On friendship and grilled cheese sandwiches

Over the weekend a very dear friend (and sometimes reader of this blog) commented that if we didn't know each other before, we probably wouldn't be friends. It's not the first time I've heard that sentiment and it's lead me to think, my god, I should be friendless.

I hear it from my more right-leaning Christian friends and relatives. I hear it from my non-Christian friends who lean both to the right and to the left. I dunno. I think if we all were in search of like-minded folks to spend our time with, we'd all be awfully lonely. (I get this vision in my head of the Jetsons and those dome-thingies that they put around themselves as they exit the family transporter, but when we reach our destination, we forget to remove the shield.) Not only would I be friendless. I'd be without a spouse and family.

Whether it's religion or politics, I'm either too liberal or too conservative. I back the wrong causes or am too passive in regards to the causes I "should" be backing. Funny thing about us humans. We inexplicably end up (if we're lucky) surrounded by tons of friends and family that we really would have nothing to do with if we operated on the mindset of needing to always be with people just like us. Fortunately, we were also born with hearts that override a lot of the tendencies our minds tell us to partake in.

Now that's not to say that I look at life as a series of opportunities to link arms with one another and sing Kumbaya -- yet another topic of conversation this weekend. I'm actually way too introverted to get charged up with that much humanity. But, it is to say that I can enjoy a meal with my extended family or go to a party with old and dear friends and know full well that some in the room are way too far to the right, others too far to the left (yes, there is such a thing, but it's really hard to get there in my book). But, for whatever reason, we've been thrust into the same sphere and through forces beyond our control, we feel some degree of love or affection for one another.

While some spend time looking for "signs" in things like a grilled cheese sandwich that appears to have an image of the Virgin Mary on it, I'm happy to celebrate the miracle that two or three can gather and not beat the snot out of each other over their differences. Rather than looking at the sandwich and arguing about what we see in it, let's make it a part of a shared meal (dare I say fellowship?), maybe with a nice cup of tomato soup.

Looking forward to Lent...already

Yeah, yeah...it's Christmas Eve morning, so I should be looking forward to the newborn savior and all that. Poor kid is buried in so much tinsel and wrapped in swaddling plastic packaging that there's no way he's gonna bust loose.

Now, I'm not saying that we ought to put Christ back in Christmas. Like the many rituals, relitions and traditions and from which Christmas evolved, it's evolving again. There's nothing wrong with celebrating friends and family. I could do without the sappy music and the overt capitalism, but if people want to take the day to show they love one another, fine. I can get behind love.

So, yeah. I'm looking forward to a wonderful meal, laughing with family and even the ritual of going to church with my mom. But I'm not offended if instead you want to pile up the kiddos and gawk at the neighbors' lights. You're doing something as a family. Good enough.

But leave your freakin' hands off of Lent. Not like I think society has found a way to market the time of giving up something bad, taking on something that's good for you that you wouldn't otherwise do, and music in a decidedly minor key. That doesn't even cover the Lutherans burying the Alleluia until Easter morning.

Yeah. That's what I'm talking about. If we insist on ritualizing religion then let's go for it. No beer for 40 days (Sundays off for good behavior); intentional working out / prayer / meditation / whatever; songs in church written in a range I have a fighting chance of hitting. Yup. Lent. That's my kinda holiday. It speaks to the morose Scandinavian within me. As an added bonus, you manage to get through Lent, spring is within spitting distance. You get through Christmas and what do you have? (Well, after Epiphany for those who are counting.) January! Cold, cloudy, dark, miserable January.

Yup. You can keep your flashing lights, mistletoe, and ho ho ho. I'm looking for my hair shirt and workout sneakers. But, can I keep my fiber optic, twinkle-light tree?

Good God! Mosquitoes are people too?

One wouldn't think that on a sub-zero day when my car conked out on me in the middle of a turn onto my county road that one of my next thoughts would go to mosquitoes, but that's how things go in the great white north. Here's the string of thoughts. Try to keep up.



So while chatting with a friend who lives in Florida about the bitter cold weather and the 2 1/2 hour commute to the office this morning and the fact that one's spit could freeze before hitting the ground (back off, I was using a hands free), I'm making a turn and "FUDGE" [but, I didn't say "fudge" I said it -- F-dash-dash-dash] my car died. The lights dimmed, the steering froze up (no irony there) and the car coasted through the intersection before coming to a complete stop on the shoulder. After telling my friend I was fine but I needed to hang up and make a call, I fiddled with the car a few times and eventually, the car started again. I called my wonderful spouse and had him talk with me the final miles home on the back roads.



