Of Recovery and Discovery
It’s Sunday in Los Angeles, one chapter in a seven-part weeklong story, a mini narrative with millions of variations. At the New Millennium Sports Beauty and Barber Salon on Crenshaw and 43rd, Jay Byrd, a barber who takes only half a day off every week, says that Sunday is time to be with the family and get ready to “knock down the trees on Monday.” Father Greg Boyle, who lives and works in East Los Angeles, sees the day as a time to “engage at a full level,” in communal and spiritual outlets. At the farmers market on Main Street in Santa Monica, Gary Gordon arrives early on Sundays to grab a table and wait for his “community of co-thinkers” to join him, ready to test his values through conversation and debate. And in North Hollywood at the Wat Thai Buddhist Temple, Pamela Susslin brings food, candles and incense as a “merit” offering to the monks who live and practice there.
What we do on Sunday in Los Angeles, a day that for most of us is our own, reveals what we regard as precious and where we go in search of it. A city that detractors say lacks a soul is surprisingly full of people who have crafted a sense of community, spiritual depth and creative engagement from the expanse of this weekend day.
Writers, historians and even psychoanalysts have explored and dissected the richness of Sunday, sensitive to its historical, emotional and symbolic meaning. F. Scott Fitzgerald looked out at the Pacific Ocean with its “colorless ... sluggish sunset” and observed dismally that Sunday in Los Angeles was not a day but a “gap between two other days.” Historian Alexis McCrossen writes that Americans have debated the purpose of Sunday since the country was founded. Would Sunday be a holy day or a holiday? And Sandor Ferenczi, a psychoanalyst and contemporary of Sigmund Freud, theorized that a “Sunday neurosis” afflicted his patients with depression and other guilt symptoms brought on by a loosening of the psychic repression necessary to make it through the work week.
Divining the meaning of this day, it seems, can be an exercise in self-or even cultural revelation. And pausing to observe Los Angeles on a Sunday, it’s possible to see and sense the city’s essence. On Sunday the soul has time to think and feel for itself, giving earthly form to our transcendent yearnings. It’s the day when the city becomes manageable, recognizable and human.
Father Boyle believes that a critical difference exists in how Eastsiders and Westsiders approach Sundays. In contrast to their more affluent and status-obsessed counterparts on the Westside, people in East L.A. don’t “fall into the trap” of defining themselves by what they do during the week, he says. “There are a lot of doctors and lawyers who don’t know who they are when the weekend comes. In East L.A., Sunday is a joyous thing, the opposite of alienation, because we define ourselves by what we do on Sunday.”
At Dolores Mission Church, the church parish just across the 1st Street Bridge that separates East L.A. from downtown, Sunday is a day of communal purpose. The locals call the Dolores Mission area the “flatlands,” set apart by the hills of Boyle Heights and the freeways, a kind of sacred space and axis around which people orient their lives. Every Sunday, dozens of parishioners gather in the parking lot of the church for a venta de comida--a food sale run by local women that benefits the neighborhood school, homeless shelter or a needy family.
The small church is full for the early morning Mass. Teenage lovers hold hands in the back of the room while the rest of the congregation sings together, the words of the hymns projected slightly off kilter on a blank white wall. Three ceiling fans are silent and still, but poised for the afternoon heat. Here the Sunday finest includes suits and ties but also the casual attire of a Dodger shirt and a Deportivo Cruz Azul soccer jacket.
Margarita Amador, who works for the Los Angeles Housing Authority, prepares food outside while waiting for the service to end. “Sunday is a day to meet new people and gather information for the week ahead,” she says, summarizing her desire to integrate work and life in a community she says she will never leave.
Sundays at Dolores Mission reflect what biblical scholar John Dominic Crossan says was the heart of the original Jesus movement--”shared egalitarianism of spiritual [healing] and material [eating] resources.” At the church each week, that profound story is reenacted in its own intimate way through the sharing of food and the offering of emotional support, the symbols of Christian mystery observed in a small parking lot next to a humble church.
Teresa Mejia, who waits for her daughter to exit Sunday school, says simply, “It’s food that brings us together. We don’t have therapy or counseling. If I feel bad, one of my friends here will comfort me.”
The search for community goes on in other parts of the city too. On a lazy Sunday in Leimert Park, singer-songwriter Sean Miller relaxes on the steps of Doboy’s Dozens Coffee House, a meeting place for African American musicians, filmmakers and aspiring actors. A jazz saxophonist and a guitar player riff together inside, preparing for that evening’s open jam session.
Miller’s Sundays have become more “scattered” since he quit his job in the complaints department of a large insurance company and “stepped out on faith” to pursue his art. Now, rather than feeling the “Sunday dread” of returning to a job he hated, he owns more of his time--finishing his album, seeing his family and celebrating the positive energy of his church. “There is so much negativity in the world it’s hard to deal with that by yourself. So on Sunday, I try to be around happy people because it’s hard to be sad when you’re around happy people.”
