PeaceBang

“Jesus Camp:” A PeaceBang Review

I finally saw “Jesus Camp,” Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady’s 2006 documentary about Pastor Becky Fischer’s Pentecostalist Kids On Fire camp, which used to be held for three days every year in North Dakota.

I heard a lot about this film when it came out. I read a dozen horrified reviews and heard from a lot of religious liberals who found the content of the film deeply disturbing and who compared Becky Fischer to Hitler.
I was prepared to be sickened by what I saw.
I was not. I was definitely angered and irritated, but I saw some really good things happening in these children’s lives. I suppose my “tolerant” liberal fans out there will want to give me a toilet whirlie for saying so.

So what did I see?
I saw charismatic Pentecostalists behaving like charismatic Pentecostalists have been behaving for thousands of years: speaking in tongues, taking the Bible literally, engaging in group-think that I disagree with, having a theology I find in many ways abhorrent, and having intensely emotional experiences in worship.

In Pastor Becky Fischer I saw a dedicated, hard-working youth pastor whose theology I find really awful in some aspects, but whose creativity and sincere faith is undeniable. Scary message? Absolutely. Hitler? What?? Wouldn’t it be great if people could actually understand, and have a context for, what they’re seeing in religious material like this without freaking out and giving way to total demonization of people whose traditions they have no knowledge of?

Actually, I went away from the film more disturbed by the liberal reactions to it, than to the actual film.

This harkens back to one of my earlier posts, but let me repeat myself here: it would be a good thing if more Americans learned about religious traditions so that they wouldn’t be so all-fired horrified whenever they encountered one with which they passionately disagree. Sure, I wouldn’t raise my kids the way these conservative fundamentalists in Missouri do, but I can watch them on film without wanting to refer to them as “lunatics” and “monsters” (two words used in reviews of this film). They didn’t make up this way of being religious — they inherited it from previous generations. The hysteria over this film baffles me. If you saw a film of Catholics lining up to take Communion, would you recoil in horror and say, “Oh my GOD, they’re pretending to drink a man’s blood and eat his body!!” No you wouldn’t, because you know something about Catholicism. Some of your friends are Catholic. You are able to disagree with aspects of their tradition without having a nervous breakdown about how they raise their children.

“BUT THEY’RE INDOCTRINATING THEIR CHILDREN!”
Yes. I think so, too.

“BUT THEY’RE TRYING TO MAKE THIS A CHRISTIAN NATION AND TO INFLUENCE THE GOVERNMENT!”
The last time I looked, Unitarian Universalists like me were trying to influence the government, too. (Hey, didn’t I see you at the Marriage Equality rally? Yea, I met with my senator on the issue, too).
Newsflash: conservative Christians believe that Christianity is the one true religion. They feel called to evangelize about the saving blood of Christ to everyone. It’s been going on for at least centuries and its a central commitment of certain sects of Christianity. Relax, already. Lutherans, Jews, Catholics, Presbyterians and probably even the Quakers have offices in Washington, DC. While it’s not (necessarily) part of those traditions to pray for a Christian nation, it is part of their traditions to try to influence policy. Part of my religious tradition’s commitment is to fight for the continued separation of church and state. As we have always done, we’ll battle these issues in the public square. So will our children. That’s how it works.
We’ll keep advocating for freedom of reproductive choice, and they’ll keep praying for God to appoint the right judges who will outlaw it. If one of their children bombs an abortion clinic, one of our children may prosecute them and put them in prison. And so it goes, in the ongoing fight to define “righteousness” and to live by it.

The thing that frosts me is when liberals holler about a film like this and claim, by way of comparison, ideological superiority while naming “them” as ignorant, crazy drones. Not only is that an uninformed, simplistic attitude, it’s completely unproductive and leads to nothing but more deeply entrenched intractability on both sides.

So Pastor Becky Fischer, if you’re out there, I think we should have lunch sometime. We have a WHOLE lot to disagree on, but you know what? We have an awful lot to talk about, too. We’re both considered dangerous by some of the same people, and girl, I’d like to buy you a drink for that.
And by the way, I admire you for being honest in this interview.

I Guarantee This Is The Worst Music You Have Ever Heard

More cultural commentary because I just can’t for the life of me come up with a satisfactory ending for my sermon.

I attended a pow-wow today hosted by the Praying Indians of Natick, MA, that made me cry.

And then I saw this video and it made me cry for different reasons.

Love and Kisses To Tom Cruise!

Dear Tom,
How ya doing? You and your beautiful wife are looking SO FINE lately, and that sure is a gorgeous daughter you have there!
I just wanted to let you know that I absolutely AM NOT in possession of any personal photographs from your wedding or any other special religious observances and I really regret if I’ve ever said anything you might construe as even partially negative.

Because Tom, I love ya, man! I really do! I’m not at all terrified by your fiendish, gummy grin and maniacally twinkling eyes! They’re charming!
In fact, I think it should become a constitutional amendment to love Tom Cruise and to go see all his movies!

Bye for now! Love to the Mrs. and Suri!

