Sunday, Sunday

If 23rd and Union is an intercultural crossroads the rest of the week, Sundays deserve particular thought. In RantWoman's experience, Sundays reflect both the parallel universes of many different faiths and some amusing commonalities among people of different faiths.

One of the things RantWoman noticed upon moving into the area is all the different Churches of God in Christ, one around every corner, and not large buildings either. WHASSUP with that? RantWoman knows of sects with amazingly small total numbers of adherents who nevertheless manage to splinter over the tiniest questions of practice or doctrine. Is that that or just the vagaries of real estate and group decisionmaking? RantWoman does not even know who to ask?

Mount Zion Baptist Church is not strictly 23rd and Union, but since it's the kind of religious body in-the-know white people would pay attention to, RantWoman will offer comments about it too. RantWoman has been there a time or two for events or sometimes when service providers such as United Way tax help visit there.

On one of RantWoman's visits there she remembers noting that Mount Zion is a member both of the National Baptist Convention (African American congregations) and the American Baptist Convention. Who says segregation is no more? To be fair, when RantWoman lived in another city and belonged to the NAACP, that organization held meetings in another Baptist church that belonged to the National Baptist Convention.

On the other hand, when Rev McKinney retired RantWoman followed the transition to Rev. Braxton with the same interest she devotes to the soap operas that sometimes accompany leadership transitions in other churches RantWoman is familiar with.

RantWoman's Sundays in public often began at the bus stop in front of Mt Calvary. RantWoman's usual travel time to her regular house of worship in the U district was, she thinks, between services at Mt. Calvary. Sometimes RantWoman heard pretty rocked-out full-voiced singing. Most of the time, RantWoman got to watch a succession of cars drive up, often from places like Renton. Nearly everyone was finely dressed, some with awesome African American church lady hats and big Bibles.

It's not like RantWoman easily strikes up conversations with anyone but she got used to who she saw regularly. One time when RantMom was still an occasional Seattle visitor not yet a full resident in her own capacity, she came with RantWoman on one of these journeys. RantMom was quite a bit less sure of herself in this environment than RantWoman was and RantWoman remembers one time getting on the bus and assuring RantMom that "those ones are fine; they're on their way to church. I see them every week." For the record: RantWoman is perfectly well aware that many people go to church because they really need it; nothing can automatically be assumed about churchgoers' benevolent intentions. In RantWoman's mind though, making the effort to show up, no matter what motivations or ulterior motives might be going on counts for something.

RantWoman often thinks of that run of the 48 as "the God run:" East African immigrants on their way to St. Demetrious on Boyer, a couple young white women with small children in tow on their way to the Mormon stake in the U-district invariably because their husbands are either already deployed somewhere or ready imminently to ship out.

Then there would be RantWoman on her way to Friends Meeting. RantWoman might not have been a Quaker in previous centuries for any number of reasons. For instance RantWoman likes a little more flash in her attire than previous centuries of plain-dressing Quakers would tolerate. (RantWoman also hopes she would be more outspoken and less self-congratulatory about some topics than Quakers who have gone before.) In the centuries RantWoman lives though, "plain dress" runs heavily toward denim and tennis shoes, biker tights and shoes with toe clips, or in rare cases chinos and T-shirts.

In contrast to the finely dressed folks at Mt Calvary, the flavor of Quakers RantWoman hangs with tends not to dress up for anything but weddings and memorials, sometimes not even then. RantWoman remembers one sweltering Sunday when she went to Meeting for Worship wearing only shorts and a T-shirt. At Meeting she realized there was a memorial after worship. Although RantWoman had barely ever spoken to the deceased, there was an ex oficio reason it was totally reasonable to expect RantWoman to show up for the memorial. RantWoman apologized sheepishly to a family member after the memorial, but the family member graciously pointed out that his father never wore anything but T-shirts either.

Considering the directions people move, RantWoman is struck by parallels between people who drive in from Renton and some she knows who drive to the U district from suburbs up north. RantWoman supposes there are curious intersections of faith and sentimentality and urban planning in these practices but that perhaps could get to be another whole post.

