Hypothetical Judgments Meet Reality

So the other day, our youth group had a rummage sale. I dressed appropriately for working with potentially dusty old clothes and such. Which means I was wearing (self-)cropped jeans and a second-hand polo shirt with tennis shoes. This is not usually what I wear to work, since I'm not usually working with old, dirty stuff. I am a professional, and usually I dress up, at least sort of, for work, even when I don't particularly feel like it. So it was a bit odd when an older man (church member with particular skills for indirect communication) said to me, "I like your outfit. You look almost human." So immediately, I went into "what was that supposed to mean" mode. I have been discerning lately that there is a wide variety of perspectives on what the role of the pastor should be in this new congregation I am serving. It occurred to me that what I wear could be a reflection of that. So I wondered what I would learn if I did an informal survey about what people thought I should wear. ... Then I had an epiphany. I don't have the budget to go shopping. I'm going to wear the clothes I have to work, despite what anyone thinks. They will not be inappropriate, though they may occasionally be more formal than some people prefer. What I wear is not up to them. It's even only sort of up to me. It's really up to what's in my closet, so why worry about what people think I should be wearing?

The Spirit of Christmas OR Why Fox News Is Ruining Christmas

War on Christmas People? Please stop. Seriously. Just be quiet. Nobody is warring on Christmas but you. And you're making the Baby Jesus cry.

I was just skimming through facebook, having gotten home from my new church's Christmas Eve Service. Since lots of my FB friends are also clergy, there were a lot of posts about church. And they made me happy.

There were also posts about Christmas Eve pizza, or Chinese food, or traditional soups.

There was a post about a Bollywood marathon.

They all made me happy. I "liked" a bunch of them in fact, which is not something I take lightly. Each one just filled me with joy, especially the quirky ones.

All of these folks are good people, enjoying the fact that for just a little while most of us try to keep ourselves in a place of good will to all people.

So why, War on Christmas People, are you insisting on RUINING it? Because that's what you're doing.

Christmas is the most expansive, inclusive, almost-everyone-has-some-relation-to holiday that Christianity enjoys. It's like the biggest open door of evangelism we have. And you're slamming it in people's faces. Please stop.

It's pretty much always been that kind of open door, by the way. Consider this essay from superstar Rita Nakashima Brock about how it's a truly and originally an interfaith holiday.

Merry Christmas to All and to All a Good Night!

Inauspicious Beginning?

This may not be the best way to start off the year, but oh well...

Another reason I love Parade magazine:

My cat just threw up on Ronald Reagan.

Longest Night

Because there is a conversation about it going on at the RevGalBlogPals, I'm going to post the liturgy I created for our first Longest Night service, which will be next Tuesday night. If you'd like to use any of this, or want information about the service, put your email in a comment and I will contact you. (I will delete the comment once I get your email, so put other actual comments in a different comment.) I will post the prayers in a separate post, once they're written! The homily is going to focus on the fact that Christmas is really more about the Incarnation than it is about "Jesus' birthday", which means it's about God taking on the full complexity and ambiguity of human life.

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“The Longest Night”

*Please stand as you are willing and able.

Prelude

Welcome and Introduction

Song of Invitation “Come Darkness, Come Light”
by Mary Chapin Carpenter

Opening Prayer

*Responsive Call to Covenant
Leader: Friends and strangers, captives and nomads, orphans, widows and runaways, we have gathered this night in the presence of the God of Love.
People: We come seeking room at the inn – room for our true and whole selves; room for all that we are, all that we feel, all that we lack; room to air out what has been hidden away.
Leader: This night, let us make this a place of grace for one another. Let us covenant to make space for each soul here, no matter how messy or vast our brokenness.
People: Here in this place, this night, we will not judge; we will not compare; we will not gawk. We will hold the space between us gently and reverently, knowing God is here.
Leader: Here in this place, this night, let us trust that honesty is our true worship, that tears are worthy prayer, that emptiness can be openness to new blessing.
People: May these long hours of darkness hold us close to the heart of God. May the promise of the dawn hold out the hope of healing and wholeness.

*Opening Hymn “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” #119
As we sing, you are invited to omit the words “Rejoice, rejoice”
and experience their absence instead.

