We turned into the Jackson County Courthouse square in Scottsboro, expecting a leisurely circle once around, when we saw the old cars. They were lined up in front of the neoclassical, two-story, square, red, brick building: old trucks, SUVs, vans, and sports cars. We’d come to get ice cream, and at first thought of canceling these plans; but my wife had other thoughts.
“Why don’t we eat ice cream and look at the cars?” she said.
It sounded like a good idea, so I whipped into the first parking place I saw and we disembarked.
As we approached the show – my wife nibbling on a chocolate while I took large, generous bites from my cone of cherry vanilla – she elbowed me, “Maybe this is an Anglican Car Show,” she said. “Remember that?”
“I do,” I told her.
She was talking about something that happened a few years back at our church in Huntsville. We’d not been members of St. Charles for long when an even newer batch of members came aboard – Anglicanism seems to be growing nationwide, just like other liturgical churches, such as Orthodoxy and Catholicism – an event that brings an inevitable and necessary variety to the parish. Among them were some car enthusiasts who, amid their own motivation for growth, came up with the idea of having a church-sponsored old car show – something that my wife and I thought was lacking in thematic unity, if not ecclesiologically incompatible.
“You mean you’ve never heard of an Anglican Car Show?” I said.
“I suppose it was only a matter of time,” was her reply.
But these cynical notions demanded a second look as we saw a Mercury Comet, Ford Galaxie, and a Studebaker Starliner. “Well, they really seemed to have their minds on the heavens back then, huh?” my wife said.
“If not their heart,” I added, knowing I was headed for an update of my previous views.
“What do you mean?” she said.
“It isn’t easy to explain, but just follow me a minute,” I replied.
I told her how, in my opinion, people were always looking to higher forms to explain themselves, and that this was nowhere more apparent than in advertising.
“Any meaning we intend to extract is going to, out of necessity, come from a place of higher being or intellect than ourselves,” I said, trying not to sound too pedantic but failing. This was what the companies naming the cars were going for, I said. They were also reflecting the spirit of the space age in which they lived, as well as the eastern desire for expanded consciousness and enlightenment that was even then apparent in our culture. “However, the fact remains,” I told her. “We move from low to high when we try to make meaning, and how much higher can you go than the stars?”
“Well, actually, a lot higher,” she said.
“Exactly!” I said. “But the marketers of modernism, being modernists and therefore naturalists, just can’t get there, so they go to what is for them the highest form – outer space. It just goes to show you how right the scriptures are when it says of our Lord that everything holds together in, by and through him, so that, even in something so random as a car show, a person can still be led back to the Creator of the Universe, because, as St. Paul said of the Father in his Mars Hill disputation, He is actually much closer than we realize.”
“In other words, even when people think they’ve gotten past religion, they’ve actually not gotten much farther than where they started?”
“That’s right,” I said.
She had a funny look on her face. “Which also means that…” she stopped in front of a Chevy Nova. “That maybe, just maybe, an Anglican Car show isn’t quite so crazy as you first thought?”
An airplane streamed by overhead that might’ve been a meteor headed to an unknown galaxy, and the owner of the Nova came up and asked if we wanted to take it for a spin. I took my wife by the hand and let him hand me the keys. “Sure,” I told him.
Along with his father, Allen Keller runs a lumber business in Stevenson, Alabama. He has a Ph.D. in Creative Writing from Florida State University and an MBA from University of Virginia. He can be reached for comment at [email protected].
The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the policy or position of 1819 News. To comment, please send an email with your name and contact information to [email protected].
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