and light-rail to Baltimore on a very windy and slightly drizzly late Saturday morning and arrived at Mariner Arena around 1:30.

I paid my $5 for a ticket at the downstairs box office and followed my nose upstairs to where I could tell lunch awaited. Lining the corridors where vendors normally sell nachos and hot dogs and beer sat tables overflowing with vats of biryani and chana masala and dal. Platters mounded high with pakoras and samosas sat next to giant bowls of mint chutney and tamarind. The food was selling for a flat fee of $5 for any two menu items on a plate. Starving, I bought a double for $10 and took a seat in the arena to chow down while listening to the musicians playing bhajans on the stage.

Mariner Arena can hold 11,000 people. It is home to Baltimore's soccer team, but more often it hosts shows like Disney on Ice, Motocross, or Ringling Brothers' Circus. Inside, three levels of stadium-style seating, in a U shape, look down on the large, sporting-event-sized floor, with a wide stage at the flat end of the U.

On the floor, about thirty or forty rows of chairs provided prime additional seating for watching the stage, and behind those rows were assembled fifty to sixty booths made of blue curtains and metal piping for vendors to sell their wares. Several hundred people filled the arena, some sitting in the stadium seats like me, plates of food balanced on their laps, while others milled about the booths or lined the seats on the floor.

I wore a dark flannel shirt and jeans and felt that I did not look terribly out of place among the men, who ranged from low-end casual to business suits, with only the very occasional kurta. The women, on the other hand, skewed toward maybe 75-percent traditional dress, which, seen from the height of the stadium seats, presented a delightfully classy and colorful sea of humanity.

After bolting my food and pitching my plate, I made my way down to the floor to see what I might see. In addition to the predictable booths for saris and jewelry and Hindu art, I saw booths for life insurance, blood pressure testing, and services for wiring money to India. Booths for kids offered the chance to fill in black-and-white lotus drawings with glue and colorful powders, as well as children's picture books about the gods and goddesses, and dolls manufactured by Mattel labeled "Barbie Goes to India."

Other booths offered vast arrays of Bollywood films and music, cosmetics, oil lamps, the services of traditional wedding decorators, and back issues of a magazine called The Indian American that has placed Barack Obama on the cover of its current issue. I thumbed the literature on the table of the Vedanta booth, reading short sections of text about how to interpret the Upanishads to reach self-realization and cosmic consciousness. The man staffing this booth never stopped talking on his cell phone while I stood there, but I took note of a banner overhead that linked the booth with someone called Swami Chinmayananda, so I made a note to follow up.

Elsewhere on the exhibition floor, I looked amongst the assorted god and goddess figures for a Lakshmi.

I have a small silver Ganesha statue that a friend gave me for Holi in the spring, and I thought I might like to place a matching goddess of wealth next to him, as America gnaws its collective nails over the economy. Alas, all of the Lakshmis were painted in garish colors that I didn't like, though I did see some attractive Buddhas fashioned in silver (which was a surprise to me).

The cultural program began around 2:30, with each of the temples allowed about fifteen minutes of stage time for a performance. Each temple took its turn presenting choreographed dances, often dedicated to a god or goddess (Ganesha, Shiva, Lord Nataraja the God of Dance), with some described without a god-reference ("a Gujarati folk dance," "beats from the State of Punjab"), and one described as "a hymn to God, the Divine Life that is our best friend in every way."

After about three temples' presentations, I noticed that either by design or by happenstance, the performances did not seem to involve men, boys, or older women. Only girls and young women were taking the stage to sing and dance, and I reflected that if I were a young Hindu boy I might likely feel jealous. The highly stylized choreography looked fun to perform, and the fanciful costumes looked fun to wear. Most of the pre-recorded music was loud, fast, inspiring, and exhilarating -- with a heavy beat that wouldn't have been out of place in a nightclub.

Later, during the time I slipped out to purchase a dish of masala chai ice cream, a boy-performer did take the stage. He was the drummer for a female dance troupe, and when I returned with my sweet treat, he stood at the microphone praying. The boy called God our creator and our sustainer, but did not mention any names like Brahma or Vishnu. And when he called on God to give us prosperity in the new year, he did not mention either Lakshmi or Ganesha, with his connection to auspicious beginnings. He asked God to guide us all down the noble path.

After a few more dances, a man in a suit took to the stage to announce the start of Lakshmi Puja.

While he spoke, several others -- men in suits, one man in a saffron-colored kurta, a woman in a rose-and-white sari -- began to transform the stage. They brought out two large images, about the size of college dorm-room posters, framed in gold, and leaned them against a long table covered in a gold cloth that was already sitting to the rear of the stage. The image on the left showed Lakshmi, two arms raised, two arms outstretched, standing on a lotus flower with a white elephant emerging from a river behind her. The image on the right showed a pink and white Ganesha.

Between these images, the men and woman placed a huge pile of bananas, and then they rolled out a red cloth on the floor before the images. At the corners of the red cloth, they rolled out two more red cloths, forming an inward-slanting rectangle with its arms open toward the audience.

The man at the microphone asked for all of the board members of the Association of Hindu and Jain Temples to come to the stage, along with two children from each temple. The adults who came forward knelt on the first red cloth, facing the images. The children knelt on the two other cloths, facing the audience. While the man at the microphone spoke about Lakshmi and Diwali and the New Year and thanked various people, the other men and the woman provided the kneeling worshipers with various objects -- cups of water, and red plates covered with I knew not what.

When the man at the microphone was finished, a different unseen man began reciting prayers in Hindi. His words triggered actions among the worshipers on the stage. They touched or moved things on their plates, or raised their hands above their heads.

Occasionally, the praying man would give a partial instruction in English ("now the rice and flowers," "now the mango leaves," “run the rice through your fingers"). He paused to give voice to drawn-out ohms occasionally, and every now and then, from somewhere, a bell would ring. This went on for nearly forty minutes.

