PeaceBang

Hi Calvin, I’m Paul

Paul Tillich
Originally uploaded by Peacebang.

Which theologian are you?

http://quizfarm.com/test.php?q_id=44116

Boy In the Bands scored as Calvin,

http://www.universalistchurch.net/boyinthebands/

and I scored as Paul Tillich. Whattyaknow.

My results, quoted from the web page:

“Paul Tillich sought to express Christian truth in an existentialist way. Our primary problem is alienation from the ground of our being, so that our life is meaningless. Great for psychotherapy, but no longer very influential.

Paul Tillich
73%

Friedrich Schleiermacher
67%

John Calvin
60%

Charles Finney
53%

Jürgen Moltmann
53%

Augustine
47%

Martin Luther
40%

Karl Barth
33%

Anselm
13%

Jonathan Edwards
7%

THAT was fun. And illuminating. And slightly disturbing. Definitely evidence that it’s time to hit the books in a serious way this summer. I don’t know who Finney is, but I’m very happy that I got a little skotch of Jonathan Edwards in there. I’m either a study in contradictions or just a sloppy theological mess. Either one is fine with me. Because, you know… it’s that existentialist thing. It doesn’t matter in the end, anyway.

Seriously though… how come I can’t be Elisabeth Schussler-Fiorenza or Sarah Coakley or even Hildegard of Bingen? Or Theresa of Avila?

I know he’s not a classical theologian or systematician, but it’s all about EMERSON for me. And Channing. Rolled up with Bette Midler, Endora, Martin Luther King and Stephen Sondheim. That’s what I call the meaning of life.

"Nothing Human Is Alien To Me" — Terrence

According to the Associated Press,

“People don’t know who Michael Jackson is,” said defense attorney Susan Yu. “I spent a lot of time with him. I’ve never seen anybody so vulnerable. This person is totally incapable of doing any of the things they said he did.”

Let’s get this straight right now. There is no human being who is “totally incapable” of any heinous crime that might be beyond the pale of your personal imagination, Susan Yu or any of you other Up With People types out there.

The sooner we all embrace the philosopher’s dictum that “Nothing human is alien to me,” the better.

Therefore, a Jeffrey Dahmer’s human snacking will no longer truly shock us. Our jaws will not drop when we finally learn what happened to that Alabama high school senior in Aruba. It will not cause us to shut down in denial to learn that our government has tortured thousands of completely innocent men at Guantanamo, detaining and tormenting them long after they knew they were totally unconnected to any terrorists. A bug-eyed Georgia bride’s “lies and mendacity” will not inspire us to buy the newspaper and “read all about it!”, and Tom Cruise’s bizarre, simian shenanigans will not make the front page of any so-called “news” publication.

When we get over, give up and move on from our eternal willingness to be shocked! appalled! ohmahgodded! and made incredulous that anyone could do such a thing, we’ll move that much closer to maturity as a species, and can stop rubbernecking the multiple horrors of the world and actually do something about them.

Repeat after me: “Nobody is totally incapable of doing anything. Nobody is totally incapable of doing anything.”

You may want to acquaint yourselves with the works of the Marquis de Sade, who so well understood human depravity and sadism and who remains for me the unparalleled Dark Angel of Western philosophy.

I recommend the definitive Grove Weidenfeld edition of Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom and Other Writings, compiled and translated by Richard Seaver and Austryn Wainhouse.

When I Got Rev’d

RSCN0339
Originally uploaded by Peacebang.

I was ordained eight years ago today.

My family came up and robed me, and my Internship Committee came up and put the stole on me. Then I sat down in a chair and heard Elizabeth sing “A Simple Song” by Bernstein. I was glad the chair was hidden behind the pulpit off to the side because I was just sobbing.

(This butterfly posed for me on my last trip to Mexico, in Ixchel.)