So getting back to the mosquitoes, remember the mosquitoes, this is a blog about mosquitoes...I thought back to my work colleague who claimed the January class was canceled because of my personal needs (who cares about the others in the class). I was thinking about how she'd say that God protected me and made sure my car ran until I was safely home (it actually tried to die again right in front of our driveway). Hmmm...it's a pretty thought, but that God would go out of God's way for me today when God didn't see fit to keep a grain truck away from an intersection when my nephew's good friend blew through a stop sign and was killed doesn't add up. That goes in a sense to the question of evil. You know, why do bad things happen to good people and all that. Am I somehow better than my nephew's friend? Am I more evil than he, and thus the bad person that good things happen to? (He dies in his car while I survive.)



You see, it's all about mosquitoes. Yeah, mosquitoes. In one of my small groups last semester, one of my classmates posted that he believed all creation had a purpose, except for mosquitoes. While that can typically be seen as a throw-away line, when one has a druid/nature-worshipping classmate, even a goofy line about mosquitoes can have an in depth theological conversation in which we go through the gamut of topics, from the question of evil (Can mosquitoes be truly evil? Can anything besides humanity be evil? Can humanity be free from evil?) to what happens to the bad people (Do they get their "just rewards" in this life or in the next? What is "just"? Can punishment be just?). The druid in the class is a believer in reincarnation and suggested that perhaps mosquitoes are humans who royally screwed up in a past life and are now back to learn some divine lesson -- we "current" humans are charged with a profound responsibility -- mete out justice by whacking the mosquito or show a brand of mercy that the human may not have known him- or herself in a past life.



That's all too hard for my brain to take in. Sometimes a kid blows off a stop sign, an alternator gives out on a bitterly cold day, and a mosquito chooses the wrong mammal to grab an early evening snack.

Looking for the Way

I got lost on my way to school last Tuesday. The trip didn't have the best of beginnings -- there was yet another financial crisis that I was trying to communicate with the right balance of seriousness without a tone of impending doom. Not an easy task, especially so, since I was feeling a little under the weather. So, I walked out the door late and it was already dark. Not a good thing.

So, I was working my way to school and being lost in thought and suddenly realized it wasn't just in the figurative sense that I was lost. I was truly lost. I had missed my turn and was in uncharted territory. Now, round home, that's no big deal. If you know you need to go north and east, you just grab the next road to the north and east and you're good to go. Not so in urban areas fraught with one-way roads, cul de sacs and roads that wind all over the place and dump you off in areas you had no idea existed.

Eventually, I found my way back to a road that I was familiar with only to lose my way again...and again. It slowly dawned on me that I was truly not well, in the dark, in an area I'd never been before and dangerously late for class. I had lost my way on so many levels. Yet, even when the thought occurred to me, the irony was not lost on me. Here I was on my way to seminary for a class on the Older Testament where I felt lost, at a school that seemed to be diverting me from the way I thought I was supposed to go, and I felt utterly in the dark.

So here's the difference. While I was actually feeling a sense of dread and panic about my experience behind the wheel, realizing that I was in such a fevered state that asking for directions and being able to track them was utterly useless, I didn't really feel all that worked up about the complete inability to articulate what in God's name I thought I was doing on a vocational level. Am I in peril of not actually passing my OT class. Well, yeah. Does that leave me in a panic? Financially, it could be a real drag, but metaphysically, yeah well...whatever. I'm no more clueless than a lot of the people who thump their Bibles without having any better idea of what's contained within its covers. I guess on that level, The Way might have to come looking for me -- I've decided to pull over and blow bubbles in the park. At least for now. I can get back on that road when the traffic and other distractions has subsided somewhat. The destination's still there, but I temporarily forgot that part of the trip is the sightseeing.

So what happened literally? The practical part of me prevailed. I decided that if I kept going north, I was eventually going to hit the interstate and could take it one exit up and get to class from that direction. I was one minute late and drenched in sweat (more from the fever than anything else). On the plus side, my instructor was five minutes late, so you could say I was actually early. I drank plenty of fluids and managed to find my way home after class feeling a little shaky but never veered from the right road.

I'm sure that in my spiritual journey there could be some easier paths that would get me to my destination with less fuss, not unlike heading north to the interstate, but I don't really care to go that route. I could have done that years ago -- in broad day light.

Liturgical Laryngitis

I've been suffering from an extended case of Liturgical Laryngitis. Okay, so the theologically trained folks would question if the word liturgical is correct and the health care folks in my realm would also offer a corrective on the word laryngitis. But, I like the alliteration, and it kind of gets to the point without absolute precision. The deal is that I feel as if I've lost my voice when it comes to speaking with God. This is not the first time, but it's been somewhat prolonged. A number of years now.