RantWoman does mention the topic though because Sunday trips to church are a very important social connection for many seniors. Lately RantWoman has been sitting in on some meetings related to neighborhood planning. The seniors getting to church on Sunday bus schedules keeps coming up!


But back to 23rd and Union as RantWoman knew and knows it. Miss Helen's Soul Food was at least a visual fixture. RantWoman knows how to eat grits and greens and might have tried the place at least once, RantWoman never managed to intersect with the place when it was actually open, but she definitely remembers the lace curtains in the window.

The back of the building where Miss Helen's was housed some kind of curious mosque. By the time RantWoman would get home on Sundays, the mosque was often teeming with families. Everything that might conceivably be considered parking was overflowing with cars, especially orange taxis. Most of these gatherings seemed quite amiable with nothing more objectionable than the same kind of parking concerns that surround one budding megachurch in the U-district except that to RantWoman's knowledge no one ever came along and coached the mosque-goers about how to manage their traffic a little.

RantWoman's ferrener sometime husband is from a country many people would not guess has a large muslim population. Even during Communist times though Islam was one of the officially recognized religions. Local practice had numbers of idiosyncrasies and when ferrener husband was first in the US he made inquiring forays both to the mosque on Union St. and to an Islamic school in the building where RantWoman used to go to vote.

RantWoman was perplexed, after ferrener husband visited the mosque in the falling-down brick building when he trotted home, not with some kind of religious text in an unusual script but with some kind of Green Beret manual, the kind of thing previously often on sale at surplus sales all over the country. This particular volume had more ammo on the cover than the average Rambo movie uses for a whole shoot. RantWoman would have been way more concerned had ferrener husband actually showed very much interest in the thing: he brought it home out of curiosity. RantWoman laughed a little and explained about surplus sales. Then ferrener husband basically forgot about it though it surfaced during some later move on top of a whole box of equally random printed material. RantWoman thinks ferrener husband like the school a little better though nothing in print ever came home from it.

RantWoman is the sort of person who sometimes goes to meetings of neighborhood activists, and the falling-down brick building was universally reviled in some quarters. This was partly though RantWoman suspects not solely because the building was in terrible shape. The buildings detractors probably considered the Nisqually earthquake an act of divine mercy: after the earthquake, safety inspections immediately red-tagged the building and all the tenants were forced to move. RantWoman has no idea what happened to Miss Helen's, but the taxi stand and mosque moved a few blocks east further down Union toward the lake.

Considering the Green Beret manual, RantWoman probably should not be surprised that the mosque also emerged later as a front in the Global War on Terrorism. There is no indication that the whole mosque had terrorist connections, and RantWoman remembers an awful lot of general hyperventilating in the aftermath of 9/11. This was connected with the mosque through the wonders of an alleged training camp in Oregon, some web presence and other activities that, RantWoman suspects fall somewhere between grounds for legal hyperventilating and serious threat.

Here RantWoman also has to acknowledge some contradictions in the dictates of her own faith tradition. RantWoman being a good Montana girl has no problem with well-managed hunting and use of shotguns for same. RantWoman does think fewer shotguns in wide circulation are generally preferable to more shotguns in circulation. However, when news of the alleged training camp in OR surfaced, RantWoman admits to thinking that if the people involved had just been white boys with shotguns wanting to blast away at targets out in the middle of nowhere, probably the NRA would be all over the issue in defense of people's God-given Second Amendment rights to blast away with shotguns at anything they want. All are supposed to be equal under the law, right? Suffice it to say that now this neighborhood has real problems with other forms of firepower; RantWoman may or may mot elaborate about that in a separate post.

RantWoman wishes to add one more note to her Sunday forays into multiculturalism, a church Little Sister has ties to called La Iglesia de Dios Pentecostes. Often in the summertime, huge "mixed status" families of Latino immigrants from this church headed out on the #2 bus to swim at Lake Washington and make carne asado on the beach. Diespite the mix of people who attended, definitely no assumptions should be made about these gatherings being paragons of interracial or intercultual concord either; they were fun on the beach, not an outbreak of world peace.

Happy Sundays to all.