PeaceBang And the Blue Lady

Oh, my.
PeaceBang is depressed tonight.
No unusual reasons. Stress for congregants in extremis, sadness over the news of a metastisized cancer, awaiting the medical explanation for one young man’s calamitous drop in white blood cells, beloveds who are in transition and would so much rather not be, rage at the vile iniquities of the “Bush Crime Family,” knowing I won’t be seeing my pals at GA this year, the heat (which finally broke this afternoon), the dog that didn’t get adopted, an old chum’s cheerful inquisition as to why I haven’t had a date in a year, and a sick feeling that my beloved alma mater is on a very bad course for the future (at least so far as it concerns nurturing the health of the ordained ministry. Yes, that’s a call to organize. Write me off-line if you like. Call me Rev. Deep Throat. I have dish).

But thanks to a Jungian author named Lyn Cowan, PeaceBang knows that she is once again visiting with Lady Melancholy and that there’s nothing wrong with that. In fact, there is nothing wrong with her consistently overly-sensitive, death-conscious, melancholic character. Unlike depression, which stifles the imaginal world and muffles creative potential, melancholy brings us more deeply into it. Melancholia is not a disease, but is a temperament that has gone completely out of favor in our manic, modern American culture, and is misunderstood, feared and unappreciated.

I’m not saying it’s a bag of adorable floppy monkeys to be a melancholic, I’m just saying it’s not necessarily a pathology. It’s a typology.

If you are a melancholic or love someone who is, or if you work with the soul in your profession, I cannot recommend this book highly enough. It does employ the rather cheezy convention of having several chapters “spoken” by Dame Melancholy herself (or her friend, a melancholic English curate), but even those chapters are very worthy.

An excerpt:

“Until the mid-19th century, melancholy was imagined as an affliction from the gods, a madness characteristic of genius, and a difficult temperament. At the height of the Renaissance, it was imagined in personified form as a majestic female figure; artists and poets looked to her as their Muse. But, in the 20th century, melancholy all but disappeared from the professional imagination, to be replaced by the diagnostic categories of depression.”

By the way, Tom Cruise can go fffffffffffffffuuuu….lop on a pile of monkeys for saying all that incredibly inane, inaccurate stuff about Jung’s involvement with the Nazis and for suggesting that Brooke Shields is a weak, misled moron for using medications to help her manage her post-partum depression. What a blithering idiot, as my father used to say.

[Oh my heavens. I hear cars honking and hundreds of teenagers screaming out on Main Street. It couldn’t be the last day of school? Not at 8 pm? It couldn’t be a football victory. What is it? Graduation was weeks ago. Michael Jackson’s
verdict? A really good episode of “Scrubs?” What?]

Could Have Knocked Me Ovah With a Feathah

Mr. Brindly Head
Originally uploaded by Peacebang.

You know how sometimes you find out that a word you thought meant something doesn’t mean that at all, and you were a big Totally Wrong Head every time you used it?
And you think, “Geez, what a dope I am!”

I always thought “brindle” meant wiry-haired, like Brillo, with a connotation of old and cranky like this hilarious ancient schnauzer I met last night named Pettibone Smith (I think she’s a schnauzer. Maybe a Something Terrier).

Anyway, when you pet her, she is very BRINDLY; her fur almost cuts your hand!
But I am so wrong! “Brindle” or “brindled” refers, in fact, to a color combination, not a quality of the hair at all.

I think I might just refuse to accept this.

I just need you to know that when I was standing in the kitchen saying my farewells, old Pettibone came over and peed right on the floor and almost got my foot. She was intentionally creating a diversion — and she was successful — because as we were howling and mopping up and exclaiming she bee-lined right over to the other dog’s food bowl and made out like a bandit. Cleaned the plate.

That naughty, brindly girl!

(P.S. What’s a bee-line? Is it a B-line?)

What Is a Sermon?

In my recent post entitled, “Thumping,” Martinet comments that s/he has preached what s/he calls “commentaries” and what I would probably call “sermons.”

In the Protestant tradition, the sermonic moment (whether we call it a sermon, a reflection, a homily, a commentary or a discourse) is the focus or high point of the liturgy. I am interested in the fact that Martinet has an aversion to the word “sermon.” Perhaps Martinet will expound further on that, or others of you who feel similarly will do so. Is it because of the negative connotation we give to the expression “preaching” (as in “quit preaching at me!”)? Is it something else? I hope you will share.