Whether Hebrew or Arabic or Hindi, Latin or Greek or German, there is possibly no other boredom in this world like the boredom of listening to never-ending prayers in a language you don't understand.

I know this is my fault for not knowing another spoken language, and I know I'm totally in the wrong for thinking this, but as much as I wanted to enjoy and learn from the worship of Lakshmi, I found it irritating. “Enough, already,” I thought, as the prayers grew repetitive and monotonous, “I'm sure Lakshmi gets it.”

I selfishly wanted the program to return to the dances ("Entertain me!"), and to top it off, my phone kept vibrating with my Baltimore friend apparently trying to contact me about our evening plans. I felt like a jerk for not answering my friend's call as I outwardly respected the ceremony taking place on the stage, and like a bigger jerk for inwardly barely respecting the ceremony at all.

When a bell started ringing non-stop, I hoped fervently that it might signal the end of the ceremony.

It did. The adults rose and warmed their hands over oil lamps situated on the table behind the two images. The man in the saffron kurta began tossing flower petals over everyone, and then the children rose to warm their hands as well. The stage began to clear, as the man in saffron moved the oil lamps to the edge of the stage. Men and women from the audience drew near to the lamps, placing their hands above the flames, then touching their faces, running their fingers through their hair, and bowing with a namaste.

I should have at least offered Mariner Arena my own namaste before rushing outside to call my friend back, but I did not.

Sukkot: Koheleth

Koheleth says that life is futility.
The preacher says that life is vanity.
The philosopher says that life is useless.
The teacher says that life is meaningless.
The quester says that life is smoke.

I could imagine a short play for five characters who squabble about the meaning of life.

They parse the shades of meaning between the very similar language they use to express their thoughts. Perhaps each would use some sort of representative prop that helps define him or her as a character; the quester carries a map, for example, or the preacher a holy book. The reveal at the end of the play is that the characters are all the same person.

The five sentences above are inspired by five different translations of the Hebrew text that came to be known in English as the book of Ecclesiastes.

Preacher/vanity comes from King James, philosopher/useless from the Good News, teacher/meaningless from the New International Version, and quester/smoke from the Message. I keep each of these texts on a shelf in my house.

Koheleth/futility comes from the translation printed in the prayer book at Tifereth Israel, the synagogue I attended for Shabbat/Sukkot services Saturday morning. Koheleth is the actual Hebrew term, which many sources (including a footnote in the Bible that translates it as "teacher") state originally meant "member of the assembly." In synagogue this morning, we treated it more or less as a proper name. (“Let’s see what Koheleth has to say.”)

The word that has been rendered as futility, vanity, useless, meaningless, and smoke apparently shows up as "breath" elsewhere in the Hebrew Psalms.

I had selected Tifereth as my synagogue of choice this morning, because they advertise American Sign Language (ASL) interpretation for their Saturday morning services. I don't know Hebrew, but I'm competent in ASL, so after reading four versions of Ecclesiastes during the first four days of Sukkot, I was eager to see it rendered in ASL -- a language of face and body rather than a language of voice and breath or a language of the printed page.

Services were scheduled for 9 - 12:30, with ASL translation beginning at 9:45. I woke up late and didn't leave my house until around 8:45. I thought of biking, because Tifereth is nearly an hour away on foot, and the bus is sometimes unreliable, but I decided arriving just in time for the ASL to begin would be fine. I preferred to take the hour to clear my head on a crisp fall morning, and I knew from a previous visit that most congregants don't arrive until around 10.

To get to the synagogue, you walk about four blocks from my house toward the Unitarian Church. At the Unitarian Church, you turn left, and then walk a straight-shot north of about fifty blocks or so, passing literally dozens of other houses of worship (Seventh Day Adventist, Greek Orthodox, AME Methodist, etc.), as well as the Carter-Barron Amphitheater and the Walter Reed Medical Center.

I strode up the street in grey wool pants, a black silk shirt, blue corduroy jacket, and black boots, listening to music and admiring the morning light and the slight turnings of color on the trees' leaves. I dialed my iPod toward a list of “recently played” tunes, which eventually cycled around to a song from Dolly Parton's 2005 album of 1960s-era covers -- her bluegrass version of Turn, Turn, Turn. This song, made famous in 1965 by the Byrds, is, of course, a musical rendition of the most famous section of Ecclesiastes.

To everything, there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven:
A time to be born, a time to die;
A time to plant, a time to reap;
A time to kill, a time to heal;
A time to laugh, a time to weep;
A time to build up, a time to break down;
A time to dance, a time to mourn;
A time to cast away stones, a time to gather stones together;
A time of love, a time of hate;
A time of war, a time of peace;
A time you may embrace, a time to refrain from embracing;
A time to gain, a time to lose;
A time to rend, a time to sew
(A time for peace, I swear it’s not too late.)

Dolly Parton can play the part of Koheleth today, I thought!

She sang her way through the entire song, and I had the same problems with the text of that Scripture as I always do. I love most of the couplets and the overall message about duality in life, but if I were to record a version of this song for myself, I could not record it as written.

For one thing, the “time to kill” line triggers not only with moral issues with the text for me, but also raises concerns about the overall logical consistency of the poem. The rest of the couplets all present opposites (gain/lose, rend/sew, etc.). “Kill” and “heal” are not opposites.

The opposite of “to kill” is “to resurrect.” The opposite of “to heal” is “to injure” or perhaps “to sicken.”

Furthermore, the other verbs all refer to human activity. But for the most part, humans do not heal. I suppose that across time doctors and prophets and others have been considered people who heal, but I don’t think healing is the same sort of universal human activity as dancing or laughing or weeping. And killing?

