I ponder community while surveying a row of chapels in Port Angeles, a little town by the sea. Apostolic, Baptist, Presbyterian. Separate, with their own personalities. Very American, I deem the whole thing. Small, separate, unique, independent. Fractured.

I wonder what happens inside each one. Who congregates, what the songs are like. How different are they?

Both of my parents were raised Christian but left their faiths, so I was raised secularly. No Sunday Service for our family. I wasn’t curious enough to seek out church, but I wondered.

Some Sunday in January I rolled out of bed late and went for a morning walk. I grabbed a coffee and accidentally walked home in the wrong direction. I decided to walk 4 miles instead of 2 - it was a beautiful, crisp day.

Eventually, I come upon the little grove of churches. Folks are dressed in their finery inside the Apostolic church, already busy with their worship. I round the corner to see a dignified little chapel with lovely stained windows - the Presbyterian church. Their grainy digital sign advertises two Sunday Services: one at 8 and one at 11am.

It is 11:02.

I hesitate. Am I too late? Am I underdressed? Will I bother them? Is it blasphemous to bring my cold brew?

I slip in the doors just as the service begins, sitting in a back pew at a safe distance from the older folks that make up the congregation. I don’t fit in. My hair is not grey. I relax, though, as I notice there isn’t a dress code. Evidently, Presbyterians are casual. I relax further as I realize that, mostly, no one notices me. This is comfortable. It is safer to go unnoticed.

I listen, sing, pray, and observe.

I believe in God. This is uncommon in my circles: coastal city folk, mostly. More common are: the universe, Gaia, or source. These work too. I shapeshift. And, I like the name God.

It can be much more complicated, but in this moment, sitting in the back pew singing along to some out-of-tune hymns and acoustic guitar, it is very simple. I love God. I trust him. I am his wayward child.

For me this simplicity is also defiance. Using the name God feels edgy - there are so many reasons not to. My parents, and so many like them, left their birth religions because of horrible pain stemming from many kinds of abuse. Tyrants have invoked God’s name to take for themselves, to destroy cultures and poison forests and torture so many beings. But I can still choose to reappropriate the name God. I choose to connect to that past. It made me.

I relax into the simplicity of the Presbyterian service. These old folks have been doing this their whole lives. They know their language for the world, and I can connect with it. I can connect with them. No need for anything more complicated.

So I pray. I ask for forgiveness of my sins. In Presbyterian worship service, you just bow your head and confess your sins in your heart, straight to God.

God, forgive me for burdening those who I love with the ugliest parts of me, while showing a nice face to strangers. Forgive me for the times I didn’t balance kindness and self-protection so well. God, please work through me in the world. Please move me. I trust you.

It was awe-some, and also totally normal.

--

When we were asked to bless each other I hesitated to take the hand of the old woman next to me. What if I get her sick? Is it okay? It feels unnatural for me to be greeted with a blessing. Or really, truly greeted at all, eager kind eyes looking into my heart.

I relax. I hold many soft hands and share blessings.

After the service, the woman whose hand I hesitated to hold comes up to me, and we chat. She asks me if I have any questions about their church. I ask her, "what does it mean to you to be Presbyterian?"

She replies, well, my mother was. My friends who go to other churches seem to have pretty much the same idea. So it doesn't really matter to me.

And then to my delight, she tells me about her connection to the place. I went to high school with that woman. I was married in this church. I have a picture of us under that archway. My granddaughter was married here too. I told her to get a picture under that same archway. She shows me the picture. I am in love with her openness.

Eventually, she asks me if I'd like to meet the pastor. She is determined to get me the right answer about what it means to be Presbyterian, and I appreciate her determination. I accept.

On the way over, I ask - what's your name? Nancy, she says.

I almost laugh aloud. Nancy is the name of my estranged grandmother, who I believe is a Methodist and very involved with her church. There are reasons she is apart from us, but I don’t know them well and I don't know her. I just sometimes wonder - who is she? What is her relationship with God like?

Port Angeles Presbyterian Nancy says to me, we might be related. We have the same brown eyes. Mine have faded, now, but they used to be brown like yours. My eyes, which I get from my mother, (not-Nancy side), are hazel with a dark stripe around the edges. Her eyes, although faded almost to grey, have a dark ring too.

I reply, "yes."

I hesitate, then tell her, "Nancy is my grandmother's name."

Nancy replies, distractedly, "oh, was it?"

--

We reach the pastor, Matt. I am introduced. I thank him for the service, and share which bits of his wisdom are working in me. I ask about what it means to him to be Presbyterian.

He shares, it’s about finding the truth together as a group, and not being given teachings from above. Sometimes it can be hard to come together as a group though, especially if you want someone to tell you what to do.

I smile. This is so true. A lot of people want someone to tell them what to do, and might not even know they want this. I’m investigating community in America, and self-organizing without authoritarian hierarchy. I’ve discovered in my research so far that a lot of the people who embark on this mission, to govern collectively, fail and give up.

Matt shares with me that many of the governance processes in this country were inspired by Presbyterian governance practices created by the Scots who emigrated here. This seems worth investigating further, but at this moment I am still mostly processing my encounter with my new decentralized grandmother.

He asks about where I was before this, and I share about my time living in and work to cultivate intentional communities. Someone close to him, maybe his brother, is a part of a group that's started an intentional community in California. "What they're doing out there isn't so different from what we're doing here."

“Yeah,” I say. “It's community - the people who stick around.”

