Get Thee To A Sanctuary (Dream)

I was recruited to speak with two other ministers in a church multiplex, I guess in the Mennonite one, also Baptists, Lutheran and United, church sanctuary options. The Catholics and the Anglicans had their own, but all overshadowed by iChurch with it’s own gigantic sanctuary appealing to the telechurched. All in the big box territory at the corner of Kenaston and McGillivary.

I am wearing a tshirt, slacks, and a single-breasted sport suit jacket, sitting in the front waiting for my turn to be called. When I get up there I take off my suit jacket, pick up the mike from the modernist pulpit and launch into a full-blown rant about the death of God, and how everyone listening is deluded if they think they will be resurrected, taking off my t-shirt to show them mortality and they walk out in droves. Once the sanctuary is empty I put my t-shirt back on but leave my suit jacket with money and I.D.

The lobby is empty when I get there, and I go next door and open it to a choir, mostly white in robes belting out gospel tunes. I move on, the United church sanctuary is upstairs, and is empty except for an organist and a thin minister setting next to pulpit on wheels.

I figure there is no-one here that can help me now. I have forgotten my meds and am having a psychotic break, making this all up. The upside is that I am walking, unaided.

I walk out of the church multiplex and try to figure out how I’m going to get home without a bus ticket or cab fare and being in the middle of nowhere Winnipeg in April. I start walking, and come across a hangar with a row of airplanes ranging in sixes (& sizes), from ultra-light to ultra-heavy. I figure I can manage the ultralight, which only requires the insertion of one arm, something like those underwater motorized torpedo things for the lazy swimmer, and I insert my arm, press the ignition button and I’m flying, low mind you, the motor squirrling (straining) to handle my weight, until it runs out of battery, getting close to Pembina highway and Bison Drive but not close enough.

I’m on the Waverley boulevard across from what used to be the church of the Nazarene with the Superstore close by. I wander in to the parking lot and tell the first person I see to take me to the mental hospital, I’m having a psychotic break, the first turns and runs, the second never appears.