Opening the Mind, Devoutly

ITS MY STORY, and I'm stickin' to it. I occurred to me that its been three years now since my local senior center reopened after having been closed for a year during the pandemic. The reopening was slow. Many people, it seemed, were not quite ready to emerge from the sequestered life, hiding at home from Covid 19. Participation in all activities, including the Monday morning gospel singing group, was low. They needed singers, so I joined, without really intending to participate for very long. Maybe just long enough for them to rebuild their numbers. But here it is three years later, and here I am, still singing. I started thinking about quitting a few weeks into it; it didn't take me long to get tired of the gospel songs. Yet, I stayed, because I like to sing, and since I have spent my life singing alone, in the shower, it seemed, and still seems good and healthy for me to spend some time singing with other people, trying to learn how to blend in with a group. A good chace to expand my abilities, learn a new skill. Its been difficult, humbling, but fun. I still don't like the songs, except "How Great Thou Art", but I have gotten used to learning them, I know them better now, and have improved in my singing of them, I hope. Just as I am willing to attend any religious worship service of any religion in order to learn, even though I am not religious, I have the same attitude about singing; I am willing to sing anything, for the experience, and to improve. I like the openmindedness of this attitude, and I like to think of myself as open minded. There are at least four thousand organized religions on the planet; why not learn something about all of them? Why not give them all a chance? This is my main complaint about deeply religious people, and I assume it applies to deeply religious people of any religion, not just the Christian faith. I know for a fact that it applies to devout Christians, because, verily, I have spent my life among them. They are sipmly narrow minded, closed minded, about religions other than their own. I never met a devout Christian who considers it acceptable that other religions exist. To the Christian faithful it is as if the world is temporarily mucking its way through a barbaric era in which many different false religions haunt human society even though the one true religion, Christianity, is now basically available to almost everybody. But ultimately this unfortunate situation will be remedied, so the Christian devout seem to believe, because the message of God and Jesus Christ will finally, some fine day, engulf all the world, as the gospel is brought to the attention of everyone. To me this attitude is dangerous, and flagrantly wrong. To me, it is particularly ironic that the most devout religious people are the most intolerant of other's religions. The most zealously religious are the least able to understand what its like to be zealously religious. My fellow gospel singers probably assume that I share their relgious beliefs, and if they don't, perhaps they wonder why I bother singing gospel music. I could explain, but they would never understand. Its like Louis Armstrong said about jazz; if you have to ask what it is, you'll never know.