Scripture Readings Matthew 5:1-12 (p. 785)
Isaiah 52:13—53:6 (p. 596)

Responsive Reading of Psalm 42 (p. 741)

Scripture Reading Matthew 1:18—2:18 (p. 783)

Homily

*Hymn “Once in Royal David’s City” #165

Time of Prayer (Individual prayers read and then a candle lit from the named Advent Wreath candle)
For those who grieve – Hope
For those with family difficulties – Peace
For those with depression and mental illness – Joy
For those who have been rejected – Love
Silent Prayer for all those who struggle – Grace

Sharing in the Light
("When Aimless Violence Takes Those We Love" with organ, recorder and solo voice)
As the music begins, you are invited to come forward and light a candle, if you would like to. Perhaps for you it is a prayer. Perhaps it is a sign of hope. Perhaps it is a cry to God for healing. Perhaps it is a way of bringing some light to the darkness. The candle-lighting can mean whatever you need it to.
If you would like to light a candle and leave it on the altar, use a tea light. If you would like to take the candle back to your seat and home with you, use one of the small taper candles.

Benediction – From Luke 1:78-79, the Song of Zechariah

Dismissal and InvitationThis concludes the formal portion of the service. You may go in peace or stay for continued prayer.
Chaplains and counselors are available for individual prayer around the room. A list of who is where is on the back of this program.
You may share briefly what your prayer requests are, or, if you prefer, you may pick up one of the slips of paper on the table at the back to clarify your needs.
The slips of paper include such issues as: grief, abuse, depression, mental illness, loneliness, estrangement, pain, lack of forgiveness, rejection, divorce, job loss, health issues.
There are also supplies in the room off the left side of the sanctuary for writing down what is on your heart.

(During the end part, we will play more Mary Chapin Carpenter -- "Longest Night of the Year" and "Once in Royal David's City" and then some classical music.)

Grammar Godmother is Getting Testy

So lately, I've been extra annoyed by people abusing apostrophes. They're using them to make words plural. They're spelling the contraction "y'all" incorrectly. They're adding them in where they simply don't belong. But thus far, I've mostly kept my mouth shut.

But now... I just saw something that made the jaw in my head drop. (That is, my actual jaw didn't drop, but if I were a cartoon, it would have.)

The culprit is a little-discussed challenge of American English. It has to do with the way we pronounce, or rather hardly pronounce, the phrase "would have". I am guessing that if you asked people what they were saying in using this phrase, a large majority would think the correct word choice is "would of".

But apparently it gets worse. Not only do we smoosh the word "have" to the point of non-recognition, evidently we do the same thing to the word "would". Case in point, from an anonymous facebook status update, "wish it had of snowed". (Emphasis mine!)

Seriously, it's no wonder people don't mind that politicans use words to mean their opposites. Apparently some portion of the American population can't be bothered to think about the meaning of the words they're using themselves. "Wish it had of snowed" does not mean what you think it means! In fact, it doesn't really mean anything at all! It is gibberish!

I sometimes wonder if the progress of literacy in this country has started moving backward. By certain measures, there is no doubt that it has. We might assume this is only bad news for publishers of books made of trees. But I think it will have much larger implications. Frequent reading is inextricably connected to the ability to think critically. Once we lose that skill, we're doomed. Dark Ages 2.0, here we come!

Stormy Weather?

So I've been kind of surprised that there haven't been thunder storms over my bed these last few nights. It's cold in my house (since I've apparently become my mother and keep the thermostat punishingly low), so I've been running the space heater in the bedroom while I sleep. (Actually, I've been running it in whatever room I'm in, whenever I've home. The cat wishes I'd just stay home all the time.) But I've also had a cold, with a scratchy throat, so I've been running my cold water vaporizer on the other side of the bed. Just seems like wet cold front meeting warm front ought to create some weather systems in between, namely directly above me. Maybe there isn't enough wind involved...

Stop Me If You've Heard This One...

Is there such a field as historical social psychology? Because if there is, I think someone should do a study of how and why humor has gotten more sophisticated through the years.

Now before you guffaw too loudly, I do realize that there countless examples of current highly unsophisticated humor around. But I just watched "Bringing Up Baby" and I'm convinced that early movies simply weren't as complex and nuanced as many of them are now.

"Bringing Up Baby" stars Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant. I think I'd seen it once before (now that I've watched it, it feels vaguely familiar). But I got it from Netflix this time because of how it was talked up on a set of Katharine Hepburn postage stamps I bought recently. They made it sound like her signal achievement. Which is sad. Because it's basically a ridiculous caper movie in which she pretty much acts surreally hysterical most of the time. It's not very funny. At least not to me.

