Churches

Yesterday I sat in the same pew of the same church where, as a six-year-old, I hallucinated in a mist of incense. It was my second return to that pew in forty years. The last visit was eight years ago at my father's funeral service. Yesterday, it was my mother's body which rested in its sealed coffin before the altar.

My 1956 hallucination was a liberation dream, a prophecy of my life ahead. Far above the altar, the Archangel Gabriel informs the Virgin Mary that she is pregnant with a babe to be named Jesus. They are frozen mimes in stained glass, objectively unchanged in these 55 years, unlike me. In my waking dream of childhood, Gabriel turned to me, suddenly alive and beautiful. A ladder of light extended down from his perch. He waved me up, and I gladly ascended to meet him. He enveloped me in his frankincense embrace. And then, smacked on the back of the head by my teacher, a dour nun with bad breath, I woke up.

Gabriel looked flat and androgynous yesterday. Not an outstanding representation of angelic vigor, no longer my type. The Virgin looked older and sleepy. The church is also changed. The old hardwood floors are covered in cheap linoleum tiles. The altarpiece has been deconstructed to give the illusion of accessibility, thrift and humility. The whole scene is rather unattractive. To one side of the altar, a bizarre grotto, perhaps a baptismal pool, has been constructed. That truly gave me the creeps for some unexplored psychological reason.

My hallucination was the best thing that ever happened to me in any church. Yesterday's ceremony, performed to comply with my mother's conventionality and my relatives' Catholicism, was a bit of a chore for me and my partner. The standing and sitting and standing and sitting provided some stretching and break-up of the empty ritual. The music was pleasant. An attractive tenor's voice pierced the large empty space. Yet, as gay men, who were both psychologically tortured throughout childhood in these places, we cannot help being discomforted there. We cannot help feeling we are in the heart of a hostile camp, determined to ostracize and punish us for being human, being ourselves.

Yes, it was my mother's funeral, her ritual, though she was not there to enjoy it. It was a ritual for those who need to hear the message that awakening to inevitable and final death is an illusion. The message seemed to be: Go back to sleep in your dream world of secrets and lies because you'll have a happy and holy life in the Great Beyond. For others, I am sure, attending this funeral was simply a gesture of respect for my mother or the mourners. Outside, a Hollywood movie crew, for the most part ignoring our minor pageant, were using the location to film a cheesy comedy.