It may have been Barbara Brown Taylor who said that a sermon is one side of a passionate conversation. If not, you should still read her lovely, wise little book The Preaching Life. Although I had extremely minimal preparation for preaching in seminary, I have found that I love preaching dearly, with all my heart, my mind, my soul and my strength, in a way I have yet to fully understand. With apologies to Jerry Maguire, preaching completes me.

I never, ever saw myself as a preacher. If you had told me that I would love preaching like this when I started seminary I would have scoffed directly to your face, as I had no intentions of going into parish ministry. Who knew?

Thus far, I have determined the following personal truths:

preaching is the aspect of ministry that brings me the most constant anxiety (which I am beginning to understand as “passion tinged with a sense of profound, unremitting responsibility”);
preaching is the honor granted me by a congregation whose trust and attention I constantly want to keep earning;
preaching is the art form that connects me to my life-long, intuitive and unexamined adoration of language (”Word!”);
preaching is the one aspect of ministry within which I grant myself almost no self-forgiveness, because while one can never fully prepare to make the best possible pastoral response in any given situation, one can (and should) be damned well prepared to climb into the pulpit on a Sunday morning.

Preaching is such an ancient human activity, very few of us have a really clear sense of what a sermon really should be, while most of us can certainly say what it should not be.

What am I doing when I am giving a sermon?
First, I am giving it. It is the best gift of my attentive mind and heart that I am capable of giving at that time. I hope it will be received as a gift of love. In my own church, I always feel that it is. I cannot overstate the sense of blessedness that comes from this manner of giving and receiving.

More practically, when I am giving a sermon, I am giving a teaching from our tradition. I have never seen a sermon described in this way but this is my current working definition of a sermon.

Finally, and in the spirit of “the last shall be first,” this teaching from our tradition must minister to those gathered for worship, else it is neither fit to be given from the pulpit, nor is it fit to be called a sermon.

The congregants who are in church every weekend have heard me give approximately 540 minutes worth of such teachings over the past church year, or 9 hours. All that research, prayer, and late nights slaving over the word processor for nine hours of preaching.

Worth every second. And of course the total worship experience is so much more than just the sermon.

Thumping

biblethumper
Originally uploaded by Peacebang.

My friend the Professor called the other day to tell me about the incorrigible Bible-thumping student he has in one of his classes, who takes every opportunity possible (like every time she opens her mouth) to witness to the saving power of her Lord Jesus Christ. Even the Nazarene youth pastor in his class rolls his eyes and sighs heavily when this gal starts in.

We were laughing about it, but I could certainly tell that my friend, who is a devoted and saintly enough professor that he actually ENCOURAGED this girl not to drop his class, is irritated and frustrated. He has every right to be. Such an insistent personality, whatever their particular obsession, all too easily hijacks the learning process for all participants in the class, and he has a real challenge ahead of him.
How could she so NOT GET IT? What kind of emotional limitations cause someone to think they must examine every single intellectual idea and statement through the lens of the salvation story of “Mr. Jesus of the Christ family” (thank you, Eddie Izzard)?

As we were talking about this young fundamentalist’s rote responses to every conceivable question put to her faith, it occurred to me that Unitarian Universalists often do the same, exact thing, only in reverse.

Immediate, obligatory disdain for the idea of the virgin birth? Check.

Mocking, insulting cliches shared every time someone mentions the idea of being “born again” or “saved?” Check.

Knee-jerk reaction when someone begins a prayer with an invocation of the Deity, followed by the protest “That word/concept doesn’t have any meaning to me/offends me!!” Check.

Eye-rolling expressions of superior logic and maturity when exposed to the Triune God? Check.

And so on and on. World without end, amen.

It seems to me there’s quite a sermon or sermon series in the danger of Rote Religion: a quality religious liberals love to accuse and condemn the conservatives for, but which they do pretty derned well with themselves, now that I think about it.

