PeaceBang

PeaceBang Bores You With More About What She’s Eating

Alright, ya’ll, I’m cooking my VERY FIRST COLLARD GREENS right now.

I hear they’re supposed to stink up the kitchen something awful. I’ll wait and see.

They, and the onion they’re cooking with, are organic.

The bacon is nitrate-free, humanely raised, grain fed and all that jazz.

I am basically using meat more as flavoring than as the main show.

This is very exciting. Not to you, I know. Sorry!

In other news, I had a blessedly uneventful day and realized that I have a lot of rage stored up from something. Can’t figure out what, but I’m glad to know it’s there. As my old high school students used to say, “PeaceBang’s fittin’ a snap!”

Could it be that I’m angry at death? Mebbe.

Could it be that I’m experiencing some of that weird aggression Chalice Chick referenced in her post about going temporarily vegan?

I am now making a very big Spanky face from “The Little Rascals.”

I’ll report back about that in a few days. I know CC got a little bit of a smack around from some vegan commenters, but sometimes a physiological response is just a physiological response. No one wants to have it, but you have it.
The fact is, I get amazing insights when smoking my one cigarette a night.* I don’t like that fact, but it’s true.

*As I have revealed before, I am a seasonal smoker: I buy one packet of tobacco in the summer (usually August) and roll my own cigarettes. When that pack is done, I don’t smoke any more for the rest of the year. This year I didn’t open the packet until late August, so I’m probably going to be observing my small tobacco ritual through October.

Ramadan Readings

Friends,
Some help, if you can offer it.

I am preaching this weekend on the spiritual discipline of fasting, and on the power of spiritual disciplines in general.

I would love to share some readings about Ramadan written by Muslims. Certainly relevant passages from the Qu’ran would also be appreciated, but I can research those myself.

I plan to weave in my recent “conversion” to vegetarianism and the issue of sustainable eating. I hope to God I can keep this from being one of those boring Meanwhile, can I tell you how delicious the braised lentil stew cooking in the oven smells right now? It’s full of fresh rosemary from my garden, red onion, garlic, and (full disclosure here) free-range organic chicken broth. And okay, I added the leftover frozen bacon I had in the freezer, because the recipe calls for it and I wanted to use up the meat I had on hand.
Sorry, vegans. I’m definitely consuming 80% less meat than previously. And that’s where I may stay.

Pope Ben Apologizes

I appreciate this:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/18/world/europe/18pope.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin

What’s amazing about this apology as I read it is that it seems to indicate that Benedict’s understanding of his role is more “exemplar of Christian virtues” than “infallible religious dude who wears great threads.”

It’s a heartening sign.

Again, I got no beef with quoting medieval texts. However, as the Pope knows, whatever he says will be heard with immediate, unquestioning respect by millions of people who may not be able to understand such quotes in context.

He took responsibility for that, and I think that’s very hopeful.

This Just In: Bloggers Should Not Have Hot Bodies!

Chalice Chick has an Asshat of the Week Award, and I feel compelled to award someone one, too (and you can call me CopyCat of the Week)!

It’s this Ann Althouse person, who actually caused a huge bloggy furor over this nonsense. Could this be more stupid?

http://althouse.blogspot.com/2006/09/bill-clinton-lunching-with-bloggers.html

Thanks to Pandagon for alerting me to this absolutely ridiculous cat-fighting.

Lord, Help Me Find a Spa That’s Open On Mondays

So I’m desperately googling area spas and health care centers trying to find someone who could massage me achin’ bod tomorrow, and maybe even throw some of those flat, hot stones at my back. Hard. Until I cry.

I am about five minutes and one bad laundry basket lift away from totally throwing out my lower back. It’s aching like mad. I haven’t worked out in weeks and have mostly had my big butt in a chair writing worship services or been on my feet in heels leading worship and greeting folks. Not very holistic. I feel like hell, frankly, although I am proud of the fact that there aren’t dirty dishes in the sink and the cat box is clean. And that I got my newsletter column in on time.

