Compare and contrast with Martin Luther King, Jr’s observation that eleven o’clock Sunday morning is the most segregated time in America.
Is it just me, or is western culture becoming more and more segregated? As well as the usual suspects of race and class, we are increasingly fragmented in the 1,000 channel universe, able to avoid any music, TV show, dance, theatre, etc. that we think we don’t care for in favour of stuff that confirms our own prejudices.
When i was a youngster, one of the most unifying hours in North America was the Sunday evening at eight o’clock TV show, The Ed Sullivan Show. With a host who could only be described as unbelievably uncharismatic, the show offered a true variety of entertainment. It was on The Ed Sullivan Show that i first saw and heard the Kirov Ballet, the Moscow circus, the great African American singer/actress Ethel Waters breaking my heart with her song, “Suppertime” about the mysterious disappearance of her partner, old burlesque comedians like Henny Youngman and Milton Berle, puppetry (anybody remember Topo Gigio?), Broadway musical show-stoppers with the original cast in costume (Carol Channing singing “Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend”; Julie Andrews and Richard Burton singing the title song from Camelot and even the hirsute kids from Hair). Sullivan was famous for the Beatles’ appearance and Elvis before them, but he also made sure that African American performers – Harry Belafonte, Eartha Kitt, Louis Armstrong, Fats Domino, the Supremes – got airtime. To a kid growing up in the WASP enclave of suburban Toronto, this was heady stuff. Is there an equivalent of Ed Sullivan on air today – a show that eschews niche marketing and seeks to expose us to a broad palette?
Last spring, i had a great rambling conversation with Cynthia Dyck, the administrator of the Refinery (the arts centre affiliated with St. James Anglican in Saskatoon, SK). Although hired by the church, Cynthia is an arts administrator. She maintains that not being a church person makes it easier to do her job at the Refinery. As someone well-known in the arts community, Cynthia had the credibility to bring in the artists/renters. Any defences the artists might have felt about coming into a church space was dissipated when they asked Cynthia, “Do you go to the church?” and she answered, “No, I don’t, but this building is for everyone.” That leant credibility to the Refinery, as potential renters thought to themselves, “Huh! It really is for everybody, or you wouldn’t be working here.” For Cynthia, the joy of her job is that people can’t silo – they have to deal with each other. She says: “The yoga students have to deal with the theatre people upstairs. The theatre people have to deal with the tai chi class. The 12 Step Program has to get directions from the weird gay guy up there. So they’re always forced to deal – they can’t silo. If they want to work here, they can’t silo. Even if it’s just sharing the same doorway, it’s amazing how we are changed by sharing space. We’re going, Hey! This is important! Look at these two people having to work things out, and they normally wouldn’t run into each other. Relationships are the most important. If you get those relationships right, then everything else falls into place.”
At the church i live and work at, our congregational demographic doesn’t match the demographic of the neighbourhood. Nor the city. While i would like to think that Martin Luther King’s statement about churches and segregation is no longer true, i am not convinced that churches, rather than being meeting places, are silos. Perhaps these silos are reflective of our wider culture, the iPod age when we download what we already like and ignore the rest. Congregations tend to have their own “playlists” – musically, theologically, socially. How do we Ed Sullivan our churches so that we can expose ourselves to rhythms not our own, to arts that challenge our spirits, to the music of Saturday night (as opposed to the four-square hymns of Sunday morning)? When i consider a new pantheon of saints, Ed Sullivan now comes to mind.
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