Oh dear sweet happiness it’s Friday. Can you believe it? If you can believe it you can probably achieve it. Some lovely friends sent me this charming piece of insanity and I thought it would be a great way to round out the week. It’s called “Can You Find God in a Bikini? In a city where religion is dead, the young search for a higher power—in a sauna with Diplo” by someone named Olivia Reingold. I’ll pull out my seven favorite bits and we’ll have a jolly good time.
One
Skipping past the intro—which you should definitely go back and read, we come quickly to the point of the piece:
Welcome to Secular Sabbath, the members-only club that hosts bimonthly events, usually in Los Angeles but also in Iceland and Mexico City—and, at the end of the year, Antarctica. Colorful images of its young, beautiful (and sometimes famous) adherents have quickly spread the word of its mission on Instagram. For Genevieve Medow-Jenkins, the community’s 32-year-old founder, Secular Sabbath is a continuation of her youth spent at The Esalen Institute, a wellness retreat in Big Sur, California, which was famously portrayed in the final scenes of Mad Men. Her parents were “bodyworkers” at Esalen, where her mother developed a new kind of massage “based on the atmosphere” and her father meditated, sometimes for days at a time. And even though she says most people raised in Big Sur never leave, she knew she had a higher calling. “I knew that I had to share my upbringing with the world,” Medow-Jenkins tells me. “And Secular Sabbath is this chrysalis of what Esalen was in the ’90s, when I was growing up.”
Later the amounts of money required to join and then attend each event are listed and I must say, it is a lot more expensive than going to a church where no one will actually extract your cash out of your pocket before you walk in the door. Though you might find yourself, if you’re not careful, trying to buy a discarded pipe organ, or contributing to a gently used and yet very loud industrial refrigerator, or putting a lot more than you ever imagined into the building fund, or buying a turkey for someone you don’t know very well for Thanksgiving, or frittering away your last few dollars at the end of the month to buy felt to make clothes for the little figures required for your complicated Sunday school program. You know what’s so shocking about having to go to a real church? Having to be with people who can’t afford to pay the high entry fees at other kinds of places. People who are not in the same class and economic circumstance that you are. People who are, as it were, truly different from each other.
Also, I feel super stupid because I don’t know who Diplo is. I could have looked him (is it a him? am I misgendering someone here?) up but I don’t want to bother because I have to go clean my filthy kitchen in a minute.
Also, isn’t it an oxymoron—emphasis on the moron—to say “secular” next to “sabbath?” Isn’t the Sabbath the Sabbath because it belongs to God? It is, then, necessarily sacred and not secular. I guess none of that matters, though, if you find your own “higher calling.” I would like one of those, especially if it came with a nice round figure in my bank account every month. Oh well, I guess I’ll have to wait to have my reward in heaven…where God lives…who made the Sabbath…
Two
The purpose of her Secular Sabbath sessions is to connect her “couple hundred” members to a higher power, at a time when attendance at religious services across the country is dwindling. “I hope that they connect with a sense of purpose, through God or something greater than just themselves in this world,” she told me. In other words, even though Americans are increasingly giving up on church, they’re still looking for God—even in a sauna with Diplo. Medow-Jenkins, who was raised Jewish, says she rarely goes to temple now, but still finds God all around her. “The other day, I was upset about something. And in that moment, I asked God for help,” she says. “In moments of vulnerability, it always does in some way come back to God.”
I am sad about the fact that attendance at religious services across the country is dwindling. I wish everyone would come to church to worship the God who made them all. But I understand that the price of admission, though low in dollars, is high in the most valuable currency of the age—personal feelings of warmth and self-affirmation. As in, you have to be willing to give those up when you come into a church and admit that you’re a sinner and that God is justly angry with you until you accept the pure sacrifice of the Son in your place on the cross for those sins. Or, of course, you can just go on finding God “all around” you like this person who invented this highly lucrative and made-up event that doesn’t even take the trouble to in any way mimic the real thing.
Three
Still, you are probably asking yourself, what about the Law? Even if we don’t get to have the Gospel, can we at least have some rules to follow so we can feel even better about ourselves and our own abilities? In a word, no:
There are no rules listed on the Secular Sabbath website. Though drugs or alcohol aren’t provided or encouraged at her sabbaths, Medow-Jenkins also says she won’t “take it away from them.” (And judging from the pure ecstasy of today’s crowd, it wouldn’t surprise me if the vibe is pharmaceutically enhanced). Her events don’t even have to occur on the Sabbath—this event, for example, is happening on a Tuesday night. But she does try to steer clear from any connections to Western religions like Christianity, and instead borrows from Eastern traditions, because people are “more open to it.” More than anything, she wants to dispel the idea that God is uncool. “In American culture, we are so disconnected from feeling passionately about things—because it’s terrifying to care,” she says. “People are afraid to feel into spirituality.”
Jettisoning the philosophical and theological foundation that made it possible for you to even imagine yourself in the way you do now—Christianity—is usually the first and only rule for these kinds of larping exercises. I myself am always super excited to “feel into spirituality” because I have a lot of time for that kind of thing. I like to be rich and lie around in drug-induced commas in my spare time. It’s part of what makes me me….that’s a little joke. Obviously, I don’t have time nor money to do drugs. I guess there are some benefits to poverty and a soupçon of workaholism.
Four
In case you haven’t read the whole piece yet and are confused, there are a lot of different people being quoted here. I haven’t bothered to fill in the context because I feel like that would definitely spoil the mystery and delight of the thing. Anyway, this is another person who has ponied up money in a down economy to feel something fleeting and utterly and completely ephemeral:
“I technically went to church,” she says. “But it was just a place I showed up.” Now, she says she’s a “cafeteria spiritualist” who picks and chooses which practices work for her. “I want to find God and know God in my own way,” she says. “I don’t want anyone to tell me the quality of God or how to worship or anything, I want all that to be my own experience.”