But I wonder. Were things more rigid back then? Were social categories so much stricter that these caper stories seemed the height of hilarity? I just think someone should do a study of how the current state of a culture affects its humor.

Part of humor is surprise. This movie was highly predictable, to me. But would it have been to its original audience in 1938? The medium was relatively new. When a medium is new, are the mechanisms for giving an audience the satisfaction of being in on a surprise more heavy-handed than they have to be now that we're so familiar with film devices?

I have had this experience quite a few times, where I hear such incredible things about some classic film, and then it disappoints. I'm not very good at appreciating films for the impact they had when they first came out. I am not a product of 1938.

Anyway, if anyone knows of any historical studies of humor, please let me know.

Say What?

It's possible that one of the reasons I have a blog is that I try to avoid mocking people too heartlessly on facebook.

This is an actual quote from an AP article I just read about a referendum battle in Bowling Green, Ohio. The referendum was about whether the city would extend anti-discrimination protections to gays and lesbians. (Well, okay, I'm assuming it would include lesbians; the article just said gays.)

"It's about trying to impose on our community a political agenda," said real estate agent Ed Sitter, who was active in the No campaign. "The militant homosexuals want their lifestyle elevated to the same level as the civil rights movement."

I'm not even sure how to begin responding to that, so I'll let you do so in the comment boxes.

(The referendum passed, by the way. How's that for elevation?)

A Difficult Time of Year

My church is going to be holding a service this year for people who have difficulty with the holidays, whether because of grief or depression or family issues or whatever. I'm having difficulty with the current holiday, myself, but for none of those reasons.

Because the current holiday isn't really a holy day, it's a series of fairly unholy days. Facebook and the rest of media and life have been taken over by two things I have absolutely no interest in -- shopping and football.

In fact, if I felt like it, I could make strenuous theological arguments about why both things are bad for the soul, but I won't. Because it would be difficult not to wallow in self-righteousness if I were to attempt such a thing.

The shopping thing isn't really ever going to go away, but it will dissipate a little. The football thing will get less intense once people go back to work. But in the meantime, I'm going to focus on cleaning house, raking leaves and baking cakes, and pretend the rest of it just isn't there. Who's with me?

For Example...

You have heard, I am sure, as I have, that language influences the way we think. That is true, I believe, in ways that are even more complicated and subconscious than we'd like to admit.

I'm thinking about this because I just had a thought reading this highly interesting post from my friend Helen's blog. (You should read it. It has cool pictures from a museum. And if you go to her home page, the post just before this one is about monkey poop and highly interesting.)

Anyway, she has this picture of whales carved out of ivory from walruses. And here's the thing. I realized that because we call ivory "ivory" and not, say, tusk, I think of it as a substance unto itself. Not that we call the stuff that grows off elephants' and walruses' face ivory, but more that they have tusks made of ivory. In my head, ivory is like something you mine and then the elephants and walruses have their tusks made of it.

This is, of course, ludicrous, but it's reflective, I believe, of how we relate to ivory. That is, we don't see it from the elephant's perspective (my big tooth), but rather, in giving it a name, we were already commodifying it and thinking of it as a raw material. I find this disturbing.

If I were industrious, I would research whether cultures indigenous to the habitats of elephants or walruses have names for ivory that better reflect its existence as a body part more than a raw material. I hope they do.

In the meantime, we must keep questioning the perspective that our language dictates to us. It may be enforcing values we don't really believe in.

Moving a Movement

So I went to a vigil today. At least, that's what it called itself. It wasn't really a vigil. It was a rally. No biggie.

It was commemorating the death of a young boy who took his own life a year ago, apparently because of bullying and/or pressure to join a gang. It was a good thing. But it could have been so much better.

I have been to numerous rallies/vigils/events in this particular park, and I usually come away feeling like, with a little attention to certain details, they could have been so much more effective.

So I offer here, some advice to those planning events that are aimed at getting people to coalesce into a movement.

First of all, it is, obviously, important to think about your goals, what you want to say, and who you want to have say it. But it is equally important to consider the perspective of the audience. Just because you succeed in saying what you want to say does not mean the event has been a success. People may have heard you (or they may have half-heard you). But at an event aimed at creating a movement, people need to be moved. They need to experience something, not just hear about something.

