Going To Church In Small Town America, and Surviving

BACK AT THE SENIOR CENTER, onward goes the saga, the daily saga of my having retired too young from teaching, sixty, and joined the senior center. There is an epidemic of aging globally, although American conservative republicans might deny it. Aging in America and around the world might be in the same category as global warming, the holocaust, and the moon landings: factual, but denied by American conservative Republicans. We're going to have to learn to take care of each other, pure and simple. At the senior center in a town of two thousand, I have received seven (7) invitations to church, all Christian churches, presumably. I intend to accept them all, but just haven't started yet. What's delaying me, I'm not sure. I am a natural procrastinator. Also, reluctant. Every Christian church I've been in in the American south in the past few years dogs he Moslems, the gays, and the liberals, and I don't like that. It aint Christian, to dog folks. And I hope none of the big seven, my inviters, does it this time. My God, I wonder, exactly how fragmented is American Christianity? How many churches in such a small town, with how many members? I have told a senior or two that this proves my point: we all have our own individual religions. Not a popular notion at the conservative Christian small town American senior center. Most of my notions are not popular, and its a wonder I haven't been kicked out> But its still early. Hell, I'm actually rather popular. Must be that glowing smile, warm personality, and incessant smartassiness. These people have a sense of humor, which is why I love them. That, plus, after thirty five years with children, and I'm ready for a change. What a change. but I cannot be honest with them and conceal that fact that I have a religiosity similar to that of Thomas Jefferson and Albert Einstein, which is decidedly non-Christian, but, to my way of thinking, utterly sublime, sensible, and logical. I'll go to these tiny country churches, with an open mind. Nonetheless, I am not likely to emerge therefrom believing that God speaks to us in books and stories, or any such nonsense.