Broadly speaking, I do not believe in killing. We could parse out the lines of argument on all sides of many divisive issues, from capital punishment to assisted suicide to abortion, and I'd start to nuance things a bit, but even at that, "killing," like “healing,” ruins the universal appeal of the poem. Society absolutely restricts legitimized killing -- to medical professionals, to law enforcement, to soldiers.

A believer might say that killing and healing are activities that should be left for God, and they don’t belong in a poem about the dualities of human life.

Rather than “heal," humans nurture. We nurture each other and hope that it leads to healing.

I don’t know what the original Hebrew for this couplet meant. But I do know that to coax the poem to make consistent moral sense to me -- to make it into something I could recite or sing -- I wish to edit the line about healing and killing.

If I could edit Ecclesiastes 3, I would change the third verse to read:

A time to nurture others through their pain, and a time to accept nurturing for our own.

I would not be the first to make a change. The final line of Turn, Turn, Turn, (“a time for peace, I swear it’s not too late“) does not exist in the Bible, and Dolly-as-Koheleth also tragically eliminates two of the best couplets from Ecclesiastes:

A time to search, a time to give up;
A time to be silent, a time to speak.

*****

Tifereth is a conservative synagogue that requires kippot, so I pulled mine out of my pocket and bobby-pinned over the baldest part of my head when I was about a block from the building. Tifereth’s sukkah, like the orthodox sukkah in the park, was made of a metal frame hung with white and blue plastic. The roof, however, rather than being made of fronds, was composed of branches from deciduous trees (tulip poplars?). The branches appeared to be cut, rather than fallen, and their still-green leaves were drying to a sickly gray.

I entered the building and hung my corduroy jacket in the coat room. I accepted a program and a supplemental prayer book from a woman in a flowered suit and pink hat standing at the door to the worship space. The woman and I greeted each other with a “Shabbat Shalom,” and I noticed that she gave my head a quick glance to check for kippot, much as Zaki had slipped a quick glance at my wedding ring finger at the Ahmadiyya mosque. I took a seat toward the front, but off to the side.

The ASL interpreter was not working yet, and as it turned out, she wouldn't start translating the service until about an hour later, when one deaf woman arrived alone. As a result, when the reading of Koheleth/Ecclesiastes began a few moments later, I did not get to see the ASL version. Rather, I followed along with the English translation in the supplemental book, and also raised my head to watch the speakers.

Tifereth employs one rabbi and no cantor, and encourages its congregation to accept leadership roles in the service. So, four chapters of Koheleth were recited by a combination of six people (three men and three women), including the rabbi. Their voices varied along a continuum of chanting versus singing. Five of them held their books aloft, in front of their chests, though the third reader left her book resting on the podium in front of her and gripped the sides of the podium tightly with both hands. She wore a white crocheted kippah and a white shawl over a simple brown dress, and she wore her thick, brown hair very long, to her waist. Her interpretation seemed, to me, the most intense of the six of them, and I wondered what I was missing by not knowing how she was accenting or emphasizing or shaping the phrases of her Hebrew to color its meaning. Her voice was huskier than Dolly Parton's and her delivery was more forceful than Vijayalakshmy Subramaniam's.

After the section of text chanted by the rabbi, he took note, in English, that he did not approve of all he had just said. I wondered if he disapproved of the same section of text as I.

Tifereth's standard prayer books don't have phonetic transliterations in them, so when we moved on to the Torah portion of the service, I couldn't follow along very well. I fell largely silent during the bat mitzvah portion that included a 13-year-old girl and great crowds of her relatives and friends leading the congregation through the annual text from Exodus (the section where Moses asks to see God, and God says nobody may see His face and live, so God shows his backside instead).

Of the supplemental texts on Saturday, the first was from Numbers, a text that lists God's desired offerings on the different days of Sukkot ("On the fourth day, prepare ten bulls, two rams, and fourteen male lambs, all without defect ... On the fifth day, prepare nine bulls, two rams, and fourteen male lambs, all without defect…” etc.) The second was from Ezekiel's prophesies about Gog and Magog descending on Israel only to be destroyed by God ("I will execute judgment with plague and bloodshed. I will pour down torrents of rain, hailstones and burning sulfur... and so I will show my greatness and my holiness.")

The girl sang all of this beautifully. She was afterward congratulated by the rabbi who praised her intelligence and creativity and compassion for the poor, as recently evidenced by a marathon jump-rope session she organized to raise money for charity.

The rabbi took this moment to illuminate his earlier comment about the disagreeable section of Koheleth. He did not zero in on the "time to kill" or the "time for war," but on the paragraph immediately before this section, which begins with the sentence: "A man can do nothing better than to eat and drink and find satisfaction in his work."

The rabbi noted that there is more to life than this, and he predicted a lifetime of devotion to God and to others for the girl who was being bat mitzvahed.

Through all of this, my view of the interpreter, after she started her work, had been partially obscured. I was too far from her and at too much of an angle to see clearly, especially with other congregants shifting into and out of my line of sight. Also, I realized after a while that part of my problem was that the interpreter was left-handed, which is not a problem in normal conversation, especially for the fluent, but for me -- a relative newcomer to the language, and sitting at my weird angle -- it sometimes confused me. (Imagine a person whose speech is already muffled using an upside down mouth.)

I couldn’t catch nearly everything the interpreter was signing during the Hebrew prayers, and it was only after she had repeated a certain construction many times that I realized a sign I was apprehending as "school" really meant "praise."I stifled a laugh as the full phrase "Thank you God and we praise you" flooded into my consciousness.If I’d been interpreting, I probably would have made “praise” a bolder sign, and probably would have done it with an expression of enthusiasm and rapture on my face. Both signs look a bit like clapping, with “praise” looking more like “good job, way to go," and “school” looking more like “pay attention, class."

