Church Halls

I'm a gym rat. I can't say exactly why, other than working out makes me feel better over the course of the day. From my college bubble, the morning CNN newscast playing over my shoulder shrugs provides the majority of my daily glimpses into the rest of the world. Occasionally, between headlines, the crew will analyze the results of a recent survey, in this case, whether spirituality is overtaking religion.

I grew up without religion. I went to a conservative Catholic high school in a conservative state and found it absolutely stifling. Do I care one way or another whether religion is wiped off the face of the Earth? Yes. I have numerous qualms with religious practice, and I consider myself respectfully agnostic; however, after tonight, I can provide at least one example of why religion, why houses of worship must not be eliminated. That reason is music.

I have just returned from listening to the Oriana and Apollo Choirs perform at the St. John's Episcopal Cathedral on Adams and Flower. In the three years since I'd set foot in a cathedral, I had nearly forgotten the beauty of church chorals. The resonance produced in these halls floods from the ears through the body and straight into the soul in a way that I have never experienced at a stage or concert hall. I believe that within this resonance, churchgoers experience the feeling they understand as the presence of God.

Whether God is as they imagine is irrelevant. What is truly profound is the effect that the sounds of these halls have upon someone who does not attend services, which is why I do not take the popular anti-religion stance. These cathedral halls offer moments of sublimation, which is enough for me to vouch for their continued existence.

Social Cocoon

I sat down to dinner.  Normally, when I preface with dinner, one can infer that I'm eating alone.  This is not necessarily out of necessity or a desire to avoid company, but at this stage of my life, my eating schedule rarely coincides with those of my friends.  Lonely as it used to make me, it has since given me a fantastic opportunity to observe people in their various stages of social metamorphosis.

The "social butterfly" is the most familiar of the stages, describing a gregarious person who flits among friends and groups, while not necessarily connecting with any of them on a deeper level.  However, I have noticed several other stages preceding the social butterfly.  There is the larva, who actively searches for more friends but specifically chooses friends who will help it grow and evolve.  Then comes the cocoon, a stage at which a person has a group of friends but has either forgotten how or chooses not to make new ones.  This is my stage.

The dining hall was not particularly crowded, and I selected a seat at the end of a long table to enjoy my gyro plate.  Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted someone walking over to my location.  Preparing for the onset of conversation, I looked up and made eye contact, which immediately led to the request to use the chair across from me.  I saw nothing wrong with that, and the fellow moved the chair over one table to chat with his friends.

I would have thought nothing of this if not scarcely two minutes later, someone else approached me and silently grabbed the next vacant chair, pulled it directly in front of me, and sat down.  He looked to his right once and called something in Hindi to his friends at another table, then proceeded to eat, never saying a word, eyes glued to his plate, as if I, like Medusa, could turn him to stone with a glance.  This continued for five minutes until I hastily finished my food and left, thoroughly uncomfortable about the whole thing.

I could have offered a friendly "Hello," or said pretty much anything, but the absurdity of the situation struck me to such a degree that it paralyzed me.  I literally did not know how to interact with such an individual so deliberately sitting in front of me yet blatantly ignoring me.  I call this the cocoon, and the more I observe people my age, the more cocoons I notice.  I see it at lonely tables, a feigned lack of recognition in passing on the sidewalk, the forgetting of a name the moment it is spoken.  Perhaps this is a natural stage of personal growth or a symptom of a larger social devolution, but I wonder what is at its core.

Having spent far too much time socializing online in high school, my personality quickly came to be defined by the Backspace button.  I could choose my words carefully before anyone could see them and judge them.  I could edit my face in Photoshop to remove blemishes and even the angioma on my right temple.  In short, online, I could be perfect.  I could be desired, sought after, a source of fascination.  Offline, however, I felt that I was the opposite.  Perhaps let us take a moment to consider the irony of my blog and website.  Moment taken.  Moving on.

I hypothesize that the digitization of socialization is fueled by a primal human emotion: fear.  We now live in a world where a computer program can remove every human defect, making the mirror itself an enemy for the self-conscious.   We live in a world where a personality can be honed by a single keyboard button, to the point where the very notion of making a real, human mistake becomes a catastrophe to be exploited by cyber bullying, which gives the aggressor the luxury of never seeing the pain on the victim's face.  The delusion of human perfection thrives in the digital world to the point where the real world starts to become unsatisfactory.

These insecurities may have plagued my mid-metamorphosis dining buddy, or he may have felt uncomfortable with his grasp of English, the California cultural clash, or a thousand other possible things, including basic eye contact and its many alleged implications.  These form the cocoon, and if anyone is to break out of such a cocoon, the perceived flaws must become the wings.  Learning to be human again without the guise of binary...  Therein lies the next challenge.