As a child I used to watch a lot of TV. It seemed to me that when any character on television went to a church, it usually wasn't a church like the one where I went. Much of the time, the church portrayed on the small screen was a Catholic one. Someone would walk into the church from off the city street in order to pray. I never went inside the church of my youth during the week.
I never saw priests out and about when I was growing up. Ever. But I saw them on TV all the time. So, the church I saw on TV didn’t exactly match the one I saw on Sundays, and I used to wonder why. My minister wore a suit to preach in, but the priests wore a funny white collar. Joppa Community church was pretty plain inside, with paneled walls, and a plain wooden cross on the wall behind the pulpit. The churches on TV were usually dark, ornate and big. (Sometimes, if a plainer church was portrayed on TV, it probably didn’t get my attention as much.) The images of the statues and ornamentation in churches on TV made the Catholic Church seem exotic, and probably contributed to my wanting, secretly, to be Catholic. I had the feeling that I was missing something, even though I didn’t think about it too deeply as a child.
The church of my youth taught me that I didn’t need a visible sacred space to find Jesus. Jesus was in my heart, and I could just believe that he was. TV, on the other hand, is a visual medium so if a television character needs find a pastor, how do you show that on screen? You put the man in a visually recognizable collar, in a visually recognizable building with stained glass windows and big statues and long ornately- carved wooden pews.
And if a director of a television show needs to show a character praying, it is much more visually appealing to have him or her step into a large stone church rather than simply sit in a favorite easy chair and open a bible.
As I grew up, images of quiet, sacred spaces stuck in my mind, and I used to have a nagging fear that I was missing out on something holy.
And all this because I watched too much TV.
