One of my first memories after arriving in Ohio was getting invited to a barbecue at a farm near Butler, Ohio. It was pretty wonderful: volleyball and plenty of food and an Ohio summer evening. Then things got confusing. Someone set up rows of folding chairs and we had to sit down and have a worship service. Someone had a guitar and everyone knew all the same songs (there were only about two dozen songs anyhow), so we sang and prayed.
Over the years, there weren't that many different social events, but it seemed that (with one or two exceptions) they all ended up with prayer meetings. One member told me that, to her, a prayer meeting was the best kind of fun to be had.
Social evenings often had some sort of ulterior motive or (at minimum) had to be "redeemed" with a prayer-and-praise service at the end. One example was the annual Harvest Party (couldn't call it a "Halloween Party"), to which we were supposed to invite outsiders. Once they were there, they got treated to an extensive (and sometimes weird) dose of Christian testimony and exhortation. Another "social event plus" was the New Years Eve party at a member's house. It was quite a good party, too, with plenty of food, board games, and a lot of laughing and talking. Then at about 11:50, the host walked through the house ringing a handbell because it was time to shift gears and "pray in the new year." The first couple of times, that caught me off guard. I didn't really know what to do, and after all, it was midnight and I was ready to go home and sleep. After the first couple of years, several of us would keep track of the time and slip out at the very last second so we could go over to someone's house and watch the Times Square countdown on television. We felt like diners escaping a restaurant without paying the bill. I got over that feeling the night Buddy, an elder and one of the most uptight right-wing people in the place, slipped out at about the same time I did.
It always seemed sad that the very human urge to have fun with good friends needed to be "redeemed" with a prayer meeting.
The annual Christmas party was a bit different, and (to be fair) every church has a Christmas pageant. Grace was different because each family was considered to be a tiny church of its own, so for several years the GFC Christmas party had half a dozen or more nearly identical Christmas pageants: elementary school children progressing down the aisle in their bathrobes to present gifts to a baby Jesus doll while papa read the birth narrative from the Gospel of Luke. Once was cute. Twice was repetitive. Half a dozen had us looking for the exit.
One fun time that didn't need redemption was the annual St. Patrick's Day breakfast at Robin's house. It got started years and years ago when Robin and Debbie were roommates and someone put green food coloring in the breakfast oatmeal for St. Patrick's Day. After that, the event grew and grew. Every item of food had to be green, and after a while the two or three friends became a gathering for the whole church with an incredible variety of potluck green food. I miss those breakfasts. They were atypical—fun for the sake of fun, not needing redemption and not having the ulterior motive of converting anyone or anything else.
—Curt Allen
There was always a very strong sense that all decisions were a choice between good and evil, and if something did not have Christianity as its overt focus, it was decidedly evil. As a child I was paralyzed by indecision over the slightest thing because of this. Making choices like chocolate or vanilla ice cream could not possibly be a morally neutral decision.
ReplyDeleteThis was part of why I loved the St. Patrick’s Day potlucks so much; there were so few situations where I could set aside the fear of WWJD.