I knew "school" couldn't be right because it was a noun, positioned where a verb should be. And while a native ASL-user might not have found humor in the mistaken substitution (since school is always a noun in ASL), my native-English brain enjoyed the idea of "school" as a verb.

"Thank you God, and we school you."

It's slang, sure, but "to school" means …
to teach a lesson...
or to show better…
or to correct.

It‘s not much of an interpretive leap to: “Thank you, author of Ecclesiastes… and we’ll edit your text.”

Sukkot: Feast of Booths

"Have you shaken the lulav yet this year, my friend?" asked the man in the blue dress shirt, grey slacks, and black kippah. He wore tiny eyeglasses and sported a scraggly, uneven beard, and he held out to me the bundle of the Four Species as I approached his sukkah.

"I have not," I replied.

"Do you want to shake it?" he asked me, waving the Four Species back and forth, and then, before I could reply, he asked a second question: "Are you of the Jewish faith?"

Of course I am not of the Jewish faith, but I had been looking for a way to observe Sukkot this week, and because I have been busy, my observations have so far all been of the mental variety. However, yesterday, on Thursday, as I was walking to lunch with a colleague, I noticed that the National Synagogue, an Orthodox congregation, had erected a sukkah in the park a block from my office building, two blocks from the White House. I did not wish to stop and visit with my colleague in tow, and we did not have time to do so anyway, but I held out hope that the sukkah would be there the next day, which is to say Friday, which is to say today -- and indeed it was.

Sukkot is a weeklong holiday that began on Tuesday, so today places us right in the middle of the celebration. For Sukkot, the faithful are instructed by God to construct a temporary house, or “booth” -- a hutlike space with a thatch-style roof for entertaining guests and observing the holiday. As I understand it, the hut represents the temporary dwellings carried across the desert by the Israelites during their forty years of wandering after escaping slavery in Egypt. The hut reminds us of God's faithfulness during difficult times, and that all things are temporary.

I find the reminder of life’s impermanence compelling, and the symbol of the hut interesting, but in actual practice, the demands of Sukkot seem culturally out of place for me as an urban apartment dweller. Just as hauling a Christmas tree into the living room seems better suited for a rural Bavarian farmhouse next to a pine forest than for my Washington, DC apartment next to a national park, so too does the sukkah seem better suited for a long-ago village settlement somewhere in the Middle East, where there is space to build, and where the palm fronds for the roof of the hut are plentiful.

As the holiday approached, I considered building my own sukkah in the alley outside my bedroom window, from whatever I myself might be able to scavenge from my own surroundings -- cardboard boxes from behind the local supermarket, perhaps, or fallen branches from the park, but I knew my free time would be short this week, and I wasn't sure the hut idea was truly meaningful to me anyway. Perhaps, I thought, I could make some temporary art instead, and I fantasized about some improbable projects like maybe a salt sculpture that would be washed away by the rain, or a Zen-garden-style space that I would rearrange each day of Sukkot.

Interestingly, when I went to scope out the alley, whether for a hut or a Zen garden or who-knows-what, I discovered a sukkah of sorts already sitting in my intended space. The apartment building in which I live happens to have some structural integrity issues, with the hundred-year-old mortar between its bricks continually crumbling out. This causes leaks into the apartments (I had soggy walls in my bedroom for a year), and over the course of the past two years or so, the management company has been replacing the mortar one section of wall at a time, with a new section tackled every few months or so.

When I walked into the alley on the first day of Sukkot, I discovered that the workmen had returned to repair a new section. They had erected a scaffolding for this task, and over top of the scaffolding they had flung a tarp. It looked like a close approximation of an urban sukkah (though it violated the rule that the roof must be organic), but I stepped inside underneath the tarp anyway, happy to have my booth appear by magic.

I went about my week, reflecting on themes of impermanence, reading the book of Ecclesiastes (already my favorite book of the Bible, and a required Sukkot text), and making plans to attend synagogue this weekend (tomorrow).

When I saw the booth in the park yesterday, I decided I should make time to stop by today, and experience the ritual apart from the synagogue. So at midday today, I wandered on over, hoping to spend my lunch break in the sukkah.

I approached from the rear and then walked around to the front, so I could apprehend the booth’s construction. The roof was made of some kind of fronds, balanced on top of a metal frame. Attached to the frame, white plastic walls with a blue stripe at the bottom hung toward the ground. The back wall contained a clear plastic window, and there was no front wall. The structure’s shape was that of a rectangle with twice as much length as witdth, about the size of a large van or a small truck cab.

It was when I had walked around the sukkah to the front that the man with the glasses and beard asked me if I wanted to shake the lulav, and then asked me if I was Jewish.

He actually pulled back a bit when I answered, “No.”

I thought he might then be interested in explaining the lulav to a Gentile, but that's not where he went next. I knew already about the lulav, from reading about it, but I kind of wanted the explanation from a practitioner. The lulav is a bundle of "Four Species": a frond from a date-palm tree, a bough from a myrtle tree, a branch from a willow tree, and a fruit from the citron tree. Some say that each of the four Species represents a part of the human body, such that binding them together represents a total devotion to God. Others say that the binding represents bringing various types of worshippers together before God.

I was curious which explanation (or perhaps a different one altogether) this fellow might give me, but instead, after asking if I am Jewish, he asked a second personal question:

"Are you religious?"

"I do not practice a religion; no." I replied.

"That's not what I asked you -- if you 'practice' a religion," the man quibbled. "I asked if you are religious. Do you believe in God?"

"No," I said.

The man holding the lulav literally jumped. He stiffened and he sniffed and he put the lulav back down on a table. Next he said, "Well, then, you will not want to pray."

"I do not know if I want to pray," I said, "What is the prayer?"

The man seemed confused and remained silent.

"Is it for guidance, or something?" I prompted.

