Abby and I went on a day date today for the first time in a while. Roby’s grandparents were kind enough to spend the afternoon with the girl so we had some time to ourselves. Initially we wanted to go to an antique store to shop around for gifts for one another (which we have not yet gotten) but the one we scouted earlier this week was closed and will remain so until after we leave. 

So, instead we went to a local shopping mall to look at thousands of people and be thankful for our lives. Malls are profane and horrible nightmare places, and they are also the hideously smiling face of our society. I kid myself that what I do is somehow more interesting than standing in front of an American Eagle shop to lure in teenagers who are self conscious about how they look, but that’s not as far from what I do as I’d like. Marketing is an effort to give tools to these stores. We design systems to cultivate envy, through contrast or through hope, or through fear. Even if we don’t do it explicitly, our work is to make others yearn. And to make them yearn for things that can only hurt them, as to yearn for anything but the eternal is a cancer.

The first thing we saw in the mall was two nuns coming out of an unassuming hallway. In that hallway was a printout of a sign advertising a catholic chapel down the stairs, very dreary sad looking stairs...in a random shopping mall. Of course we went down. The gift shop was charming, and I bought a few gifts, and the chapel itself was lovely. It had the universal appeal of the aptly named catholic faith, and it gave me much food for thought. 

There were perhaps a dozen people in silent prayer and I found it kind of strange and disquieting, all of these people praying in a mall, albeit a quiet and tender corner of a mall. It struck me as a strange or bad place for a church. 

Then I spent an hour walking around the mall. 

Abby and I walked the whole thing. It kept going. Each time I thought that was it, a new vista of shopping opened before us replete with belly-shirted teenage girls, rambunctuous broccoli topped boys who could only swear, and the most exhausted parents to exist on Earth. Abby got a drink from a coffee chain and we walked, considering people. We spoke with a very earnest woman selling children’s clothes and we lamented just how lost we all are, me chief amongst us. Between the overwhelming smells and the crowds I felt intoxicated by the time we made it back to the beginning. 

Then we went back to the chapel and I decided that was a very good place for a church, maybe the best, at least in America. I didn’t get the sense that most of the people in this church had either gone shopping or were going to after their time in prayer, it was just a convenient place for a church with cheap utilities and ample parking, but still, the context could be felt. The air was cleaner, and the calm was of great contrast than any two next-door places I’ve ever been. 

There couldn’t have been an Orthodox church under that mall I don’t think. I believe that’s a real credit to the church of Rome.