Tonight I listened to the radio in my house. In the last 10 years this has happened precisely once. From deep within the bowels of 89.1 FM’s death-by-classical-music dungeon static’d a cathedral choir into my living room. The tinny sound buzzing out of my thirty dollar Phillips veiled a much richer, much more regal affair that probably brought an audience to tears when originally performed. Despite the rattling dissonance of prostituted technology, I closed my eyes and surrounded myself with gothic spaciousness. Every pointed arch, every buttress and cloister and spiny-pillared space was filled with a relentlessly reverent harmony riding on the back of a wandering melody. And for six minutes…I was Catholic. I was crimson and grey. I was blood and stone. In the few decades between ChurchOpression and InsignificantShell I knelt in a buttery pillar of sunlight and gave thanks for all the pomp and circumstance. My Catholic church is an aesthetic church. It smells like gold. It has rubies in its eyes. My senses are filled with the glory of the Earth. My mind is filled with the glory of God. I understand this. I understand this. But the music ends. The light cools. And my church returns to the socio-political white-noise giant-shrimp American-movie Catholicism that we respectfully disrespect today. It once was beautiful. It once made sense. But the senses cannot hold.
