The Church Up The Hill
Oct. 21st, 2025 05:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
canyonwalkerI grew up in a neighborhood where there was a church up the hill. It wasn't right next to our house but it was a short walk away. Go up to the corner, turn left, go to the end of the cul-de-sac, then follow the walkway behind one of the houses up to the church lot. It was close enough that by the time I was 8, my younger sister and I could ride our bicycles up there. ...But not on Sundays. For even though it was a church of our religion, the religion my father had been born into and almost dedicated his life to the priesthood of, we almost never attended that church. Instead my parents took us to another church of the same faith a 20 minute car ride away.
Why didn't we attend our own neighborhood church? It was so close a child could handle the walk. Indeed, I remember occasionally seeing some of our neighbors walking to or from late Sunday morning services when the weather was nice. But we virtually never joined them. Instead we piled into the family car and drove to another church virtually nobody in our town had heard of.
This church nestled among the mature trees in our neighborhood was unusual in our town. In our town, built almost entirely by a single developer starting in the mid 1960s, all the other churches were on the main roads into/out of town. That made them easy to drive to; they were on major roads with high speed limits. But there was no weekly parade of neighborhood faithful walking to or from services, because those churches were on high-speed roads with no sidewalks— next to the strip malls. "Centrally located!" I'm sure the 1960s suburban planners touted. But their design also made them centrally isolated. Except our neighborhood's church.
"Why don't we go to the church up the hill?" I asked my parents numerous times when I was a child.
"Urrrarrughh," was my father's reply— when he'd reply at all. It was a guttural grumble, a nonverbal answering indicating that the conversation was over.
A few times my mother answered. "Your father doesn't like the way they celebrate there," she explained. "It's too modern."
"What's different— or wrong— with the way they celebrate mass?" I wondered, sometimes out loud. But usually silently, because there was low tolerance for badgering questions when I was a little kid. Keep asking after a nonverbal Urrrarrughh answer and the next answer might be a nonverbal swat with his right hand.
Now, since we did occasionally attend a service at that church, occasionally as in once every year or two, I did see how they're different. Or, rather, how they're not.
They were both Catholic churches. There's a not a huge amount of difference in how they celebrate Sunday services. The Catholic church's strong central hierarchy sees to that. When we were on vacations hundreds of miles away we could drop in to a church, and the service would be immediately familiar. Oh, the physical building might look newer or older, there might be old-fashioned wooden pews and maybe even a pipe organ; but the content of the worship was word-for-word virtually the same. The same format, the same readings, the same prayers at the same times. So what was so unacceptably different about the church up the hill?
It's too modern. That three word phrase was the only meaningful answer I heard for a dozen or more years. And yet it was also absurdly meaning-less as there was so little different between the two churches. The only nominally "modern" thing I could spot in the church we avoided is that it had a younger core of volunteer musicians who led the congregation in songs. And among the instruments they played was... gasp!... an acoustic guitar.
Nobody else played an acoustic guitar in a Catholic church. Nobody. Especially not at the totally-not-modern church my father preferred. There they played only the one instrument that was common in the time of Jesus Himself. The electric organ.
Haha, yes, I'm being tongue-in-cheek with that. But seriously, the choices of instruments was the only material difference I could spot. And as far as differences go, it was pretty darn close to immaterial. The "modern" church sang the same songs with same appropriate reverence.
Years later, decades later, I learned the truth about why my father refused to take us to the "modern" church. As you might suspect when the stated reason is so vacuous, so readily disproven by easily observed fact, the real reason is quite different from the stated one. And often the real reason is shameful for the person offering the dissembling answer to admit— which is why they dissemble and distract instead. The real reason we didn't attend the church up the hill is my father felt shame going there.
To be continued....
Why didn't we attend our own neighborhood church? It was so close a child could handle the walk. Indeed, I remember occasionally seeing some of our neighbors walking to or from late Sunday morning services when the weather was nice. But we virtually never joined them. Instead we piled into the family car and drove to another church virtually nobody in our town had heard of.
This church nestled among the mature trees in our neighborhood was unusual in our town. In our town, built almost entirely by a single developer starting in the mid 1960s, all the other churches were on the main roads into/out of town. That made them easy to drive to; they were on major roads with high speed limits. But there was no weekly parade of neighborhood faithful walking to or from services, because those churches were on high-speed roads with no sidewalks— next to the strip malls. "Centrally located!" I'm sure the 1960s suburban planners touted. But their design also made them centrally isolated. Except our neighborhood's church.
"Why don't we go to the church up the hill?" I asked my parents numerous times when I was a child.
"Urrrarrughh," was my father's reply— when he'd reply at all. It was a guttural grumble, a nonverbal answering indicating that the conversation was over.
A few times my mother answered. "Your father doesn't like the way they celebrate there," she explained. "It's too modern."
"What's different— or wrong— with the way they celebrate mass?" I wondered, sometimes out loud. But usually silently, because there was low tolerance for badgering questions when I was a little kid. Keep asking after a nonverbal Urrrarrughh answer and the next answer might be a nonverbal swat with his right hand.
Now, since we did occasionally attend a service at that church, occasionally as in once every year or two, I did see how they're different. Or, rather, how they're not.
They were both Catholic churches. There's a not a huge amount of difference in how they celebrate Sunday services. The Catholic church's strong central hierarchy sees to that. When we were on vacations hundreds of miles away we could drop in to a church, and the service would be immediately familiar. Oh, the physical building might look newer or older, there might be old-fashioned wooden pews and maybe even a pipe organ; but the content of the worship was word-for-word virtually the same. The same format, the same readings, the same prayers at the same times. So what was so unacceptably different about the church up the hill?
It's too modern. That three word phrase was the only meaningful answer I heard for a dozen or more years. And yet it was also absurdly meaning-less as there was so little different between the two churches. The only nominally "modern" thing I could spot in the church we avoided is that it had a younger core of volunteer musicians who led the congregation in songs. And among the instruments they played was... gasp!... an acoustic guitar.
Nobody else played an acoustic guitar in a Catholic church. Nobody. Especially not at the totally-not-modern church my father preferred. There they played only the one instrument that was common in the time of Jesus Himself. The electric organ.
Haha, yes, I'm being tongue-in-cheek with that. But seriously, the choices of instruments was the only material difference I could spot. And as far as differences go, it was pretty darn close to immaterial. The "modern" church sang the same songs with same appropriate reverence.
Years later, decades later, I learned the truth about why my father refused to take us to the "modern" church. As you might suspect when the stated reason is so vacuous, so readily disproven by easily observed fact, the real reason is quite different from the stated one. And often the real reason is shameful for the person offering the dissembling answer to admit— which is why they dissemble and distract instead. The real reason we didn't attend the church up the hill is my father felt shame going there.
To be continued....