--

As “community” becomes a hot industry now, I watch many people on Twitter try to define in complicated words what it is. There’s wisdom there, sure. But in my research, the only thing that feels actually true to me is: a community is the people who stick around in a certain space, the people who don’t leave or die.

You can analyze to no end the reasons they stick around. Or where the edges of the place begin and end. But it doesn’t need to be complicated. Community is the people who stick around. You deal from there.

The Presbyterians don’t seem to have many young people sticking around. This means that eventually, their Sunday Service will die. I’m not surprised. Their music wasn’t very good, honestly. It lacked aliveness. I found myself wishing for a gospel choir, or at least a faster tempo.

But I find myself wishing for something like what they have, a place to come back to, greet each other, worship. Somewhere to be in-place and become a family, where anyone is welcome. Not a job or a gym. For anyone, for the purpose of being together as something bigger, in relationship to the Big Thing, which I call God sometimes. I found something like this at The Center SF, but it’s a pretty unique spot.

My generation interfaces with spirituality very differently and has every reason to reject Christian language. But in the movement to abandon old and worn-out forms of culture, it seems we haven’t quite set foot in the new forms yet. We are still in limbo, figuring out the new technology that allows us to gather from afar.

I am left wanting. For eye contact, for an embodied greeting. For simply being with each other. Are you?

My experience using Lensa was of mild awe. After selecting some images and uploading them to the machine, it thought for about an hour. Then there I was as: a fairy princess, cosmic goddess, Celtic warrioress, ageless cloaked traveler, and anime protagonist. The AI was spot on. It cloaked me in forest green and adorned me with flowers and leaves. The long, flowing hair I’ve tried to grow out was right there in generated brushstrokes, more vibrant than in real life. My face was thinner, exaggeratedly magazine-worthy. I ultimately chose to use one of the images as my profile picture. It’s like me but better. A perfect mask for the internet.

This is the perfect use case for AI, because I wasn’t going to seek out an artist to create these images of me. I barely even shelled out $8 for the AI to create them. Sure, in order to produce the art that the machine was trained on, hundreds of artists put in hundreds of man-hours with brush, pen, and stylus. But none of those artists were going to produce even one image of an idealized me. Although now that I see how much I like my AI-painted portrait, I’m thinking about asking for one created by a conscious, fleshy human.

Some of the images were lifeless— just drawings of a character who looked vaguely like me. But some struck a chord, and not just by playing on my surface-level vanity. OK, there was vanity. That’s the base appeal of the app. Seeing myself as a fairy princess and a cosmic goddess is fun.

But some of the images generated cast me as some Celtic warrioress, and these hit me in the bones. Did my many-great grandmother look like that, before her culture’s destruction? I felt closer to this ideal, seeing the image. The machine probably correlated something in my face with a resonant feature of existing art of someone with similar ancestry. Merging us together did something in me. That’s cool; that couldn’t happen before.

—

These tweets by Jordan Chase-Young crossed my feed one day after I’d been deep in a Midjourney creation flow.

https://twitter.com/jachaseyoung/status/1576234155377319936?s=20&t=m7k3AsMDP_wh96lmo6cUVQ

Taking in these simple illustrations caused an epiphany. Jordan was right — this illustrator captured something evocative in a different way than all of the images I’d just produced using AI. The simple illustrations drove home something that is in retrospect very obvious.

I’d spent a few hours iterating on the prompt “Aphrodite vomiting planets and universes by Klimt,” having a blast creating minor variations and marveling at the contortions produced. The inquiry produced dark-haired women in various degrees of wholeness, mostly not vomiting at all, looking model-like while surrounded by stylized swirling golden balls for the most part. Some of them had a torturous depth. I wondered who were the women underneath the layers of interpretation; first by artist and then by machine, called forth thus altered by my words.

It’s shiny and spectacular that a machine can do this. But none of the images were quite right. I spent hours trying to make the perfect image by varying it with the machine, but it didn’t work. To make what I wanted, I’d have had to jump into Photoshop and alter the images.

The quality of the images reminds me of making a smoothie. Component pieces are processed into an entirely different form. The result is delicious, smooth, a bit unnatural, and impressively convenient.

A smoothie is nothing like a blueberry.

Sitting in presence with a blueberry is miles more satisfying than sitting in presence with a smoothie. They are both delicious and nutritious. But a blueberry is much more alive. Blueberries are pure organic creation, every last one. A smoothie—well, it’s got some qualities of aliveness, depending on the smoothie, and it hits some of the same spots. But it’s not the same domain of experience. I like to have seeds in my smoothie, so I need to put whole raspberries in it. But, personally, I prefer just eating raspberries.

Let’s torture this simile a bit more. When an artist spends time with a prompt or an alteration of the AI image, using it as a tool and not a crutch, it’s a brand-new cyborg berry. A cyberpunk bush made of wires and veins intertwined. (Hey, that sounds like a good visual prompt).

I, for one, celebrate the birth of grotesque new fruiting forms.

Of course, this analogy is flawed. For one, a smoothie is more expensive than a basket of blueberries. The potential to be priced out of their livelihood by a lifeless machine is one of the major pain points for artists. I feel this pain too. In the cold cruel terms of economics, when a new technology enables a shift in the supply side of a market, demand will respond, and some suppliers will be screwed.

This is the price of innovation. This is the pain of a world where we get to experience magnificent shining cyborgs, the likes of which have never been seen before. And… it still hurts.

I have faith that there will still be a market for blueberries. Even if smoothies are cheaper. I certainly don’t want to live in a blended-food world. Do you?