Garrison Keillor, delivering the News From Lake Wobegon

ST PAUL, MINN. — The legendary public radio show A Prairie Home Companion comes off as an exercise in spontaneity. But sounds can deceive. The scripts are tight, the music is well coordinated, and all the segments are planned to a tee to meet a rigid two-hour format.

Except for the traditional News from Lake Wobegon monologue.

For fifteen or twenty minutes, it’s just host Garrison Keillor, a stool, and a microphone. He speaks without notes from a mostly dark stage about the various adventures of small town farming people in Central Minnesota.

For years I have joked that a majority of whatever can be considered my spirituality centers around A Prairie Home Companion. These, are, after all, my people. Many a relative and great grandparent from Mom’s side rests a few feet below ground on the banks of the Mississippi in Central Minnesota, not far from where Lake Wobegon would be. Listening to Keillor’s weekly news bulletin, I come to new understandings of my family, heritage, and self. The songs are familiar, even if the words are not. The comedy brings back many a blissful Saturday long gone.

This past weekend my buddy Joe and I stood in line for three hours in the bitter St. Paul cold in a successful bid to score rush tickets for the show. We ended up sitting on the stage, on a mocked up front porch, where I shot the above picture.

We were at the heart of the action. We were close enough to the band to exchange pleasantries with the drummer and piano player. We witnessed the frantic pre-show rush to find Keillor’s glasses. We saw the drummer getting handed his paycheck after the show.

At some point during the News from Lake Wobegon, I realized that the excitement of the moment was, in fact, something more. The jokes I had been telling all these years were true.

What is church, really, but a community of like-minded people who come together once a week to sing the old songs, tell the old stories, and generally lift up the simple, ordinary, and decent part of our life and our nature? By that definition, A Prairie Home Companion is high church, and Keillor, one of the better ministers this nation has ever seen.