The journey begins

In 1932 my father met my mother by means of one of the great pick-up lines of their era. After a "young people's" social at their Lutheran church, he followed her along the park on the near north side of St. Louis to the streetcar stop. When he caught up to her, he said with the savoir-faire of a Lutheran Cary Grant, "Say, do you go to movies during Lent?"

I suppose you could say, "Thank God, even 67 years ago the church's regulations did not prevent an independent-minded woman with bobbed hair from saying yes to an interesting young man in a green fedora." But that's not my point. His question was more interesting than that. It presupposes a church whose practices set certain conditions on its members' daily existence. Lent was a holy time of prayer, self-discipline and extra churchgoing. When you skipped a meal or altered your social routine, you were trying to remember, if not always successfully, Jesus' sacrificial life and death. The church still recognized the incongruity between focusing on the crucified Christ on Sundays and dissipating your wits in movie theaters and speakeasies during the rest of the week. How quaint.