Fortunately, this go-around I'm affiliated with a less conservative denomination, so this is less of a big deal. I think the long episodes of silence are a lot more common than some would think, but it's a dirty little secret we hold onto. Sometimes we're just not that into God...but then I don't think God's always that into us, either. Seriously, if we were intended to be joined at the hip with the almighty, we wouldn't have been afforded free will ... or legs.

While Bob is somewhat cynical about the deal, I still think that releasing Mother Teresa's journals and letters about her own feelings of being apart from God for the bulk of her adult life did a service to mainline Christianity. Not saying it makes much of a difference to me one way or the other, but it may be helpful to some who are freaked out that they just aren't feeling it for a day, a week, a year, a lifetime.

Still, if I had my "druthers" I'd rather feel more of a connection than I typically do. But I don't. So what do I do? Well, a number of years ago, I told a clergy person that my approach was to fake it till I make it. I was heartened to hear that's a theologically sound approach -- one can go through the motions as an act of discipline and worship. And, as I'm fond of saying in other contexts, my mama did teach me right. One says thank you. No matter what. So, while I sometimes feel like I'm saying thank you to the wind, or more often to an empty room, I stil feel compelled to say "thanks."

I've made a conscious effort of late to take this excercise one step further: I've begun to participate in intercessory prayer again, both praying for people others lift up ... and also lifting up people who I care about in public groups to have them prayed for by the group. This is extraordinarily difficult for me for many years. I stopped believing that it's God's job to be at the beck and call of an individual. But, I do see some value in the act of group (or corporate) prayer. I think that the spirit/energy within each of us directed toward an inividual or a group of people can't hurt. When I look at it this way, then it's more like God is the magnifying glass that helps focus the energy to do more good, sort of like a beam of sunlight on a pile of leaves in a kid's back yard.

So, while I still am not sure whose ears I expect will pick up my words, I have begun to exercise my voice and to work toward a recovery from this laryngitis. Like the common cold. There's no real cure. It takes, time and rest ... and the belief that eventually this hoarseness will pass and one's voice will once again be strong and true.

Reading Pedagogy of the Oppressed like it's the very first time

I have a friend who has called me "half-full" in the past because there can be really messed up situations and I'll crank out a Bill-Murray-as-Karl-in-Caddyshack-sounding "but I've got that going for me" kind of line. That's sort of how this next statement is going to sound: I lost entirely too many brain cells in my youth and have forgotten huge chunks of what I learned in my undergrad years -- that's great news because now I'm reading "Pedagogy of the Oppressed" by Paulo Freire as if I've never seen it before. How delightful!

Given the political turn of events in the past 24 hours, the timing of my reading the first chapter is pretty freaky. For months, I've seen more than my fair share of emails and web postings and overheard enough conversations to pick up that a not insignificant number of Americans look at the prospect of President Obama with a great deal of fear. I've seen and heard many (what I consider to be) outlandish statements. Imagine my surprise when I stumbled across some eerily familiar-sounding phrases in the reading I did tonight. Here's a sampling (from the 30th Anniversary Edition, which has different pagination than the one the class was assigned, but was available at the library, so we didn't have to buy it)...

For the oppressors, however, it is always the oppressed (whom they obviously never call "the oppressed" but--depending on whether they are fellow countrymen or not--"those people" or "the blind and envious masses" or "savages" or "natives" or "subversives") who are disaffected, who are "violent," "barbaric," "wicked," or "ferocious" when they react to the violence of the oppressors. (56) [Lefty notes: all that's missing are the phrases "that one," "marxist," and "socialist" and we could be looking at last week's headlines]

But even when the contradiction is resolved authentically by a new situation established by the liberated laborers, the former oppressors do not feel liberated. On the contrary, they genuinely consider themselves to be oppressed. Conditioned by the experience of oppressing others, any situation other than their former seems to them like oppression Formerly, they could eat, dress, wear shoes, be educated, travel, and hear Beethoven; while millions did not eat, had no clothes or shoes, neither studied nor traveled, much less listened to Beethoven. Any restriction on this way of life, in the name of rights of the community, appears to the former oppressors as a profound violation of their individual rights--although they had no respect for the millions who suffered and died of hunger, pain, sorrow, and despair. for the oppressors, "human beings" refers only to themselves; other people are things." (57) [Lefty was going to note something here, but either you, the reader, sees what I see today locally, nationally and globally or you won't and any further commentary isn't going to illumine you any more if you don't see it.]

