I went to church this morning, wearing my Sunday best: pink cotton, knit floral pajamas and green sheepskin-lined slippers. Knowing my propensity to get bored, I brought my newly-purchased finger cymbals and walked into the church. I skipped out on yoga, so I figured learning zills would make up for missing out on doing Triangle pose all morning.

I walked into the church surrounded by rainbow colored stain glass windows. I settled into a pew and started clanging my zills, Left-Right-Left, Left-Right-Left. My poor rhythm and unkempt look didn’t turn heads in the ALM CyberChurch.

See, this isn’t a real church; it’s a Second Life church. I’m probably not the best one to explain this, but as best I can understand, Second Life is a virtual reality world, where people do everything from buy property to build houses and set up stores. I was really skeptical, but for the sake of education, I signed up. The News21 reporting initiative is looking for us, “young journalists” to find new innovative ways to report and present to the news, so I put my misgivings of Second Life aside and created my avatar, Ludmila Lubitsch. She’s still wearing a Cybergoth getup that was free when I signed up. I’m not crazy about the outfit, so, if someone wants to give me a SL makeover, I’m all yours.

In real life, I grew up in Utah as a non-Mormon and went to a Catholic high school as a non-Catholic. I’ve always been surrounded by religion, but never have completely embraced it as a culture or a practice. So, it almost makes sense that I have gotten sucked into trolling for religion stories in a virtual world.

I did my first interviews on SL life with avatar, classmate and fellow journalist Inmy Tristan. We sat on zafus in the Peace Gardens next to the Hare Krisna Temple with devotee, Premadas Shepherd, an avatar with a shaved head and an orange robe draped over his body. He was a fascinating subject who had found the SL temple and a few weeks later started going to the Hare Krishna Temple in RL. The idea of finding spiritually through a virtual reality was absolutely fascinating.

The church service this morning was equally intriguing. People stood in the pews swaying with their virtual arms extended to the sky as ALM Pastor Benjamin Psaltery walked to the pulpit. About 20 avatars filled the red pews and typed messages to each other over an audio stream of a church service probably recorded at a RL (real life) church earlier in the day. It started with started with a list of prayers and then moved on to singing a song with a chorus of, “Wash all my sins away.”

The sermon’s title today was the Blood, Easter being just two days a way and all. The sermon droned on and I got a little bored and started a load of laundry in RL, made my bed and drank some coffee. My whole intent of attending the service was to meet people afterwards. By the time the service had wrapped up, a good hour later, my computer crashed. When I got back on everyone was gone except for a few stragglers, who weren’t really involved with the service.

I’m off to an SL Buddhist meditation group now. If you attend any kind of religious service on Second Life, look me up or email me at ludmilalubitsch@gmail.com. If I’m not online, see if Inmy Tristan is.

P.S. Moving around SL and typing chats with zills wrapped around your fingers is not recommended or endorsed by the author. My rhythm still sucks.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 25th, 2007 at 4:18 pm and is filed under TheLivedExperience. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.