Sunday, August 14, 2011

The Masses

The year was 1989. The movie was Field of Dreams. Every movie-goer thought they had learned a valuable lesson: If you build it, they will come.

I took that statement at face value, never giving it a second thought because (a) I was 8, (b) it was just a movie, and (c) everything sounds more profoundly true when it comes from a disembodied voice whispering across a cornfield.

This weekend, I've been to three very different events where masses of people had come, and it got me to thinking about why they really come. Is it actually just because someone built the event, therefore they felt compelled to come to it, like moths to a bug zapper?

The first event: Friday night's live showing of Bye Bye Birdie at The Muny, which is an outdoor theater in Forest Park. (Finding The Muny was a victory in and of itself. Sometime, ask me to tell you the lost-in-Forest-Park story of the golf cart, the public bathers, and the Unibomber lookalike who knows all.) Thousands of people were at the show on Friday night, and as I stared across the crowd it struck me that even though all of our lives were intersecting there for the same show on the same night, every one of them had a separate reason for being there. Most of the reasons probably boiled down to being either:

- a huge fan of musicals

- someone who hates musicals, but got dragged along by a sadistic fan of musicals

- a girl named Sarah on a doozie of an awkward date with a math teacher... um... just hypothetically speaking, of course.

The second event: Saturday at midnight, another date, this time for an annual bike ride called the Moonlight Ramble in which they close the streets to traffic and let the bikes own the night. 10,000 cyclists showed up and packed the streets for a 15-mile ride in a giant loop around town. In theory and feel, it reminded me of the Krispy Kreme Challenge last February, but mercifully donut-free. Why were we all there?
To ride. To be up way past our bedtimes. To pedal down the center lane of Missouri's busiest freeway system without any cars on it. To feel like a solid mass of people with a common bond. And, okay, maybe to find out whether some people really treat this as a clothes-optional event.
Clothes mandatory!
The third event: Sunday morning in a Catholic church. A new friend of mine let me come along to Mass. I had been to one Mass before this, at midnight on a Christmas 10 years ago, where hundreds of people acted as though they had only come because their mothers would be ashamed if they didn't attend church at least once or twice a year -- They rotely stood/sat/knelt/mumbled stuff. They ate wafers. They left. It had a cold, empty feeling.

Today's Mass was different. There was joy. There was a guy in the choir who smiled every time the piano started to play. There were people there because they liked it; because they chose it. They came because they wanted to come.

Why do you attend what you attend?
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4 comments:

  1. AnonymousAugust 14, 2011 at 1:48 PM

    I attend church to find out whether some people treat it as a clothes-optional event.

    ReplyDelete
  2. JoshAugust 14, 2011 at 9:39 PM

    Sometimes, I attend church as though it's a duty, because I know it's where I am "supposed" to be or "expected" to be.

    I'm trying to become the kind of adult who attends church out of purer motives, though. To use your words, I should be there because I like it, choose it, and want to be there. That's a work in progress.

    ReplyDelete
  3. deepsAugust 16, 2011 at 9:54 AM

    thats a good question...

    ReplyDelete
  4. SarahAugust 16, 2011 at 3:39 PM

    Thanks deeps. I'd be interested in your answer to it if you felt like sharing.

    ReplyDelete

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