The man launched into a hasty explanation that I did not follow exactly, but which could be summed up, I am pretty sure, as essentially the same as the five daily Muslim prayers: Thanks and blessings to God just for being God, who is great and awesome and so on, and thanks for putting together this religion for us to follow, amen.

Then the man told me he liked my beard, and said, "Good day to you; nice to meet you, my friend."

The words were spoken in kindness, but were clearly phrased as my dismissal. I wanted to talk more about Sukkot and what it means, and I wanted to understand the prayer more clearly, and most of all I wanted to be invited into the sukkah to sit on the chairs and maybe chat. I'm not always that willing to just talk with strangers, but the sukkah had a sign on it that said "welcome," and since they were in a public park, I assumed that the organizers wanted to talk to people about their religion. I assumed the non-Jewish and non-religious were being invited to learn more.

Also, a woman with a stack of six pizzas had arrived at almost the same moment I did, and she placed them on a table inside the sukkah, alongside several two-liter bottles of soda, some paper plates and cups, and a large, orange water cooler.

I did not really want any pizza (and I avoid drinking soda), but on my initial approach I had thought the man might welcome me into the sukkah for lunch.

Alas, I was wrong, so instead I just popped into a coffee shop for an afternoon pick-me-up and walked back to the carrots and dip waiting at my office.

The Five Pillars: Shahada (No god but Allah...)

When I came up the stairs in the Hindu temple from Vijayalakshmy Subramaniam's concert, I was running a bit late to return my rented car, but I wanted to see inside the worship space. I hadn't even peeked in before, while I was asking the man in the lobby shop where to buy my concert ticket, so after reading a couple of posted signs to try to ensure I wouldn't be breaking any rules by entering, I stepped from the lobby into the worship space.

The Muslim worship spaces I have experienced are empty, with rugs on the floor for praying. The Jewish worship spaces I have experienced have tended to be furnished with rows of chairs with arms, like a theater, with great variation in the style of ark situated in the front. Christian spaces, of course, have pews, with or without a baptismal pool or font in the front. The Hindu worship space surprised me in its difference.

Whether rugs, chairs, or pews, the monotheistic spaces are designed to arrange the worshippers in rows, facing forward, toward one thing: the ark, the East, the cross, whatever. The Hindu space (as perhaps I should have predicted, but did not) had no single focal point. Rather, the space contained shrines to 16 different named gods. The space was not quiet. People were talking and children were running around. Some people stood or bowed before particular shrines, others were simply sitting on the floor in lotus position, not apparently focused on any shrine in particular.

My instinct was to walk through the space and investigate each shrine one at a time. I walked up to Vishnu's space, because his was one of the largest, and because the depiction of the figure inside was different. Whereas many other shrines depicted a seated, standing, or dancing figure, the object inside the Vishnu shrine looked more like a corpse, or more specifically like a sarcophagus. There were flowers and bananas left on the stairs up into Vishnu's space and a sign at the top of the stairs reserving the inside of the shrine for priests only.

Next to me, a woman fell to her knees before the shrine of Hanuman (a god who symbolizes devotion to selfless service and humility), and pressed her forehead to the floor. This shrine also bore a sign reserving its inner space for priests, and the figure of Hanuman sat in a recess behind a curtain that could be closed. Next to the woman on the floor, another shrine, to I know not which god, had its curtain closed, and a living figure -- presumably a priest -- was moving around inside.

The rebuke from the woman at my last iftar rang in my head: "You can't be a religious tourist. Those people are there to pray."

I questioned my instinct to walk from shrine to shrine, wondering if treating the worship space like a museum might be unkind. Then I thought the better comparison might be to a Catholic, walking the stations of the cross -- something I have never done. I let the pressure of the car reservation make my decision for me, and after admiring only about a quarter of the shrines, I went back outside to collect my shoes from the cubby.

What would even the progressive Muslims of the suburban iftar have made of this temple, I wondered.

I have heard Christian sermons condemn Hindus for praying to "idols," and at the suburban iftar, I heard Richard (the convert from Christianity) criticize their polytheism as well. He mentioned it in the context of criticizing Christians for being "like the Hindus" in their worship of a three-part god.

"How is that monotheism?" Richard was asking a small group that had formed around him. "You've got Jesus, and you've got God, but Jesus is also God, and then there's this other thing, a ghost, and then you've got the Catholics, and they've got Mary all up in it too. And what's up with Mary always looking like some white woman from the Middle Ages? It's like, when somebody go all crazy and see Mary pop up her face on a piece-a toast or something, it always look like some white woman. And she’s a part of God too? What's up with that?"

The Trinity made sense to me as a child, but as an adult, I do feel like Richard has a point. I don't agree that the Hindus and Christians necessarily have it wrong somehow because their theism isn't as absolutely mono as Richard's, but I do see how being able to conceptualize God in three parts should put Christians in a bind to explain how they reject others who see even more parts to God, whether Catholics who add on Mary or the Saints, or Hindus who split the concept of God -- by some reckonings -- into millions of parts.

At the Kol Nidre service, we prayed to the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Rebekah, the God of Jacob, the God of Rachel, and the God of Leah. I had done this before, but this year, for the first time, I heard the cantor explain her understanding of why we repeat the words "God of" each time.

"It's because each generation -- each person, really -- encounters God in his or her own way," the cantor explained. "We're not praying to this God of... a whole big group of people who always agreed on everything. We're praying to a God who was real to Isaac, and real to Rebekah, and to the rest, and we're honoring each of their encounters with the Eternal, as well as our own encounter."

So, by my count, that was seven gods at Kol Nidre. Or maybe a few hundred, if I'm counting the God of Jim, the God of Suzi, and the rest of the congregation celebrating High Holidays in the United Church.

