Faith in the shape of a Donut. (Doughnut)

Sunday mornings always make me misty. I am a sentimentalist in search of a faith. Faith in something. When I was younger my family would pile into our Ford station wagon (the one with the fold down seat so you could sit in the back and look at the cars coming at you and pretend to pick your nose or whatever. The same metal death trap that is at the end of A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving) and then we would trundle off to St. Andrews Church for Sunday Services. If I am not mistaken St. Andrew was a fisherman. Or a fisher of men. Me? I am just a fisherman, thats were our relationship stopped.

Anyway, if we went without a struggle and sat quietly and still through the service we would be rewarded for our behavior by stopping at a bakery called Hazel's. This place sat at the corner of Eaton Court and Washington Street in Wellesley Mass. Right across from the clock tower and sold doughnuts that rival any known to man on this earth. The only thing that came close in the 35 odd years since then is a warm Krispy Kreme. But those you can get sick of. Hazel's Doughnuts you never got sick of. Warm, glazed, a mess to eat and impossible to understand. They were more impenetrable to me then than the Christian faith was and is. I couldn't conceive how anything so good could be all things to all 8 year olds at all times. First off, they were sanctioned by the parents, second there were no monogamy rules concerning flavors, third you got all sticky and sweet, and fourth it was a Pavlovian association that was unconsciously building in my mind that associates deep religious faith with doughnuts. Much as I associated Brighams Chocolate Chip ice cream with visits from my Aunt Eileen.

So I don't know, perhaps the lesson is that my faith is tied up in doughnuts. The whole Christ thing flew like a barn swallow through my head because Sunday wasn't about church...It was about doughnuts.

Theologically this has caused me some trouble over the years. I was on a film shoot back in 1998 and we were shooting in the middle of nowhere Oklahoma. We had three 35 mm film cameras set up to shoot a major confrontation scene in a film called Restoration that was produced by the Mormon Church as a really expensive history lesson. Some day I will write on that experience. Anyway... Mormons have more faith, and I mean pure unadulterated FAITH, than any group I have ever seen. And when some dark clouds started coming in like an army (sorry Emily) threatening to shut down this VERY EXPENSIVE shot, the crew and many of the actors( I think there were only about 6 of us on that shoot that were not Mormon) gathered together with some of the Church Elders to pray for the weather to break so we could get the shot off. It was kind of amazing because we were on a ranch that was literally bigger than Manhattan with scorpions and snakes and ticks and all sorts of other junk and this group of Mormons held hands, bowed their heads and prayed like the dickens for the sun to come back out and let us get the shot off. But what will always stick in my mind is that they were holding hands in a tight circle and if God was looking down on them they would have looked very much like a doughnut.