Down the street at the New Millennium, where a basketball backboard, rim and net are attached above the door and the barbers wear Laker jerseys, Al Brooks sits for his weekly trim. It’s the beginning of a day that will include watching sports and spending the evening at his mother’s house in Compton, where his large family of siblings gathers each Sunday for gumbo. “Sunday is as close to a holiday as any day, and a time to check in on my brothers and sisters,” he says, beneath the sounds of a tennis match being broadcast on four televisions in the corners of the large room.
Henry Louis Gates Jr., chair of the Department of African American Studies at Harvard University, believes that history’s long hand reaches right into the most personal details of a community’s daily life. Gates, on a business trip to Los Angeles, had spent a morning at church with comedian and actor Chris Tucker, an experience that reminded him of the church of his youth, filled with “glorious” music and a powerfully delivered sermon. “It was an emotional catharsis, it really rocked,” he says.
Gates also recalls childhood Sundays with his family eating “Mama’s” sumptuous meals and watching football. The roots of the tradition are deep, he adds. Under the thumb of their overseers “six days a week, slaves had to experience their culture on Sunday, the only time they could do so above ground.”
Eugene Genovese, historian and author of one of the most influential studies of slavery, concurs, concluding that Sunday was a day that slaves made their own, carving out an autonomous space away from the overseer by creating a community of song, dance and prayer as part of a “single offering the beauty of which pays homage to God.”
“Even though people don’t think about it too much,” says Gates, “by getting with their families, we’re tending a 200-year-old-ritual.”
Sanong Choochuen, a 40-year-old Buddhist monk from Thailand, is up by 5 a.m. on Sunday to chant and meditate. But like the other 20 monks who rise with him at the Wat Thai Temple in North Hollywood, he sees Sunday as a time with no special significance. It’s one more day in what he calls the “wheel of life,” another opportunity, he says, to move toward enlightenment with each breath. So here, Sunday, like every day, is a day of potential transformation, of transcending this mundane world through awareness and meditation. “If you are bored on Sunday, it is your mind that is boring, not the world,” Choochuen says, smiling.
There is a feeling of serenity inside the temple, a largely empty room with a 40-foot-high vaulted ceiling and a plush red carpet for kneeling and meditation. At one end of the room are several gold and green statues of Buddha, surrounded by food, flowers and others gifts brought by morning worshipers. Choochuen laughs and points to the green Buddha. “If you want a new job or a new wife, put a carton of eggs in front of that one.” It’s his sly way of acknowledging that practitioners have altered a few of the Buddha’s teachings over the centuries.
The notion that every moment is a time for awareness and reflection appeals to Pamela Susslin, an actress who comes on Sundays for the rituals that help her cope with the stresses of urban life. A “learning Buddhist” who has recently started paying closer attention to its spiritual disciplines, she offers food, candles and incense to the monks in honor of her recently deceased mother, a devout Buddhist.
She prefers a religion that is not the equivalent of a spiritual filling station where, she observes, “people atone on Sunday and then go out and do things that hurt others during the week. Coming here on Sunday connects me with the fact that we are flawed as human beings but there are lessons to learn in life and a path by which to learn them.” She believes her mother has reached enlightenment, the final goal of Buddhist practice, and will not have to be reborn again into this world to work through the karmic cycle.
Outside the temple, Studio City resident and comedy writer Phil Stellar has brought his son Chet, whom he adopted from Thailand, to experience his culture and to partake of the Thai food fair that is held here each weekend. Stellar, who is Jewish, says that he is now more of a “Jewist” or “Buddish,” an idiosyncratic commingling of the two religions. He wants his son to appreciate both traditions. “What can I say? Buddhism is a gentle and loving religion with great food,” he says, ordering Thai chicken from one of the food stalls that line the entrance to the temple.
Back at the Sunday farmers market in Santa Monica, Gary Gordon is joined by other members of what he jocularly refers to as the “Algonquin West” group. Some 30 or 40 regulars will make their way to the table over the next few hours. “Sometimes we talk politics, sometimes it’s trivia,” observes John Gabree, an Ocean Park writer and former bookstore owner. Debates have covered “educational vouchers and the virtues of Krispy Kreme doughnuts,” he adds. Joshua Avedon, an Internet consultant who grew up in Venice, regards the Main Street market as a “commons” for the Westside, part organic general store and part community water cooler. “We’re not corporate types and a lot of us work at home,” Gordon adds. “Sunday is our happy hour without the booze.”
The group has been meeting since the marketplace started more than 10 years ago, an indication that if we build space for community, people will come.
We create our city on Sundays. It is not the city of spectacle and sensation, and it’s far more than the violent crescendo of Sunday NFL football. It’s a place where, through millions of intimate gestures, communal gatherings and quiet musings, a restorative spirit that is banished during the tumult of the workweek is brought back home.
The potential for community is here--in those places where we can create our little platoons of friendship and connection--but they have to be looked for and created. Across the city, Sunday is a reflection of what we want our city to be: a beginning, a faint glimpse of life’s full potential--and, looking into a new week, a belief in that which has not yet begun.
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Kelly Candaele is a frequent contributor to The Times. He is a trustee of the Los Angeles Community College District.