To Church? or not to Church? That is the Question

I'm not particularly religious. I thoroughly resented thirteen years of being forced to attend Chapel services twice a week at Church of England school's and, up until a couple of years ago, the mere thought of voluntarily attending a religious ceremony of any kind made me feel faintly sick with boredom. However this festive season I've been going to carol services. For fun. And donating money to the Church in collections.

Now some of my more militantly atheist friends have found this deeply outrageous demanding how I can be so hypocritical or, in one slightly more extreme case, how I can support what is transparently a system of lies designed to control the masses with fear and concentrate power in the hands of the religious elite.

Well I have a few reasons:

1) I dunno about everyone else's but my local Church isn't an evil force full of corrupt priests seeking to control the congregation, it's rather nice. Aside for Church services they run a whole range of prayer groups, old folk befriending services, soup kitchens and charity ventures. True, not all Church-goers are the saintly types they'd like to pretend but there's a great big core of essentially good folk who combine their beliefs with helping people, and at Christmas I like to show my support for such good will, especially since there's rather too many people out there willing to mock them for their beliefs.

2) Jesus taught nice stuff! Of all the religions I've looked into the teachings of Jesus appeal to me most. Love thy neighbour? Do unto others as you would have others do unto you? Forgiving sins? One of his closest followers was a former prostitute! I'm not convinced that he was the son of God but for a man living a couple of thousand years ago in the Nazareth you've got to admit he was pretty forward thinking. In this time of trouble and strife I think it's nice to hear a bit about good will and peace.

3) And finally I get presents on Christmas day primarily because a nice fella called Jesus Christ died over 2000 years ago. I might not be a Christian myself but thanks to Christians once a year I get to eat hefty amounts of food, exchange gifts with my friends and see the family all together in a cheerful festive mood (a rare occurance). So what if it's just an appropriation of a pagan winter solstice festival into the Christian calender? I love Christmas and I see no problem with singing some cracking carols and donating a bit of money to the nice folk down at my local Church to thank them for it.

So that's why I like going to church at Christmas, and in this day and age where congregations are down and everyone's complaining about a lack of local community, if your a bit curious, why don't you go too?

...Though if you're utterly appalled by the idea and would rather sit in your nice warm house drinking hot chocolate and looking up funny things on the t'internet you can always check this out http://www.smosh.com/smosh-pit/photos/20-most-awkward-santas

Now I'm off to get ready for midnight mass, Merry Christmas everyone!!

H.B.

x

Exploration Archive: Flat Pack Suburbia

Here we have a copy of my latest article for the North America section of the fabulous fledgeling online travel magazine Exploration Online. If you haven't heard about Exploration before and are interested in travel advice and anecdotes, fun facts or becoming a regular contributor yourself check it out! http://www.eruditiononline.co.uk/exploration/article.php?id=243

A few years ago I went to visit some of my increasingly vast collection of American cousins. All that I really knew about them was that they lived in a suburb of Chicago so, naturally, I was expecting it to be like London suburbs: connected to the main part of the city by a vast urban sprawl, narrow streets, narrow houses, a fair bit of traffic and lots of hurried looking people catching buses. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

My first experience of Orland Park was a slightly surreal one. Far from the stereotypical English suburbs I was greeted by a picture book American one: huge houses, wide streets, kids playing in the road, neighbours waving to each other and nothing that resembled a city in sight (turns out Chicago itself is a good 40 kilometres and a 45 minute train journey away). It was adorable.

After talking to my aunt and uncle about it I discovered that, for them, it was truly a dream home. They are in the late seventies; my aunt met my uncle when he was a GI stationed in England during the war. They fell in love and moved to America. Years later, after long careers and raising five children, they bought a plot of land in Orland Park, picked what elements they wanted in their house out of a catalogue, watched it being built and settled in. Their grown-up children were also impressed; so impressed that most of them bought their own flat-pack dream homes in the area and now live within a twenty minute drive of each other. They spend much of their time working, going to church, hanging out with the neighbours and having extended family bowling nights. They love it. Their kids however, aren’t so impressed.

The majority of my younger cousins are around my age, and most of them can’t wait to get out of Orland Park. It’s boring. There’s nothing fun to do within walking distance and all their neighbours know both them and at least one or two of their relatives so there’s little chance of getting away with any misdemeanours. What is a safe little slice of American paradise to their middle aged and elderly relatives is just dull and frustrating to most people under the age of 30. And I kind of saw what they meant; my time in America was spent being handed from cousin to cousin of various generations to be shown stuff, taken to things and constantly entertained, whilst also having a random selection of their friends and neighbours drop by to meet ‘the English girl’. It was sweet and really well meaning, but a little stifling. Yet living close to way too many of your relatives who know almost every detail of your day-to-day life must be even worse for my cousins.

Despite all this, Orland Park does look like an amazing place to grow up. It’s safe, secure and all your friends live near-by. Having spent my childhood split between a small countryside village, Rugby town, Oxford and (more briefly) London, and having few close relatives beyond my immediate family, I can honestly say I’ve never experienced anything quite like it in the UK. And I’m sure, once my cousins have kids of their own, they’ll look back at Orland Park and its flat-pack monotony with a lot more fondness.