One of the hardest weeks on my personal ministeria…

One of the hardest weeks on my personal ministerial record.

Usual tasks, plus two very large funerals. Some other epically painful things occurring in peoples’ lives.
Six hours of on-campus class time, plus approximately 225 minutes of commute time. Most weeks will have half that.

I got most of my service for our new Second Sunday liturgy written last night before going to M’s surprise birthday party, and returned home at 11:00 pm to finish it up. The computer crashed. I spent an hour trying to get it to boot up, but decided to let the computer rest before I threw it out the window in a rage.
I slept restlessly through a night full of nightmares, then got up at 6 am to salvage what I could of the service.
Thank the gods, the computer booted.

I wrote the rest of the service, made breakfast, and went to church.

If I may brag just mildly, do you know many congregations who wouldn’t react with some negativity to the minister changing around the liturgy a lot? We changed it A LOT, for our new Second Sunday thing that focuses on faith development through service. Whole new order of service. Music Director was a champ. Lay preacher, a champ. Everyone was a champ. That’s my word of the day: champ.

I didn’t get one complaint, but I probably got about 12 smiling thumbs up. Comments ranged from a simple, “Hey, I liked it!” to “That was interesting, I liked it, I think it will find its rhythm really soon” to “I really liked it, I’m going to digest it more and see if I have any specific feedback.”

Excuse me, but I call that incredibly cool.

The trick to ministry, I am convinced, is to have the kind of congegation who, when you have no energy of your own, are great people to vampire off of. I actually and truly don’t think I could have gotten through the service if they hadn’t been who they are.

And now, sleep. Without nightmares, I hope.

[update 3 hours later: I racked out like a champ and feel slightly more alive, but only slightly. I had more nightmares. In this one, I was forced to walk the plank and drop into the water from a big ship as some kind of sacrificial ritual. I was wearing period clothes of a 19th century naval officer or something. It felt like the dream was a more intense piratical follow-up to the dream of the other day wherein I adopted a dog named Jean Lafitte. This will definitely bear some reflection. What would Dr. Jung say?– PB]

What Do You Mean By "At Risk?"

Well, of COURSE he says this:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/16/us/16bush.html?th&emc=th

But it depends on what you mean by “at risk,” Mr. Bush. At risk for an attack, or at risk of becoming a nation without any moral integrity that condones torture as a legitimate information-gathering technique?

More On Islam

I used to think that comments like this weren’t really that inflammatory:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/16/world/europe/16pope.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin

There was a time in the recent past when I would have nodded and said to myself, “Of course the pope is just saying things that are politically incorrect but honest. No one wants to say this, but Muslims do have a concept of jihad and there are parts in the Quran that do recommend conversion by the sword.”

Not that I’d ever read the Quran, you understand — just bits and pieces of it. My status as a citizen of the most powerful nation on Earth made it eminently acceptable for me to pass easy armchair judgment on the entire Islamic world without ever having visited a Muslim community or knowing much of anything about the religion and culture of Islam.
I’m not ashamed of that; I’m just another dumb, arrogant American. No shame in that unless you adamantly stay dumb.

I am beginning to see, however, that my smug Western assessment of Islam — which came with a kind of pursed-lip liberal gee-whizzery, as in “Gee whiz, I hate to say this about a major world religion, but Islam is kind of extra violent, isn’t it?” is just as inexcusably ignorant, racist and dangerous in its own way as the Christian militant who wants to imprison all the “towel-heads.”

I have to admit now that a lot of my own reaction to Islam was/is the visceral reaction I get to the visual images and sounds of the Muslim world: thousands of people wearing clothes I can’t relate to, jammed in tushy to tushy in a mosque prostrating themselves in prayer, women covering their heads with scarves, wailing ululations that sound nothing like the hymns that are so comforting to my own soul. Visceral anxiety = You People Are Weird. Not an acceptable way to approach fellowship and understanding.

