Going to church on Easter Sunday

My dreaming mind is apparently rebelling against how Jewish this blog has been recently.

I dreamt that I was traveling with a group of very conservatively dressed people -- and by "conservatively," I mean they would have been considered very well-dressed in maybe the 18th century. It was Easter Sunday. We were all independent Christians who fancied ourselves much too enlightened to be churchgoers, but one of the men in the group said that we should definitely go to church on Easter Sunday just to "stick it to the man" -- meaning, I thought, to show solidarity with Christendom in defiance of the anti-Christian powers that be.

The church we were going to was one none of us had ever been to before. It was not in a building of its own but in an upstairs floor of an old stone building. We had to go up a big stone spiral staircase to get to the entrance.

Throughout the dream, I simultaneously thought of it as a Protestant church and therefore somewhat exotic (a handful of Lutheran and True Jesus services being the extent of my experience) and as a Latter-day Saint church about which I, having been raised in that tradition, would know more than the other members of the group. (I never said or thought the word "Mormon," though. Russell M. Nelson would have been proud.)

The church was rather grand-looking inside, and everyone in it was, like my traveling companions, dressed like 18th-century gentry in their Sunday best. I was impressed and said something like, "I should give the Protestants a fair shake, I guess. They're not all electric guitars and 'we just wanna thank you Lord' after all."

During the service, someone started setting up equipment in the back of the chapel to record the sermon. One of the women in the congregation stood up and insisted that they stop immediately. "That is not permitted," she said, speaking very clearly and emphasizing the words I have italicized. "The only record is to be made by Father, who will distribute it to anyone who wants it. You must disconnect your equipment. You are in honor bound."

All the congregants said in unison, "And so say all of us." I understood that any point of order required this ritual assent of the entire congregation. (In real life, I associate that line with the lighthearted song "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow," but in the dream it was completely convincing as something people would say in a rather formal church service.)

When it came time for Communion, most of our group opted not to participate, thinking it inappropriate to take Communion in a church where we were not members. Two of our party did go up to the altar to receive it, though. I said to the woman on my left, "They're going to be surprised when it's bread and water instead of wafers and wine." That is, I understood that this would a Latter-day Saint sacrament. It wasn't served that way, though, with deacons walking through the pews passing around "sacrament trays" with pieces of bread and disposable cups of water. Rather, communicants went to the altar and were given a piece of bread and a sip of water from a very simple glass chalice.

Then it was time to sing a hymn -- "Do What Is Right, Let the Consequence Follow." I again thought I would be helpful with my LDS background and help the others find the right page in the hymnal. It was (in the dream) hymn number 24.

When I tried to turn to it, though, I found that there was something wrong with my hymnal. "This isn't a hymnal," I said to the woman on my right (one of the congregation members, not part of my group), who had given it to me. "This is a recipe book!"

"Are you sure?" she said. "I gave you four hymnals just to be safe. I'm sure they can't all be recipe books!"