Yes, dear, but you don’t get to “find God and know God” in your own way. The whole point of God is that you have to find and know him in his way—that’s one of the distinguishing factors of being God. Your idolatry is showing, my love, and you should find something more substantial than a “secular sabbath” to cover it up. Something like the saving Gospel of Jesus Christ.
What was it that God said that one time? He was talking about himself in the third person, as he so often does. Let me think, going from memory, I feel like it goes something like this:
Seek the Lord while he may be found;
call upon him while he is near;
let the wicked forsake his way,
and the unrighteous man his thoughts;
let him return to the Lord, that he may have compassion on him,
and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon.
For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord.
For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts.
In other words, dear heart, God disagrees with you about everything you’re doing and you should try to be a little bit curious about how he sees things.
Five
In the meantime, another person is trying to find something to do of an evening besides drinking too much:
Around the corner, a woman is tending to a “plant symphony”—a group of potted ferns and succulents attached to sensors, which track the movement of water through their systems, turning it into sound. The result is like the single note of an organ ringing out, punctuated by the twinkle of a chime. “It feels like a natural high,” says the woman, who is wrapped in a spa robe, her light hair draped across her shoulders. She tells me her name is Macy Baker, and she says ten years ago, when she was 18, she probably would’ve been at a bar by now, but the beauty of Secular Sabbath is it gives attendees an alternative to booze. “I feel like we’ve put a lot of emphasis into unconsciousness, with alcohol and drugs and things, to ensure that we stay lost,” she says. “Like people could be out at bars, and instead they’re here at a spa, listening to plants generate music and doing breathwork and sipping cacao. How awesome is that?” Then Baker meets my eyes in the dim light: “But now, we’re in this new great awakening.” Three hours into the evening, there’s been no mention of God in the official programming. It feels more like Coachella than church.
I don’t mean to be testy about all the people who are perishing and who so obviously need Jesus. Honestly, it’s not The Lost who are drawing my ire, it is the number of people who are making a buck off The Lost. This is no better than someone like Benny Hinn. Except that at least, in this case, I suppose all the people who pay money to this woman have it to spend, whereas Benny Hinn is robbing people who have less of everything. Anyway, this is not an “awakening,” of course, it is an occasion of great darkness.
By the way, I’ve found my pre-advent song. It seems to dovetail nicely:
Six
Another person seems a bit more circumspect, but to no avail whatsoever:
“Oh, these are just some Hollywood kids living their yoga life,” she imagines a stranger might say. Hell, she even thought that when she came to her first Secular Sabbath, held at Joshua Tree. But then she dispensed with her judgment when she realized how good it all felt. “The first time I saw pictures of this, I was like, mostly everyone is white, so you’re like, ‘What is this yogi community that’s trying to create—some sort of cool kids club?’ But then you go into it with an open mind and see through it.” Now, she says, she considers Secular Sabbath a “church,” but the kind where no one has to say anything specific or meet a certain dress code to belong.
That’s so funny. It is “mostly” “white,” which seems like of course. The main thing, though, is “how good it all felt.” That’s what “god” always cares about a lot—how good you feel at any given moment. Also, remember, being in a place “where no one has to say anything specific” is on the exact same moral plane as meeting “a certain dress code to belong.” This person has obviously not attended “church” in a while because the dress code went away a long time ago.
Seven
By the way, I love the writer of this piece. I love the deadpan quoting. I will be looking up this author and reading all of her stuff.
Back in the sauna, I’m sitting in the dark on a wooden bench with Diplo, who is still in his khakis, Crocs, and t-shirt. He tells me that he grew up attending an Episcopal church back home in Daytona Beach, Florida, when he was still known as Thomas Wesley Pentz, and even now, at 44, he looks to Jesus Christ as an inspiration. “He was a perfect person. He was kind. His ambition was to be the best person you could be.” Since his mom and sister passed away recently, he says he’s been back in church. But he doesn’t believe God can be found only there. “Everyday is church for me,” he tells me. “I’m always like, at the club”—then he cocks his head to think. “That is the church because people go there to deal with their problems.” He adds: “Anything that makes you feel like you’re celebrating life is a church.”
I too look to “Jesus Christ as an inspiration.” He is totally “a perfect person.” And sure, let’s sum up his entire ministry as an “ambition” to “be the best person you could be.” Why not. One of the best ways to “be the best person you can be” is to read the Bible where it also says this:
“If you turn back your foot from the Sabbath,
from doing your pleasure on my holy day,
and call the Sabbath a delight
and the holy day of the Lord honorable;
if you honor it, not going your own ways,
or seeking your own pleasure, or talking idly;
then you shall take delight in the Lord,
and I will make you ride on the heights of the earth;
I will feed you with the heritage of Jacob your father,
for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.”
So anyway, have a nice day!
Oh what fun! My snarky Anglican lady blogger (which is how I refer to you in polite conversation) and The Free Press merge in one fun post, and on a Friday no less! I actually thought of you upon reading that article, and thought what a fun piece it would be for you to pick apart. Glad it happened irl, as the kids say. 😁
I love that you invite your readers, even the ones you critique into the kingdom, making certain we all understand the cost of entry, the death of pride. Faith alone in Christ alone opens the door to the life we all long for and that a "Secular Sabbath" promises but can't deliver. All joy and blessedness of knowing and being known by God, you lay before us all, Anne. Lord, Holy Spirit use Anne's words to draw us all into Your true Sabbath rest, in Jesus' name