For the oppressors, what is worthwhile is to have more--always more--even at the cost of the oppressed having less or having nothing. For them, to be is to have and to be the class of the "haves." (58) [Lefty notes: Joe the Plumber would hate Paulo Freire]

One more and I'll drop it, but man this is good stuff!

For them [the oppressors], having more is an inalienable right, a right they acquired through their own "effort," with their "courage to take risks." If others do not have more, it is because they are incompetent and lazy, and worst of all is their unjustifiable ingratitude toward the "generous gestures" of the dominant class. Precisely because they are "ungrateful" and "envious," the oppressed are regarded as potential enemies who must be watched. (59)

I know someone else would pick this book up and absolutely hate it and not see anything in it that relates to modern day America, but maybe because I saw a bunch of signs in front of my polling place yesterday that said things like "Obama = Marxist" and the like, I really wanted to create a bumper sticker yesterday that said "Another Socialist for Obama" -- but here's the deal. Obama isn't a socialist. He isn't really going to redistribute the wealth. For me to get all self-righteous about the upper 5% of American incomes getting taxed more and saying, "Yeah, they can afford it, selfish bastards!" doesn't really address that the number is probably some unsubstantiated but astronomical number like the upper 95% of Americans live better than a good chunk of the rest of the world. I am just as culpable.

Knowing doesn't fix things, but it does get me to move on to the most logical question, "Now what?" To steal a phrase that'll be familiar to those alive in the 80s, but in a totally different context, "It's morning in America" -- we can look at this slight tipping of the scales as a fresh start, or we can roll over and hit the snooze bar. We're burning daylight.

God's calling -- look busy!

I've been doing a lot of thinking about call lately. Part of that has to do with one of the classes I'm taking and its primary focus of vocation. Part of it has to do with a lot of the extra activities associated with being a first-year seminarian. There are a lot of meetings and such one attends. A few weeks ago I did one of those "bubble tests" where you fill in bubbles in responses to questions such as "those voices in my head really bother me" -- well, not quite that bad, but close. Last week I went to a meeting to learn about the internship I'll need to take sooner rather than later. Last night I met with the school chaplain. Tonight I get the results of my phych eval. Sometime soon I'm also supposed to set up a meeting with a spiritual director. Part of me says this is a lot of hoops for a person to jump, but part of me also figure there have been plenty of unhealthy folks who have become clergy and if this helps weed out some of the rif-raff before they're ordained, that can't be all bad.

So, would I say what I'm feeling now about wanting to go back to school a call? I guess I'd have to say "yes" but with reservations. For a time in my life, I figured EVERYTHING was a call. I changed careers because I felt called to do so. I took on new roles because I was sure there was a call involved. When things didn't turn out, I started to think that perhaps God is a great prankster -- calling and when I run out of the figurative shower soaking wet with soap bubbles in my hair, God hangs up (perhaps a little chuckle just before the click on the other end).

Not saying that all those moves were bad ones. I had a lot of good experiences in my short career schlepping life insurance for a faith based organization. I truly felt I was doing ministry at times. Not when I was selling insurance, necessarily, although there were times when there was a true need and I felt like I was really helping a family. Rather, there were a lot of kitchen table conversations with folks where I helped them with other matters, like helping an older couple get fuel assistance or listening to an older widow as she talked through her mounting debt issues. On more than one occasion, I cried with my members (we don't call them clients in faith-based organizations). While some of sales folks give me pause, I do believe others truly see value in what they do ... and they do great service for their members. Anyway, one of my members just died. I bumped across her obit about 5 minutes ago. I hadn't thought of her in a while, but she's one I visited with regularly. A very cool old lady. I think that's what's got me thinking about this calling thing right now.

So, I'm in school now, spending lots of money to move on to a career where I'll make significantly less. Nice math. Perhaps that's part of the reason why when the call was coming in for this move, I pretended I didn't hear the ringing. Perhaps if I looked busy, God would give up and go find some other sucker to bug. No dice.

I completely reject theology that implies that God plays a direct role in career moves. In fact, I just "unfriended" someone on Facebook because this person claimed God got them their big promotion (intentional pronoun disagreement to obscure the gender of the individual). But, I do think there's something to be said for the tugging on one's heart to make a move that's sometimes unplanned or puzzling because there's an almost primordial pull to do so. That's why I'm currently in school and seeking ordination (eventually) to do, pardon the phrase, God knows what.

