Ayup, me luvs! ChurchMouse here.
Situated up in the church rafters rather than down below from the tiny mousehole in the mopboard, as I am traditionally depicted, I am reporting, as is my wont, on the emergent church shindig. I do so with uncharacteristic pizazz, because feeling a bit of a high from the altitude.
Truth to tell, we Mickeys hanker after rafters and attics as much as bats do belfries, only all the bats are down there hanging out at the all-plexiglass pulpits. Such is my lofty view on the mutinuous movement.
Anyway this mod basilica doesn’t have a belfry or clanging bells. Instead of clangers, Kliegies, uncountable myriads of Klieg lights dangling like legions of, er, bats from a humungous black steel grid skeleton that look like tower cranes used to construct 17 story hospitals. There are serried ranks and city blocks of these gadgets, interspersed with banks of loudspeakers and disguised surveillance cameras, forever trapped up here, embedded in the black firmament.
Down below on the floor are a squad of giant wheeled tripods as bulky as the Eiffel Tower topped off by big black contraptions sprouting prongs, panes, vanes, fins, and gills like mutated viscera of a robot, with one big glass eye and a blinking red light like the devil’s eye, trying, like Trojan Horses, not be noticed as they roam about amongst the pews. And over there in the far aisle is a single 20-foot-long boom at the end of which is affixed one of those contraptions with a blinking red light and a bulgy eye systematically sweeping like a radar dish the congregation. When the cyclops eye fixes upon them, they are in a twinkle of an eye transformed into pews of beatific icons saying cheese (we church mice should be so lucky), and encircled, thanks to the miracle of special effects and suspension of visual if not theological disbelief, by halos.
All the pious throng, several thousand souls, are transfixed by an array of screens, each about as big as a croquet field, upon which dance enormous virtual images (the Canaanites should have been so lucky) of costumed duly ordained shes or hes. Pacing the bare oversized stage like Admiral Nelson upon his great ship’s poop deck, the blighters are reminiscent of Shirley Temple tappy-toeing across a cavernous movie studio. The old time pulpits whether 2- tier like our London trollies, or vast desks, have been hauled away to make room for the progressive promenade. Such is the price of refractory righteousness.
Strange little black fly-like things clipped to their blouses or lapels somehow turn their soft syllables into thunderclaps. The houselights having been dimmed, shafts of celestial light focus as if magnetized upon the performing pastors and pastorettes, much like spotlights glued to Heinkle He 111 bombers in the Battle of Britain or the stroboscopic floodlights intimately playing upon the Beatles at the Shea Stadium, or Frankie Sinatra in old Las Vegas.
In the spirit of the event, and to evince the theatrical happiness seizing the congregation, jokes rather than homilies are bandied about evoking swells of chuckles and tsunamis of guffaws. Movie clips and a smattering of quotes, seldom from Scripture or E.G. White, are projected, to happy applause rather than amens.
If in ancient times Levites officiated before the altar, a new species of elite ecclesiasticians of the tribes of Producer, Gofer, Gaffer, Cinematographer, and Makeup Artist pop up here and there in the nave. These are habilimented in bespoken holey jeans rather than robes and vestments and accoutered with headphones rather than phylacteries.
My dear old stalwart Grandpaw ChurchMouse, long of snowy whisker and umber tooth, recalls the days of yore when he scurried under the pews of the cathedral occasionally glancing up at the vaulted ceiling that reached high into the heavens and was adorned with murals by Michelangelo supine on a scaffold. Now the heavens are choked with klieg lights tended by techie blokes nested in a cherry picker. Also remembered by dear old High-ChurchMouse are the stained glass windows, glorious things. O the splendor of the stained glass windows, as tall as upended Seine River barges. No gleaming stained glass now. Where they were are a parade of dimly flickering screens blanketing the walls. Perilous times, predicted of yore, are among us (2 Timothy 3).
I daresay, old chaps, all this could be as controversial as vaccination. But me, I’m just an humble ChurchMouse, addicted to cheese not Disqus throwing. That’s one of the bang-up things about being a ChurchMouse rattling rafters instead of pew blogs wherein is naught but argy-bargy and kerfuffle. Methinks I hear voices extolling the new-fangled media as the latter rain. Blimey, what do I, a mere mouse, a worm, know?
Could be. He works in mysterious ways. But if you ask mousey me, all this seems rather too Hollywoodish, Bollywoodish, and Dollywoodish. I daresay, lads, if those dangling Klieg lights are shaken loose by an end-time earthquake, it’ll be a rain all right. Raining Kliegs not frogs or shoulder flames. It could herald the Shaking.
Or perhaps a falling away.
"Let no man deceive you by any means: for that day shall not come, except there come a falling away first, and that man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition" (2 Thessalonians 2:3).
Cheerio,
ChurchMouse