When we left Casa Grande for the summer we headed for Las Vegas to hook up with son Roy and watch him play in a racquetball tournament. We could have chosen a more direct route to LV but decided in a fit of curiosity to detour a little by Lake Havasu and check out London Bridge, which we assumed, wrongly, was set into the lake as a tourist attraction. As you probably know the bridge is now, in fact, in daily use as a gateway to a peninsula (or perhaps an island) in Lake Havasu  and to our chagrin we found that the reason we couldn’t find the bridge initially is that we had already driven over it. Our assumption of reality…that the bridge would be something other than practical….turned out to be false.

Of course no essay that describes Las Vegas is complete without having some reflection on reality, as basically Las Vegas turns reality upside-down. Nothing is as it seems here. This includes, interestingly, The Shrine of the Most Holy Redeemer, which is, by my reckoning at least, is perhaps both the most upscale and least real Catholic Church I’ve ever seen. Located just off the strip, within an easy chip-toss, appropriately, of the Mirage, with a pastor who delivered a sermon in which he sang parts of Handel’s Messiah and who discussed his interview on Fox News the night before (where undoubtedly he gave his opinion on the economy and on China’s role in environmental affairs), nothing in this church looked like a Catholic Church is supposed to look.

What does this mean, you ask? Well, it’s easier to answer by asking a few questions of my own. What other Catholic Church has two deacons whose job it is to follow along behind the priest when he is shaking holy water over the congregation with mops to immediately dry the marble floors?  What other Catholic Church has vocational candles that are actually electrified and turn on and off with individual switches instead of actually burning? What Christian church of any denomination has a “Last Supper” scene cast in bronze at a scale of about six times life? There are many other examples but you get the drift.

But I am probably making something out of nothing. At the same time I seem to be criticizing, I have to say, to be fair, that the angel-voiced priest spent as much time talking about the upcoming food drive and the church’s mission in assisting folks who are HIV-Positive as he did singing. And the people in this decidedly upper-class building were as friendly as any I’ve seen anywhere, including Sister Pat, the semi-retired nun sitting in the row in front of us who shared that she had lived many years in San Francisco and for many years before that in Redwood City, which is next to San Carlos, CA., which is where, South of San Francisco, that Irene and I lived for many years.

So what conclusions can I draw from this, after all? Only the same one that I’ve come to realize plays so big in so many parts of my life. I don’t know much and what I do know is subject to change ‘cuz I’m probably wrong about that, too.