Back around the turn of the Millennium in the Pacific Northwest, I recall always having to leave early-morning Seminary early in order to arrive at Jazz Band practice late, so that nobody would be happy. I have never once been an early riser, and ages later intentionally completed a PhD while sleeping in till nine every morning specifically to debunk the myth of the early riser, to prove—contrary to what my father and seminary teachers always told me—that there was no correlation between being self-disciplined and an early-riser, that in fact it was easier to accomplish hard tasks when you’re not in a constant state of sleep deprivation. (My own children would later rob me of my late mornings—the early riser gene skipped a generation down to them—but c’est la vie.)

I always felt a twinge of guilt showing up late to Jazz Band practice all four years of high school, though I certainly felt none leaving seminary early, and wish I’d been naturally rebellious enough to only choose to attend the latter. I was too obedient to do so, however (my parents certainly would have told me to “choose ye this day” and what not, preferring that if I only attended one, it would be the bleary-eyed scripture-chases of seminary), though the irony was certainly not lost on me that Jazz as a genre was considered only a half-century earlier to be a most wicked, animalistic, and rebellious genre, which only the most self-destructive and wild of artists indulged in. Yet for however much of Jazz today is now dominated by band nerds just trying to pad out their extracurriculars for college applications, you can still glean some of that older, defiant spirit from the original recordings if you have ears to hear.

Take for example the title to “Moanin’” by Charles Mingus, from his 1960 LP Blues & Roots (a track that still gets enthusiastically played by high school Jazz combos today, my own students inform me) is both an obvious sexual innuendo, but also per Mingus’s own liner notes a reference to the religious moanings and wailings of the black church he grew up in in the ghettos of Watts, Los Angeles during the Great Depression. (The opening track to Blues & Roots is “Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting”, after all—and boy were there a lot of Wednesday night Mutuals when my unprepared and unimaginative youth leaders had us awkwardly playing basketball in the cultural hall for the umpteenth time that I wish I could be whooping and hollering in a Black Church prayer meeting instead.)

No doubt many LDS leaders of the ‘50s and ‘60s justified their insane and man-made Black priesthood ban by pointing to the sensuality and sexuality of the black church service as an inferior version of the quiet reverence of the LDS service—this, despite the fact that this distinction between the bodily and the spiritual is a late Neo-Platonic interpolation into the primitive Apostate Church (as this site has previously highlighted here and here), that in fact the Restored Gospel itself declares that “there is no such thing as immaterial matter” (D&C 131:7-8), that there is no distinction between the spiritual and the temporal (D&C 29:34), that our own bodies are essential not only for the resurrection but our own eternal exaltation and eventual ascension to godhood, and so to deny the sacredness of our own most powerful bodily functions is to deny the gifts of God. (Not to mention that our faith was the one accused of gross sexual deviance during the polygamy years on the 1800s, which in any case means we should be the ones treating sex as a sacred act, but I more than digress.)

That is, when Charles Mingus was writing and recording “Moanin’” in 1960, he was not only rebelling against the Puritanical sensibilities of all those self-righteous white-Americans who sought to keep him and his people oppressed and repressed, but against the very Neo-Platonic corruption of the primitive Church by St. Augustine and the Greek Doctors from Late-Antiquity clear on down to the present day. Mingus’s was the highest and holiest form of rebellion—not like Lucifer against God the Father, but more like Christ the Son of God Himself against the Scribes and Pharisees. That’s the sort of rebel I wish I could have been in high school Jazz Band!

Alas, by the end of the ‘90s, all the actually rebellious kids were listening to Punk, Metal, and/or Hip-Hop, while the Jazz combo was, again, made up primarily by a bunch of band nerds trying to pad out their extracurriculars for college applications. If any folks our age attended our concerts, it was only due to the very brief West Coast Swing revival of the late-‘90s (and as a general rule, nothing that features in a GAP commercial or was popular at Stake Youth dances can reasonably be considered cutting edge or rebellious), which were otherwise only patronized by an increasingly elderly cadre of WWII vets trying to reminisce on their youth and everything they’d lost in the interim.

Which has increasingly included me recently, I’ve come to realize. Just earlier this week you see, my brother ran into an old ward member in the Portland Temple, from whom he learned that our old ward building in rural Washington—where we were ordained, passed the sacrament, attended seminary, left from for our missions and gave our homecoming talks and attended our mother’s funeral—has been put up for sale. Our old childhood ward will now meet in a neighboring town’s stake center.

And the news hit me like a brick, I confess. For despite all my earlier evinced cynicism, I really did have some old affection for that building. I really did gain my testimony there you see—very much in spite of early morning seminary and Wednesday night mutual, but I did gain one, for the Spirit does not reveal itself through brick and mortar, but in spite of that as well.

I would often go on splits with the local missionaries after I got my drivers license, where I couldn’t help but feel that same spirit myself—as did the many people I watched them teach, who were converted not by anything they said but by everything they didn’t. My homeward in fact was once highlighted by M. Russell Ballard in a 2003 General Conference as an ideal model of collaboration between members and missionaries in the work. I was serving a mission myself at the time, and couldn’t have been prouder in my homeward, and in that old building where I used to resentfully attend seminary and gratefully leave early.

But at a certain point I guess it stopped being a model ward I guess, till someone in Salt Lake City determined that they didn’t even deserve their own building anymore. Part of it I suppose is simple demographics: that region of rural Washington has been chronically depressed (both economically and otherwise) for decades. Especially after some catastrophic flooding hit the region in 2007, everyone who could leave did. My own family moved closer to the Portland area in 2011, and I hadn’t lived there for even longer than that. You can shatter baptism records all you want, but if all your converts either go inactive or move to the Puget Sound or Portland areas, then your ward will remain a leaking sieve, sadly.

But that still doesn’t explain for me why those who did stay have more been deprived of their building that they have served and been served by for literal decades. (I definitely attended branches on my mission with lower attendance than my old ward who nevertheless still had their own building.) This isn’t the late-‘60s anymore when the Church almost went bankrupt, it is now common knowledge that the LDS Church is obscenely wealthy. They can afford to hang onto an old building that was long ago paid for and for which they owe no property taxes. But then, they also have the money to hire paid janitors for these same buildings too, but obviously choose not to. This penny pinching by the indefensibly-wealthy drives me bonkers, quite frankly, and I find myself wondering how many folks on the bubble will go inactive now that 20 minutes has just been added to their commute to church during an era of high gas prices. Is the worth of souls really not so great after all?

I suppose I should remind myself of what I just said a minute ago, that conversion comes not from brick and mortar but by the ineffable feeling of the Holy Spirit. It’s not the chapel that matters, I learned that clear back in high school when I developed a testimony in spite of, not because of, early morning seminary. But as I also learned in early morning Jazz Band—and especially from Charles Mingus—the physical still matters! Ours is not a reincarnation religion wherein this material world is something to be transcended, but to be redeemed. Even our chapels are sacred.

But then, even the Heavens and the Earth must pass way; Charles Mingus too, when he recorded Blues & Roots, was not just celebrating the Church services of his youth, but memorializing them, because they had passed way irrevocably as well. That, I suppose, is the mortal experience, and what those elderly patrons in the late-‘90s were reminiscing about when they attended our Jazz concerts. One day hidden things will be declared from the rooftops; but that still means they must first be disappeared.