When I went back to the United Church (aka Die Vereinigte Kirche) the following Sunday for Christian services, I wondered which God would be there. The God who just closed the gates in that same space on Thursday night? The God of the soprano cantor? The God of the woman who looked into my eyes and blessed me? The God of the Rev. Peter DeGroote, who would be preaching that morning? All of the above?

The giant banner depicting the Torah scroll had been removed from the cross at the front of the sanctuary, and on Sunday, the crowd was much smaller. Maybe 40 or 50 people attended services, most of them senior citizens and most of them women, including a returning pastor named Rita Horstmann, who was visiting from her home church in Cologne, having served as Die Vereinigte Kirche's German pastor in 2003 and 2004.

Rev. DeGroote was welcoming and kind, greeting me as an obvious visitor amongst the sparse crowd, since I was both male and off the average age by about thirty years. He and a younger pastor (who was about my age) wore black suits and clerical collars and no wedding rings. The younger man led us in song and prayer; the older man delivered a sermon based on the book of James (or Jakobus, as it was called in Der Bibel from the pew in front of me). The older reverend led us in some prayers as well.

We prayed to God, and we addressed one recited-in-unison prayer to "the Holy One," and we also prayed to Jesus, sometimes calling him Jesus Christ. We sang a song addressed to the "Spirit of the living God," which I had sung before at the Unitarian Church near my house. The song calls for the living God's spirit to "fall afresh on me ... melt me, mold me, fill me, use me" -- a very similar message to the "thou art the potter" hymn from my upbringing, and the God-as-potter song from Kol Nidre.

We also prayed pointedly to a Creator God (Brahma?), and we finished with the Lord's Prayer.

I know the Lord's Prayer. I have sung it and recited it hundreds if not thousands of times, sometimes with the language of “you“ and “your,” sometimes with the language of “thou” and “thine”… sometimes with "debts" and sometimes with "transgressions."

When I glanced at the upcoming text, printed on my church bulletin, I saw that Die Vereinigte Kirche addresses the Lord directly on the debts/transgressions line, using the phrasing "forgive us for wronging you” (no capital Y).

But that wasn't the only fresh aspect of their translation.

When Rev. DeGroote, and Rita Horstmann, and the senior citizens, and I, and the young, unmarried pastor all raised our voices to recite the Lord's Prayer to God, we said:

"Our Father and Mother in heaven, holy is your name."

Yom Kippur (Ne'ila) and Durga Puja

After spending the day in reflection, as well as reading my Muslim texts, I washed my feet and hands and face and performed the Asr prayers before dressing for Ne'ila services and the conclusion of Yom Kippur. I was fasting for G-d, and for Allah, and for Durga, the warrior goddess who claims the final three days of Navaratri.

In the middle of the afternoon, I had fallen asleep while reading the Koran, and lost about two hours of productivity, which seemed like a kind of karmic humbling after I had posted so grumpily about Muslims who snooze through their fast.

I bicycled back down to the United Church wondering if I would have to stand, but I found the crowd greatly thinned from the Kol Nidre the night before. I took a seat in a pew on the main floor toward the back, almost exactly on time for Ne'ila. This time, I could see the worship leaders. They were a man and a woman, probably both in their fifties or sixties, both wearing prayer shawls.

The Ne'ila service included repetitions of some of the prayers sung at Kol Nidre, and I was able to sing them better because their melodies and the Hebrew syllables were fresher in my memory than normal. I have been to enough Jewish services to navigate them well, even when the prayers are unfamiliar (which is most of the time), but the repetition made it even easier. I could raise my head out of the prayer book more and look around and sing with confidence.

Normally, my face stays pointed down into the book, because there is so much to look at, and so much to engage the brain within the pages. There are the elegant and yet meaningless (to me) forms of the Hebrew letters on one page. On the facing page, there is usually an English translation, and at the bottom of the page, sometimes (but not always) a transliteration to help the Hebrew-challenged follow along with what they are supposed to be singing. There is also occasional rabbinic commentary printed at the bottom of the page, or simply a footnote from the writer of the prayer book. Unlike a Christian hymnal, there is no musical notation. You have to follow the melodic example of the people around you.

Usually, at a Jewish service, I find that my concern about agreeing one hundred percent with the words I am singing is diminished. It's a false comfort, of course, born entirely of the fact that the meaning of the Hebrew syllables feels less present since I don't know the language. If I'm in a Chrsitian church, and a song like, say, "Have Thine Own Way, Lord" is on the agenda, I'll feel torn about singing it -- like it's maybe less offensive and more honest to be silent and non-participatory than to sing lyrics I might not mean, like these:

Have thine own way, Lord! Have thine own way!
Thou art the potter, I am the clay.
Mold me and make me after thy will,
while I am waiting, yielded and still.

I feel dishonest, singing in English, about being willing to let God have His way with me, and about "yielding" to the shaping forces of a God whose presence I do not feel. And yet, that second line there, about God the Potter, comes up every year at the Kol Nidre service -- and every year I sing along. The image comes from the book of Isaiah, which both Jews and Christians accept, and the similarity between the religions of the images for God does not end there.

At the Ne'ila service, I sang for forgiveness from a G-d described as both Father and King in the Avina Malkeinu, and I belted out a series of metaphors about the human relationship to G-d in a prayer called Ki Anu Amecha. (Examples: "We are your children; you are our parent." "We are your sheep; you are our shepherd.") The shepherd metaphor, of course, to me, feels very Christian, as does God as King.

My colleague Rachel, in a conversation before the High Holidays, remarked to me that Yom Kippur feels like the most Christian to her of all of the Jewish holidays, focusing as it does on repentance and forgiveness. I replied to her that despite the thematic similarities (in fact, because of them) Yom Kippur in actual practice feels utterly foreign and extremely non-Christian to me, since it deals with those themes of repentance and forgiveness with absolutely no need for Jesus. It's a conversation directly with G-d, without the mediation of a bloody god-man sacrifice, and it introduces other not-very-Christian metaphors, such as the idea of a gate closing at the end of the holiday.

