Church

Kate French-Morris
5 min readJan 23, 2020

It was Sunday morning and we were off to church.

Except the first church wasn’t really a church, but a piece of street art. We’d driven north to south through a city half-stunned by sun to find Fight Club, the first of seven frescoes between London, New York, and Puerto Rico. Two colonial men, three storeys tall, square up for a brawl on a white wall. The artist, Conor Harrington, likes the contrast between rough and refined, the dynamics of opposition. Later I read that his work reminds us of the emotional contributions of men, since history tends to attach violence to their image.

Fight Club felt like church: maybe because it was a physical feature of a public space, as churches are, or maybe because it injected that space with meaning, as churches try to do.

Six minutes south of Fight Club, via a café where the breakfasts looked more illustrated than real, we found a real church. The original St Barnabas burned down in 1992, and the rebuild replaced gothic weight with warm wood and surround-sound. Raised among the musty cloisters of Catholicism, this modern space felt strange to me. I half-expected the vicar to show up in a polyester suit with a sermon full of corporate jargon. But the glass walls and transparent spire gave a sense of shed weight, like the church had been on an episode of Ten Years Younger, stripped back and veneered to the hilt, all problematic baggage exorcised.

*

We were south of the river for a zine fair, in fact, not church. The zine fair was held in a community space along one of those in-between, almost accidental industrial streets. Wide, corrugated buildings with concrete forecourts ran alongside railway lines. I had an urge to look to the edges, to where I could go instead of where I was. I liked the neighbourhood’s objective ugliness because it held the promise of someplace better.

But amid the ex-warehouses lay a different kind of promised land. First we passed the Jubilee Christian Centre, ‘where everybody is somebody’. Then things became more dramatic and elemental: the River of Life Center, the Redeemed Pillar of Fire, My Father’s House. The latter shares its name with a Bruce Springsteen song, and I thought of the grapple between reality and spirituality that shapes Springsteen’s entire body of work.

Mass was over and girls and boys ran up and down the pavement in socks and long white robes. An ice-cream van in need of a lick of paint stood at the top of the street. Through one warehouse door I saw a glittery pink backdrop and the blur of dancing bodies. A white man with a camera placed a wooden chair in front of a dark curtain and asked three robed girls if they wanted their picture taken. They said no, thanks.

Above the Mountains of Fire & Miracles Ministries a sign read: ‘Surely the Lord is in this place.’ It sounded almost desperate, rather than hopeful or assured, as if the people had looked everywhere and this frayed south-London warehouse was the final place He could possibly be.

I wasn’t sure about the Lord, but I knew the zine fair was in this place.

*

At the zine fair everybody wore a kind of uniform too. Their tribe was subtler in appearance but there were unspoken rules: ironic eyebrows, folded arms, clothes from indeterminable sources. Trestle tables of carefully arranged DIY art populated the small chilly rooms. There were zines on music and politics, of course, but others on mental health, pretty-but-poor poetry, and somebody’s holiday to New York. One zine consisted of photos of the artist’s attractive friends. Another reviewed hand-dryers in south-London loos.

A boy behind a table of futurist posters ate pasta from a Tupperware. I left not tempted to buy anything, but inspired to make my own zine, mostly because I reckoned I could make something better than anything I’d seen there.

The zine-makers did not belong to the kingdom of brambles, tyres, and garages of the fair’s surroundings, where some cars went too fast and some cars slowed right down to take a good long look. Across these streets of quiet fire fell the violent shadow of Milwall football ground. As we drove back north we talked about violence and you wondered why only sports fans participated in unfriendly rivalry. Not music fans, or art fans.

“But what about mods v rockers or Blur v Oasis,” I pointed out.

“Less violent, less serious,” you replied, “and if it did get serious, the music was probably a façade for other things. Maybe it was where the football fan in the music fan could come out. Nobody says, I like Warhol but you like Picasso, you suck, I hate you, I’m going to burn down your gallery!”

*

Alone in a charity shop later that day, the assistant greeted me with the unexpected question, “how are you doing in this conflict of life?” I was unable to provide an answer but I admired his disregard for small talk.

Outside, a small street-cleaning vehicle dumped a slurry of faded leaves and litter at the kerb for a bigger street-cleaning vehicle to swallow. Four middle-aged women at the bus-stop looked on in disgust and curiosity.

The sun sank below city terraces as I walked home. I was listening to Marc Cohn’s Walking In Memphis. I remembered singing it with my Catholic school-friends, friends who were Springsteen fans too, with ‘show a little faith, there’s magic in the night’ tattooed on their bedroom walls in pretty cursive.

In Walking In Memphis, Cohn worships at the (jewel-encrusted) altar of Elvis. His uniform is a pair of blue suede shoes, and one Friday at the Hollywood he does a little number with Muriel on piano. She says to him, “tell me, are you a Christian child?” and he replies, “ma’am, I am tonight.”

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