Along with music, food, art, and dance, we use religion to transmit the memes that create the culture that binds us and defines us. Dawkins, who created the term, defines memes as the fractious anatomical parts of ideas, communication, and representation--the occupation of our higher mind. It is part of how our genes seek to replicate themselves. I've tried a thousand times to prove him wrong and always failed.
We provide our children with religious stories to arm them and populate them with the memes we use to bind them into our society and our families. Despite being downtown and ancient and moderate and all the things to suggest that Galloway wouldn't have much of a youth program, Galloway is busting out with babies, toddlers, and young couples. A welcome sign of continued growth. That some of these tiny creatures in pastel color cotton easter dresses are third and fourth-generation Jacksonians with eyes that I recognize as the color and shape of their great-grandmother gives me considerable hope for the future and the survival of my own cultural memes.
Today was Palm Sunday. The day Christians celebrate Jesus entering Jerusalem during Passover. Zechariah prophesied that the Messiah, the seed of David, would arrive on the back of a colt moke so when Jesus arrived at the gates of Jerusalem on the back of a donkey, the people spread palm fronds before him and covered the rough road with their cloaks singing "Hosanna!" Their lord has arrived to deliver them from all the false kings of the world and establish the Kingdom of God. That's a lot of pressure.
When I was a child at Galloway, there were different versions of a procession with palm fronds through the sanctuary to celebrate Palm Sunday. I rarely participated in these because, for twenty years, we celebrated our cultural Messiah in the choir loft of the chapel at eight-thirty in the morning, where nobody but Clay Lee and God knew the Campbells attended church at all.
In time, this procession evolved to a small army of children with palm fronds following a live donkey in a parade around the church, now an entire city block, from the great steps before our columned Greek edifice, down Yazoo street, across West street, up Mississippi street, then back down Congress street to the courtyard between the sanctuary and the chapel. Since today was Jack's last day in Jackson until Christmas, I invited him to join the parade today with me since I missed most of his days in church when he was a child.
The plan was to make some sort of reference to his father sharing some connection with the actual live donkey leading us, but when I got to church this morning, I found out that the celebrated equidae who led Galloway children on Palm Sunday for so many so years had expired and was now an ex-jackass. I felt the sting of promising an entertainment to the fourth generation and not coming through. We had a painted cut-out of a donkey, though, and with all our ministers, we joined a parade of a dozen young families and their pastel-colored progeny waving palm fronds in the downtown breezes. Nobody sang Hosanna, but several commented on the prospect of rain. I was the donkey.
Back in the sanctuary, Meg Hanes delivered the children's church part of the celebration. Meg has a challenging job. She's to infest our children with the stories that provide them with the memes that bind them into our culture. This is huge; she's a gateway guardian into our society. There are two primary schools of thought on this. You can Disneyfy the entire concept so that children see our religious narrative as soft and inviting, like a toy or a cartoon, or you can make the entire process terrifying so that they are afraid to step beyond the boundaries of the stories. Meg takes a less common third route. She tries to relate the stories in terms of things already in the children's lives. She makes the bible understandable in their own terms, making every effort to create something called a "thinking Christian," which some people say doesn't exist, but Galloway has been producing since before the Civil War.
Meg's challenge on Palm Sunday is particularly complex. It starts with the colorful pageant of palm fronds and singing and donkeys and little baby Jesus, now a triumphant man, but moves at a frightening pace where, the next Friday, the same people singing Hosanna shout, "CRUSIFY HIM!" Meg doesn't pull any punches, but she delivers the message at a sturdy, steady pace. People are complicated. Four-year-old eyes ponder the idea for a moment, then begin searching for Momma's face in the crowd again. The meme is registered in their memory banks, but it's too soon to fully contemplate what all this means. Maybe when they're twenty.
So many people I talk to immediately write off Galloway and Millsaps and Downtown and United Methodism and anything in the borders of Jackson and nearly everything in the borders of Mississippi as dead or dying or not worth it anyway, but at Galloway, there are green shoots pushing through the ancient scales on the streets of Jackson. We are making new Christians out of ancient stock, and they are amazing.
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