I understand the appeal of a one-time acceptance of Jesus for the forgiveness of all sins. It’s quick and complete and eternal, and I did it once myself. But for figuring out how to navigate human relationships and improve one's own life, I prefer the Jewish practice of checking in once a year.

So, the practice, I get. The belief, I do not.

At one point during Kol Nidre (i.e. day one), the cantor instructed us to page through an amidah, or standing prayer, on our own. She told us to listen to our own voices and the voices of those in prayer around us, and upon finishing the prayer, she told us, we should listen to the voice of G-d before sitting down. What does that mean? If I had obeyed, I would never have sat, and would be standing there still.

At the Ne'ila service (day two), one of the cantors read a prayer that used the phrase "the Eternal One" as a name for G-d. In the prayer book, I noticed, the text stated that "the Eternal One is a compassionate God and a gracious God." The cantor said aloud however that "the Eternal One is Compassion and Grace." I decided to file this away as a tactic for translating what people mean when they say "God." Since God is an abstraction, whenever “God” is combined with an adjective, why not just combine the words all the way, producing the adjective's abstract noun form as the name for God?

I followed this new tactic the next time I opened the Koran and discovered it works quite well for that text. Quite often, Muhammed follows mention of God with a comma and then two adjectives, like this: “There is no God but He, the Powerful, the Wise.” Or: “In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful.”

To appropriate the cantor‘s formulation, then, “God" is Power, Wisdom, Compassion, Mercy.

As at the raga concert at the Hindu temple, I felt moved to dance at Ne‘ila when the music occasionally picked up a faster, more rollicking beat. Many of the songs were somber, of course, given the theme of the day, but as we got closer to the end of the service, the joy embedded in the songs seemed to emerge. Nobody danced, but many people clapped or stomped their feet, and I kept the beat by clacking the ring on my pinkie finger against the pew in front of me.

Is there a name for the type of Jewish song that breaks away from the Hebrew and just uses simple syllables? Ai, dai, dai, dai, la-dai, da-dai, dai, dai-dai. Those are so much fun to sing! A stuffy old Protestant church doesn‘t necessarily seem the right space for it though; I am put more in mind of dancing around a campfire (a pillar of fire?) in the desert, under the waxing moon.

It was during one of these more joyous interludes that the cantor announced that Fabrangeners believe that we are all priests, and we were encouraged then to accept our priestly role and raise our hands to bless each other as we sang. I put down my prayer book and raised one hand toward the older man seated to my left. On my right side was the wall, so I raised my other hand above the mother and daughter who were seated in front of me. They had raised hands to each other, until the mother noticed me behind her, and moved her left hand to bless me. She smiled broadly and I smiled back. We made bright, friendly eye contact, which seemed deeply pleasant. How often do we maintain a good-hearted gaze with a stranger?

I noticed some congregants raising over each other a split-fingered gesture that I recognize from pop culture as the Vulcan hand symbol -- which I found startling -- only to discover later that I had the origin of the gesture backward. It was a Yom Kippur symbol first; Leonard Nimoy appropriated a Jewish priestly blessing for his character’s alien greeting on Star Trek.

After the blessings and the final closing of the gates, three men in the balconies raised shofars to announce the end of the service. We all offered “shana tovas” to those around us.

Three days later, I would return to the United Church for a third time, and from the spot where the shofars ended the Jewish High Holidays, a powerful blast from a church organ would start another Christian Sunday morning service.

UPDATE, 10.13.08: The joyful, often wordless songs are called nigunim.

Yom Kippur (Thank you, frailty?)

My friend, whom I'll call Jim, was raised Catholic. He just got engaged over the summer to his girlfriend (I’ll call her Suzi), who is Jewish. Jim and I have talked about religion a lot. I don't have anybody in my circle of friends who, as an adult, is as much a disaffected Protestant as me, but Jim probably qualifies as an equally disaffected Christian -- though my upbringing taught me that as a Catholic Jim should not be considered a "real" Christian.

Jim never attends Mass anymore, I don't think, but sometimes goes with Suzi to Shabbat services with the same young and progressive crowd as my colleague who read the poem about women's voices as vowels a few weeks ago.

Suzi invited me to her pre-fast dinner for Yom Kippur this year, starting at 4:30 on Wednesday, but I was too busy to get away from my office at that time of day, and had to miss it. I brought a full dinner to work with me that day instead, and ate it quickly at my desk at about 5:30, before rushing to make Kol Nidre services by 6PM.

The Shabbat group that Suzi and my colleague attend does not put together its own High Holidays services, though many of them join with a larger, older, progressive Jewish group in town called Fabrangen.

I have an older acquaintance who is quite active with Fabrangen, and through a tangled web of connections, I've ended up at Fabrangen's Kol Nidre for the past four years in a row. Like the Shabbat group, Fabrangen does not own a building or employ a rabbi. For High Holiday services, the group appropriates the space of a willing local church, and this year had found a space called The United Church, luckily only eight easily walkable blocks from my office.

The United Church is so named because it was formed (in the 1970s) when two different Protestant denominations, who worshipped two blocks apart from each other in downtown DC, decided to merge their services. A United Church of Christ merged with a Methodist Church, and one new "United" Church was born in the building that housed the Church of Christ.

When the Church of Christ was built, in 1833, it originally was known as the German Evangelical Concordia Congregation, and it served as something of a community center for a good portion of the city's German/Christian population at that time. The combined church still advertises German language services every first and third Sunday of the month, and the first thing I noticed as I approached the church was the tall stained glass window above the entrance, which bore a cross draped in a white sash marked with an elaborate phrase of German calligraphy.

