The Eucharist of the Holy Ghost at Key West

Hegel developed the fatal art of

speaking about sober things in the

manner of a drunk.

Friedrich Nietzsche

The saints,

that is, in the fourth century or somewhat later,

occupied themselves with religion because

it was, over the sufficiently long run,

mote interesting than sex.

At five p.m., after three Michelobs too many

at the open air bar across Duval Street,

a hopelessly befuddled skeptical thinker

comes to a critical Mass in a liberal liturgy

in an island city, in the season of Pentecost,

and the flame trees blaze with the color of the Holy Ghost,

through the open windows of swiveled stained glass

which let in late hot light and wet subtropic air

and noise from the bar across Duval Street.

Breezeless heat brings sweat to this tourist congregation.

The priest, wrapped in heavy robes, walks to the altar

and plugs in a large electric fan. The acolyte,

a teen-ager in a Pinball Wizard T-shirt, prepares the candles

with a cigarette lighter. In the late twentieth century,

the reform commission said, worship must reflect

the daily life of the worshipping people.

Who are, in this case, five nondescript Northerners,

two elderly Anglicans who came over on Laker,

one or two locals, and an alcoholic intellectual.

The service moves smoothly from prayer towards Gospel.

The beauty of the Episcopal Church, someone said once,

is that you can honor God without paying attention.

Bob Dylan has turned Pentecostal. One of our famous

critics,

being an arrogant New Yorker, has singlehandedly revived

the Gnostic heresy. Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh

distributes bumper stickers saying, "Come, follow me."

A professor friend in California said, ""Everybody's

into hot tubs or into drugs. Nobody's into theology."

Key West is exploring sadomasochism as a road to the

absolute.

Pentecost: The tribes have revolted on Espirito Santo,

an observation infinitely more ironic in Portuguese;

death rules in the coffee republic they named for the Saviour,

and as for Iran, Palestine, and Lebanon,

as the West Country landlady commented about Belfast,

"They're killin' each other, and it's because they're religious."

The Catholic school here is Saint Mary Star of the Sea.

This place also is made from the dust of stars,

all those heavy elements that coagulated

long and boring aeons after the first cosmic catastrophe.

This is Carl Sagan's myth of creation,

more poetic than Genesis but no match for the Elder Edda.

Hell. The psychological function of liturgy

was to keep our rambling minds completely focused

on one event for ninety minutes. This folksy service

drifts on like a meeting of the Rotary Club,

from the handshake of peace to the descent of the Spirit.

Suppose, purely as hypothesis,

that the only way for actually existing angels

to carry on communication with human beings

lay in the brain's capacity for hallucination?

So that of, say, fifty thousand deluded lunatics

the beauty of this, from the angels' perspective,

being that no one else would believe their stories,

thereby safeguarding those necessary mysteries

that led monastic dreamers in the regions of heat prostration

to concoct imaginary secrets told by angels.

That digression at least got us through

the prayer of humble access. Now the acolyte,

still emblemed as Pinball Wizard, offers the elements

which earth has given and human hands have made.

They will become our spiritual food.

In the beginning, or so said the early Fathers,

spirit fed from God; soul lived from spirit;

body gained its daily food from soul.

Now, thanks to Adam, spirit eats soul,

soul drains substance from body; poor body

shifts for itself with material sustenance.

Thanks to this botch of our internal economy,

the whole thing falls apart in nothing flat.

The coming of Christ was the start of a repair job.

The hot light fades, and Key West gets ready

for a night of serious drinking. The evening Eucharist

achieves the translation of bread and wine, and we stumble

up from our seats. Most Episcopalians

never did manage to do this with dignity.

The machinery of nightfall coaxes the evening moths

to red flowers in the garden. The sweetness of trumpet vine

floats in the air like incense. We have seen the true light,

was what they used to say. We have received the heavenly

food.

We who have forgotten what in Hell we are doing

give thanks anyway. The bar across Duval Street

is getting louder. Fresh wind drifts from the ocean.

Above our heads, in the normal transactions between light

and darkness,

Venus and the Dog Star's companions show their bright

pinpoints