I think the Pope made a big, dumb mistake. I don’t think the Pope knows doody about Islam. He has fallen into the same trap most of us have fallen into, but since he’s probably the most important religious leader in the world, he ought to be ashamed of himself. He should get out there and fix what he did. And the next time he hires a Unitarian Christian woman of Jewish descent who dabbles in witchcraft as one of his personal advisors, I will be sure to tell him that!

I am beginning to think that the religion of Islam and the hideous infection of Islamic terrorism bear practically no useful relation to one another. I think that looking to the Muslim religion to understand why men were willing to fly planes into the Pentagon and the World Trade Center is an exercise in futility.

I believe now that we should look to other factors, such as deep cultural assumptions and influences, and stop trying to understand Islam through the lens of the question, “Why are all these terrorists Muslims?” Those who seek to understand Islam have the difficult but necessary job, I think, of exorcising the question of terrorism from their initial exploration. To set about understanding Islam from an initial assumption that it breeds terrorists can never give us a fair or responsible conceptual foundation for learning. Religious people should protest this when they see it happening. Pope Ben, I’m looking at you.

Say a group of Martians descend on our planet. They set up a university to try to understand human beings, and they decide to study human nature using Hitler, Stalin, Vlad the Impaler, Pol Pot, and John Wayne Gacy as case studies. They put a pile of the world’s sacred scriptures in a pile and begin to comb through them, looking for the answer to the question, “How do the many religiouis beliefs of these creatures incite them to such heinous crimes against one another?” Say we give the Martians some yellow highlighters in order to help them find the passages in all the scriptures that support their initial assumption. Think they would find lots and lots of things to highlight? Think that the Holy Bible would be full of yellow? Yea, me too.

Now I’ve got to go do my day.
Peace.
Bang.

E-Harmony Ads

When you see those e-harmony ads on television (with the now-ruined wonderful song, “This Will Be An Everlasting Love” playing in the background), do you ever guiltily wonder if most of those guys are totally gay? Because they really, really seem to be gay to me.
E-harmony is pretty Christian, so my theory is that a lot of the dudes who find sweet hometown honeys on that site are closeted gay men who don’t think God will love them if they get down with the brotherhood.
Boys, God loves you either way! Believe me!

Anyway, I hope I’m wrong, but that’s my nagging suspicion every time one of those commercials comes on. Check it out. See if your gaydar goes off like mine does.

Feng Shui

Do you believe in feng shui?

Here’s why I ask.

When I first moved into the parsonage, I had my bed facing east-west. I wasn’t accustomed to living on a busy, main road, though, so I felt a sense of anxiety every time a car or truck went by, which was often. I felt like the rushing sound made me want to sit up in bed.

So I moved my bed between two windows with my head to the street, my feet facing away from the street, north-south. I felt like my position somehow broke the energy of the cars rushing by, since I was no longer lying parallel to the street outside.

In January of 2005 I began to have fairly regular anxiety attacks. I found that anxiety almost inevitably kicked in just as I was on the verge of falling asleep, and I would wake up with my heart pounding, fearful of the house around me.
I cut out caffeine, started exercising more regularly, and cut out eating much sugar (and especially at night). My daytime anxiety attacks got much more manageable, but I would still feel very keyed up at night, and still awoke frequently with panic attack symptoms (feeling of smothering, blurred vision, disorientation, sense of unreality, etc.) that I managed with breathing techniques.

When I noticed that even at my most wonderfully happy and relaxed this summer I still slept badly in my own bed, although I slept absolutely soundly anywhere else, I decided to read some feng shui pointers. I discovered that my bedroom is just bad for bed placement, as there are windows or closets or other interferences that make it impossible to place a queen sized bed where the feng shui experts recommend. But I did my best to choose the best spot according to feng shui principles, and moved the bed again (actually, back to where I had it when I first moved in).
I slept well that night and have not had any panic attack symptoms since.

Was it all psychological? Was I wrapped in some kind of bad enchantment that needed to be broken? Or is there something to this feng shui stuff?

Experiences? Comments?