Oh, the agony

We’ve done a lot of driving around the country lately, and we’ll do a lot more before we finally end up in Provo again. On Sunday The Redhead and I skipped out of church after sacrament meeting to travel to her grandparent’s house about 8 hours away. We really didn’t miss too much in church anyway, although the sacrament service warranted some commentary. It was one of the weirder meetings I have ever attended, including my time in Latin America and BYU singles wards. The program was comprised entirely of musical numbers and cutesy little stories that made me want to roll my eyes and make fun of them. (Oh, that’s right, I actually did that.) To tell the truth, the closest thing I can compare it to would be a meeting from some other church. I later found out that the ward music coordinator (I didn’t even know my home ward had one of those) planned the whole thing with little or no input from the bishopric, which probably explains why it was something straight out of the UCC or something. The music numbers were almost universally off-key and/or slightly odd, with one exception that was actually rather nice. The Primary parts were fine; little kids shouting out the lyrics are cute and rather funny. But high-school kids screeching out off-key notes are not so cool. Too bad my home ward excels at such audio torture. There was one song with all the Young Women singing (once again, off-key) and a little girl playing her violin. It might have been cute if the Young Women had practiced or if the little girl had tuned her violin with the piano. Ugh, it still hurts. Another musical number involved a guy singing “O Holy Night” and playing his guitar. I was actually quite impressed with the guitar-playing, even though I’m not sure it belongs in sacrament meeting. But his singing style was heavily influenced by Kurt Cobain, and it was downhill from there.

In-between the nails-on-chalkboard singing they had various people come up and read stories or poems about Christmas. These, also, were the worst mainstream Christianity has to offer, and several of them weren’t even close to being doctrinally sound. They involved Jesus showing up in a mall at Christmas-time and wondering what was going on, or Santa crying and pleading with the people to remember the true meaning of Christmas. It was pure kitsch. So when the meeting finally wrapped up after an hour and a half, I was ready to jet. And so we did.