This is why I'm back at school

I bumped across an article on the New York Times last week that has stuck with me. I told Bob I've been having trouble articulating what it is I want to do after I'm ordained. This article does a better job of saying what it's about than I can seem to muster right now, so I'll do inarticulate grunting sounds and point. As long as it's still up, check out "Hospice Chaplains Take Up Bedside Counseling" http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/29/nyregion/29hospice.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=hospice%20chaplain&st=cse&oref=slogin

Anyway, there were some other things I wanted to talk about this weekend, starting with my disgust at the person who put the McCain flier in my car door (breaking an entering if you ask me) while I was at church with mom. Sorry, dudes, as a recently re-found friend puts it, while I may be Christian, I'm not "THAT kind of Christian." Oh, and I want to share what I learned about the word "barak" -- not the dude but the Hebrew word. Interesting stuff for another time.

I have a perfectly good rant perking on that bent, but I don't have time or energy for it now. Too much homework and my pesky day job (you know, how I draw a paycheck) to deal with. And besides, one topic per posting seems like plenty and this one is about why I'm hitting the books.

It's a good article. At least it spoke to me.

Redistribution of Capital

I'm still a newbie in the blogging world and am not hip to how one is supposed to approach this, but I'm assuming not all blogs spew out fully formed thoughts, but rather, they're a place where one can toss out a thought and play with it...and maybe get feedback from others on whether the thoughts work for them or not. (I'm not sure if the comment thingy is working. I've changed the settings a few times and tested it and got the comment screen, so I'll hope it's there this time.)

So anyway, I continue to read Church on the Margins for class and had a thought last night that was inspired by the ongoing bickering of the two presidential candidates. It has to do with the spreading around of wealth and all that. It seems to me that a lot of the political/religious capital here in the good ol' US of A was taken in a series of power grabs that left a bunch of people in the theological dust -- if you weren't a Calvinist in New England in the 1600s to claim your stake, you were...um...burned at the stake, hanged or otherwise dealt with. While burning heretics at the stake has gone somewhat out of fashion, the bullying and spiritual killing continues today through groups with seemingly innocuous-sounding names like "Focus on the Family" and such.

These folks, the so-called religious right, have amassed entirely too much capital as far as I'm concerned, and it's built on a house of cards. Like the financial groups who dealt in subprime loans, sometimes with a 30 to 1 debt to asset ratio, many of these religious organizations are building their empire on little understood tenets that will not be able to stand up to the scrutiny of concerned citizens who decide to stop taking them at face value and really dig into what they're about.

While I'm way too lazy to organize a revolution (heck, I can't even organize a kegger without a nap), I'd like to propose a redistribution of the wealth. I'd like to find a way that we could grab some of that ill-gotten religious capital from what's truly a minority (a very vocal and frightening minority) and redistribute the wealth. I'm not sure how one would get the ball rolling, but if someone can pull it off, the first round's on me.

What does it mean to be "in community"?

I'm reading a book for class, The Church on the Margins: Living Christian Community, by Mary Sawyer. While I haven't gotten too far in it yet, I did have a bit of an insight about myself. I've often been uncomfortable with the word community. It seems to be a fairly meaningless word that has taken on the form of whomever is using it, and everyone in the room nods her head in a knowing way, as if they're somehow part of this secret community. I think it's more that no one wants to feel left out and acts as if she knows what community's all about.

I know others really embrace the word community. Bob, while not a Christian, is huge on community. He has so often used the language of "we" when describing some activity he's doing that I've had to ask him who "we" is.

I think part of my problem is that for most of my adult life, I've defined who I am by who I'm not: No, I'm not a member of [fill-in-the-name-of-mainline-protestant-religion here]. I wouldn't want to associate with them because they a) marginalize women b) marginalize my GLBT brothers and sisters c) the marginalize the immigrant d) they marginalize, as Sawyer puts it, the "other" (whatever population it is) or e) all of the above. In addition, I could have a beef with a theological stance on what the divinity of Christ means, the role of a triune God, etc. etc. ETC.

Yes, I'm the kid throws a hissy fit and leaves the "community" rather than, as a dear cousin has chosen within the smothering bounds of her conservative denomination, to "fight from within." Now I'm finding that if you've spent most of your life defining who you are by who you're not, it's extremely difficult to change. In a sense, I have become one of "them" -- I've become stuck in my progressive-liberal ways and have issue being in company of "the other." I'm also finding that I frequently irritate myself. Unfortunately, i can throw as many hissy fits as I want, but I can't leave me. So, after nearly four decades, I'm learning what a lot of people grew up knowing--tolerance begins with tolerating oneself. If you can't be open to your own changing viewpoint, how in God's name can you be tolerant of others?

So, I find it curious that my first foray into learning what it means to be "in community" in Christianity, with my non-Christian family (in the larger meaning), in my ecumenical school, in the workplace or in the world means that I first need to be in community with myself. I need to stop marginalizing myself from myself.

Easier said than done.