The Dream Tells the Truth

In my dream last night I was in a crowded hotel-type setting, maybe a conference, standing in line with my oldest friend M. and waiting to get some lunch at a cafeteria.

(From here on in, as I was taught by dream work teacher Jeremy Taylor (www.jeremytaylor.com) I will shift into present tense.)

A handsome man comes up to M. and they kiss. I am shocked and insulted because this man is not her husband and I think “Wait a minute! If she’s having an affair with this guy does she actually think that’s OKAY to just flaunt it in front of me?” She is terribly blase, as is he. Like, “Cool, babe. See ya later.” I feel deeply wounded that she has become so truly shameless.

He leaves and she turns to me. “Don’t give me a hard time,” she says. “Yes, we’re together and yes, it’s because I’m bored and unhappy with my husband.”

I light into her. My voice is shaking and I am crying but I have all the words: “How DARE you flaunt your infidelity in front of me as if I won’t care? How could you do this? I MARRIED you to M., I remember what you promised! You made sacred vows in the presence of God, your closest friends, your family, on the ground of your childhood home where you and I played and dreamed and planned to become good, respect-worthy women together! What the hell is wrong with you! You have two children!! Daughters, to whom you must be an example — if not you, who else!?”

And then I really can’t stop crying as I say,
“And I LOVE M. (her husband). I love him because you love him, and I am invested in your marriage!! So is your entire family, and all your friends, and even other people you work with!”

The scene morphs into another scenario at that point, but there it is.

This isn’t a dream about the real M &M, who are adorable and married and happy. It is a dream that reveals the honesty of the fact that what troubles us remains to trouble us until we speak our truth in some fashion, even in the phantom reality of the Dreamtime. Yes, according to Jungian dream theory there is a lot more going on in the dream, where the Friend and the Lover represent aspects of the self and “marriage” becomes an archetypal reality rather than its literal self, but that’s more than I intend to go into here. The “ah-ha” for me was to understand that my very soul, and not just my sense of social propriety — is offended by the notion of infidelity, cheating, and abandonment of vows. I should know this by now but the intensity of the dream made it unmistakable.

The Lamb Days of Summer

LilClaundry
Originally uploaded by Peacebang.

What the :::sputter, sputter::!!??

We went from 40 degrees at the end of May to the high 80’s, with no transition days.
I hate it. I’m cranky. The cat is cranky.

Little Compton, however, is smelling the fresh, clean sheets at her new home and giving many thanks to be alive.

If you are not acquainted with this fair, hooved creature, may I direct you to the PeaceBang archives, Eastertide? (That would be late March, 2005, for those blissfully godless heathens among you).

Funky Format

Something’s going on with the PeaceBang format, which I may have inadverdently caused by going into the archives in some way. (I also can’t spell inadverdently. Why isn’t there spell checker on Blogspot?)

Help me, Obi Wan Scott Wellsobi. I am unfrozen caveman blogger. Your modern technologies frighten me.

Anyway, I thought a fresh post might help bring everything back to normal.
Like a high colonic for my blog.

[later…]
P.S. That fixed it.

P.P.S. The dog thing isn’t happening. Pastor the Collie turns out to be a rather sickly old gentleman, and he is being kept and fostered in CT, and not brought home to live in the parsonage with the PeaceBang and her cat.
P.P.P.S. However, stay tuned for more adventures of “Cat!Dog!Parsonage!” as it may be that Sister of PeaceBang will be relocating to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in August, staying with P.B. and bringing along her collection of bajillions of books, assorted small cute furniture items (if you didn’t know her and all you saw was her pile of belongings, you might think she was a Hobbit. Or a Pict), and her dog GORDON (Breed: orange, smooth) and cat SID (it just sounds Jewish… his full name is Siddhartha. Breed: gray, claymation).

Don’t you think “Cats!Dog! Parsonage!” is a great name for a reality show? I thought all of those exclamation points would make it more sexy and appealing.

Maybe we should call it “The Girls!Cats!Dog!Parsonage! Show” ! When you say it, make sure to really shout out the exclaimed words. And hold “show” really long, in a way that evokes Ed Sullivan.