One of the challenges of the space in our park where rallies are frequently held is the lay-out. There is a stage, where usually, organizers think to put chairs for the speakers. And then there is a large space in front of the stage, with a short brick wall around the edges. The distance from wall to wall is probably 50 yards. (I'm totally making that up, as I am not good at estimating distances.) The point is that it's pretty far across.

The intention, I believe, of the structure is that people are supposed to bring lawn chairs to come hear a concert or some such. But for something like this, that is not going to happen. There are a few sections of bleachers on the ground beyond the short wall. Some people sat there. More people sat on the short wall. Which meant that the folks attending the rally were all really far apart and far away from the stage.

This is not good. This is detrimental to experiencing the birth of a movement.

Ideally, chairs would have been placed in a few short rows, close to the stage. A section of the bleachers could possibly have been moved down there. At the very least, if I'd been opening the event, I would have cajoled people to congregate on their feet down in front, together.

If people do not feel close together with others, they go home feeling like they were the only one there. There were enough people at this event that, if we'd all stood together in a mass, it would have felt like something. But we didn't. So it felt scattered, ineffective, impotent.

I think sometimes, when people are stepping out to try something new, and they don't have a huge crowd (which is generally true when you're starting something new), they are just so grateful that anyone showed up that they don't want to risk offending their small, precious crowd, so they hesitate to tell them what to do.

I would argue that the converse is what is needed. When people show up for something like this, it's because they're looking for someone to tell them how to get involved. Even if the only directions, initially, are to get closer together and feel your neighbors' presence, they will be open to that. There is, inevitably, a little grousing about having to move, but once they do, they realize there was a good reason.

There were a few older people there, so I might have had everyone move over to where those folks were sitting on the wall and be together there, rather than making everyone stand. But it could have been done, and it would have helped.

Secondly, I, personally, do not think you should use the word "vigil" to describe any event that does not include prayer and candles and singing. If what you have is a line-up of speakers, that is a rally, which is a perfectly respectable thing to have. But a vigil, with candles and prayer (or at least directed meditation and silence) and SINGING, is a much more powerful experience. (I'm fairly certain this was called a vigil because it was commemorating a death. Which is also a reason it should have had prayer and candles and singing.)

Why? Because then the audience is involved. They are participating; they have become part of what is happening. They are moving with the movement. Action breeds commitment. How do you get people to give money to Habitat for Humanity? You give them a day on the work site. They come away committed.

Giving people a candle to hold, a child's candle to keep an eye on, a neighbor's candle to help light, these things get people involved.

Singing. A proverb tells us that "When the people sing, the spirit comes down." There are all sorts of truths about breath and the way we use it and the power it has when used in unison that apply to these situations. People are anxious about singing. They are hesitant and need much encouragement. But if you pick a simple song, with only a few words that you line out very clearly, they will try. If you have a leader who is not afraid to be the one singing, but who makes very clear that the point is to sing along, people will catch on. And the breath will move within them, and they will be moving the movement.

Candles are a little tricky. It was daylight, so in this particular situation, they weren't going to be as powerful as they sometimes can be. Also, breeziness sometimes makes candles more of a distraction than a help. But how the crowd is standing makes a huge difference here. If people stand close enough together, they create a wind break that makes candlelight possible. There is a rich metaphor there. And an important truth.

As I'm writing this, I'm sitting here wondering how it is that I think I have the expertise to tell anyone how to stage a rally or vigil. I think it's just experience. When you've been to enough events, you learn what makes things work and you notice when those things aren't happening.

It was interesting to me to realize how my reflections felt like political or public relations techniques. The main guy who organized this rally spoke last, and he immediately struck me as someone who would eventually be running for office. IF he can get a campaign manager who gets this stuff. I think the thing that makes a campaign or movement effective is taking the step beyond your own perspective -- what you want to say -- to considering how to make sure it's heard and experienced. Once you get tuned into that level, you start thinking about a whole host of details you might not have otherwise.

I'm pretty sure my understanding of these issues doesn't just come from attending rallies and vigils. These are things preachers have to deal with all the time. A huge part of effective preaching is, once you've figured out what you need to say, spending time discovering how best to say it so that it's heard. The perspective of the congregation must be part of the equation or you might as well be talking to yourself. Preachers, or more broadly, worship leaders, also must be tuned into the power of music, the power of space and how people are arranged in it, and the power of silence and ritual.

There is a reason that the church was such a huge part of the success of the Civil Rights Movement. The church knows how to move people. If you're going to build a movement, you have to move people, not just your own mouth.