Men and women in kippot and prayer shawls mounted the steps beneath this window, and I fell in line behind them. Inside, as usual, the Christian symbols had all been draped with Jewish art -- painted or embroidered stars of David, or Hebrew messages, or depictions of the Book of Life. I was just barely on time for the service, but I did not see any of my friends or colleagues, so I took a seat by myself in the center toward the back.

The service did not start on time, and worshippers continued to stream in, to the point that I started to feel self-conscious about being a bareheaded single Gentile with a fairly good seat, while whole families were peering around for a space to sit together. I still did not see anybody I knew there, so I rose and went upstairs by myself to the fairly empty balcony.

By the time services had started, I had relocated myself twice more to an ever-worse seat, ending up in the back row of the side balcony by an open stained glass window, which turned out to be a really interesting (and surprisingly comfortable) location for the services. For one thing, worshippers continued arriving even after services had started, such that there were people sitting in the aisles and on staircases, and spilling out into the upper and lower lobbies. This meant that the church grew stiflingly hot rather quickly, increasing the value of the refreshing breeze wafting through the open window.

Secondly, my back-balcony vantage point meant that I could not see the stage at all. I know that the cantor who led most of the service was a woman, but I have no idea what she looked like, or who else might have shared the stage with her. Her disembodied instructions on when to sit or stand, or which page to locate in the prayer book, floated up to the balcony like the voice of God. (God sings in a confidant soprano!)

Two and a half hours later, the soprano God announced that we had arrived at the conclusion of the Kol Nidre service "unconscionably early," and invited everyone back for the full day tomorrow before dismissing us. It took some time for all of the worshippers to file out of the church, which gave me the opportunity to spot Jim and Suzi and a colleague of mine I'll call Rachel in the crowd below. I gestured that I'd wait outside.

On the sidewalk, we chatted about Jim and Suzi's pre-fast meal, and everyone's plans for the next day, and Rachel asked me what part of the Kol Nidre service I liked the most. I answered with some comments about the al-chet portion of the service, a recitation of 44 types of sins, for which the congregation repents and asks forgiveness.

On a previous year, I had been quite moved by a modern adaptation of the al-chet prayer written by a Febrangener, which, as I recalled it, barely mentioned God at all, and really resonated with me as capturing the meaning of the al-chet and translating into a language easily understood by a 21st century… uh, humanist? Atheist? Gentile? (Me.)

The creative, modern al-chet also seemed like a convincing motivator for right action, couched in the sensible language of moderation, rather than the fiery language of condemnation or the moaning language of remorse. (Sample couplet: "For the sin of taking ourselves too seriously, and for the sin of not taking ourselves seriously enough." Sample couplet #2: "For the sin of demanding the power to change others, and for the sin of neglecting the power to change ourselves." If I were compiling a holy book, this prayer -- written a few years ago, I believe -- would be in it for sure.)

Glancing forward in the prayer book during Kol Nidre, I had felt disappointed by this year's al-chet that I saw coming up. Its recitation of sins seemed old-fashioned to me, and not so relevant, and a little ridiculous. It called for repentance for sins that are meaningless to me, like desecrating God's holy name, or for sins that I'm pretty sure I haven't committed, like bribery or extortion or "casting off the yoke of Heaven" (whatever that means).

However, when we got to the al-chet, the cantor did not go by the book. We sang a few Hebrew verses of the prayer, and then the cantor opened it up to the worshippers to raise their hands and volunteer a sin. With each suggested phrase, the cantor would sing it back, and then the congregation would follow it with a short section of the Hebrew prayer. After each three or five sins, we would return to the book, and sing a full couplet, and then take more suggestions from the group.

"The cantor took the personal and made it liturgical and I found that very powerful," I told Rachel. "Sin is a weird concept to me, and I have a hard time coming up with what I think my sins are, but when I hear someone else throw out 'the sin of pettiness' or 'the sin of holding onto anger,' I know I'm implicated too, and there's something really close and human and supportive about everybody admitting frailty together and making a vow to do better."

Congregants offered up the sins of "not caring for our planet" (I thought of how I don't dry my clothes on a line), of "not caring for the poor" (I can't say I'm a champ in that arena either), and two people offered variations on "holding onto anger with parents" (I guess this one's pretty universal).

Rachel asked me if I was planning to return for the full day of Yom Kippur services the next morning. I had planned to take the day off from work as one of two annual "personal holidays" we are allowed, but I told Rachel that traditionally I only attend Kol Nidre, and spend the next day in personal contemplation. Rachel encouraged me to change my plans this year.

"You don't even have to follow along through the whole thing, if you don't want to," she told me. "I bring my own readings sometimes and will sort of hop in and out of the service as I feel moved. You could bring something else, if you want."

"Well, I didn't manage to finish all of my Ramadan reading last month," I told her. "I could bring my Koran, or some of the other books on Islam that I'm reading, like No God But God, or The Muslim Jesus."

Rachel treated it as a joke, but I had been serious.

Her instant reply was that bringing Muslim books probably wouldn't be a good idea, and then there was a split second where I think it wasn't clear to either of us whether my suggestion was utterly out of the question or whether a progressive Jewish congregation with no rabbi meeting in a Christian church might happily endorse an ex-Christian reading Koran in the pews on Yom Kippur.

"Well, think about it," said Rachel. "You could at least come back for Ne'ila at the very end. It should be starting around 5:45."

"Yeah, come back for Ne'ila," Suzi chimed in, breaking off a side conversation with another congregant, and looking as enthusiastic and serious and emotional as I have ever seen her. "It's at the end of the day, and the sun’s going down, and you're so empty from the fast that it's easier to be ... filled."

"I'll think about it," I said, as our sidewalk group disbanded, and I walked back to my office to retrieve my bicycle.