038 ☼ Consider the lilies
growing on Tohono O’odham land and if you must know, Jesus was crucified on Palestinian land
Growing up, being at church felt the same as being on stage with all the lights on—uncomfortable, surveilled, and burdened. I sat in many churches throughout my girlhood and most of them were distinctive by their decorum and architecture. First service on Sundays or Wednesdays were in the more casual megachurch—an enormous gym filled with plastic seats and a stage built from retractable bleachers. Second or holiday services were in the sanctuary—a proper church with double vaulted ceilings, stained glass, and an enormous organ. It struck me that the second church was the more special one based solely on its presence and acoustics, the way harmony sounded different in a more sacred-seeming space. My behavior changed even though I felt all churches were the same type of place—the sanctuaries were still the site of my mother’s day jobs, either as a wedding singer (lol) or as a member of the church’s choir or praise team. Somehow the fear and awe and majesty of sanctuaries like these never wore off on me. The area I grew up in was also rife with gorgeous Modernist and Mid-century modern churches, in addition to other more pedestrian buildings like our now architecturally significant malls, literally on either side of the freeway we took to get to the beach—a sanctuary all it’s own. Since I never noticed the significance, I just assumed life was filled with beautiful buildings, each with their own purpose, a blissfully ignorant and very Californian disposition.
For Easter, I watched Lilies of the Field (1963). I first saw this film in Phoenix, near where it was filmed in Tucson, on a road trip through the desert with a handsome stranger I met on Hinge. It was the day before my birthday and struck me as the perfect holiday film. It has everything: stern German nuns in the desert wearing rattan hats, comical language barriers, the raising of a barn (a church, actually), and Sidney Poitier in the perfect pale Lee Westerner denim set.
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