:::sound of door slamming and bolts sliding into place:::

Take This Bread: A PeaceBang Review

Sara Miles is a fan of this blog and wrote me a note this past spring saying that she wanted to send me a copy of her book Take This Bread: A Radical Conversion. Would I like to receive it? Are you kidding? You BET I would!

I received the book this summer and am still reading it. It’s not that I’m too busy to finish it; it’s just that I don’t want it to end. Sara Miles is such a sister of my heart that I like to read a little bit of her story then put it away for awhile so I can hear her voice again when I need it. After all, it’s not like anything really happens in this book. It’s not a sexy adventure story. It’s just the story of one person’s attempt to deal with God’s inconvenient call, to struggle to accommodate an old and a new world view, to not be too obnoxious about her new passion for Jesus, and to love her partner and child while riding the bucking bronco of that elusive thing called “Christian life.”

Miles writes beautifully - she has an impressive background as a journalist with specialties in Latin American revolutions and politics (some of us remember with fondness her reporting for Out magazine before it became a campy glam-boy mag) — and her story really begins when she ventures into St. Gregory of Nyssa’s Episcopal Church in San Francisco and takes Communion for the first time. An unchurched atheist, Miles writes that “something outrageous and terrifying happened. Jesus happened to me.”

Her description of what happens next will cause anyone who has had a similarly shocking experience with Jesus to hoot with recognition and to cheer aloud her disorientation and her subsequent frantic attempts to intellectualize the whole thing. Oh, girl, I feel you! For all my friends and relatives who wonder how I could have become a Christian, I want to xerox pages 58-61 and say, “Here. I totally can’t explain it. It doesn’t make any sense, but here’s a beautiful description of how it doesn’t make any sense.”

Miles is then drawn into giving herself over to the literal fulfillment of Jesus’ exhortation to feed the hungry. She joins St. Gregory’s* and starts a food pantry. One of the things I love and appreciate best about this memoir is that it isn’t the story of how someone found Jesus and then did something nice and social justice-y about it for awhile before becoming a celebrity speaker on the topic. It’s the story of how someone found Jesus, rolled up her sleeves and went to work feeding the hungry, and is still working with that food pantry today. Rock on, Sara Miles! Thank you for writing so honestly about church life. And kudos to your community and its priests for supporting you in this.

St. Gregory’s food pantry feeds hundreds of families every week. It costs $50 to feed one family for a year.
If everyone reading this post over the next day or two contributes $5 to the PeaceBang blog, we could feed 30 families for a year. If you’d like to contribute to St. Gregory’s through PeaceBang, go to the “Support PeaceBang Blog” and follow the links to PayPal. Let’s see what we can do together. I will match all contributions made today and tomorrow. [Update on Sept. 29: we’re up to $400, gang! Woo hoo! Keep it up!! - PB]

I think it needs to be said that this book is the antidote to the rampant narcissism of another spiritual memoir written by a talented and charismatic writer, Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Love, Pray (which I have ungenerously re-titled Gripe, Brag, Screw). Sara’s book is the good strong soap I needed to cleanse me after being dipped in Ms. Gilbert’s sticky vat of self-absorption, white privilege and obvious addiction to personal crisis and drama. Take This Bread is also full of personal crisis and drama, but since Miles’ focus is on service and not on self, it is far more meaningful to me. It says a lot about our culture that Gilbert’s memoir has been greeted with breathless adoration by thousands and thousands of Americans and has reached best-seller status, while Miles’ book has had a more modest reception. One book is about spirituality at its most individualistic and self-serving, the other is about the demands of religious life following a radical conversion experience. One is Hollywood, the other, Jerusalem.

Take this book and read.

*Sara, I visited St. Gregory’s in August of 2000 and then again two or three years later. I wonder if I may have met you during one of those times? Your face looked so familiar to me on your book jacket…
The second time I attended was the Feast of Mary Magdalene and Donald preached on a trip to China. I was invited to carry one of the –what do you call them? — liturgical umbrellas?

Red Sox Clinch AL East Division Title!

Okay, Red Sox Nation, was that not some of the most amazing drama you’ve ever lived through!!??

I’ve been watching it all, crying like a damn fool!

Love ya, Baltimore!! Thank you, we love you!

(everyone else, sorry for the interruption)

Include Your Address!!

Calling all webmasters and webmistresses!!

Given the popularity of GPS systems, consider putting your company/church/social service agency/school/restaurant address on your web site!!

I have noticed of late — much to my frustration — that many web sites only include directions*, and not just a plain old street address. Where the heck in the world ARE ye?

Those of us who have finally tired of the danger of trying to drive and read complicated directions at the same time and who have aquired GPS systems would DEEPLY APPRECIATE the inclusion of the street address on your web site.

Thank you very much.

*Middlesex School in Concord, I’m lookin’ at you.

Blood Diamond, Thoughts On Mother Africa

I’ve been interested in Africa for as long as I can remember. I have a lot of thoughts and feelings about that, but whenever I try to articulate them I wind up sounding like a self-absorbed white woman, so I won’t try to go into any depth here.

I have always wanted to go to Africa but over the past decades it has become obvious to me that to go on safari or something equally touristy would be really shallow and avoidant (like “la la la, what a beautiful continent, even though so much of it has been/is being totally ravaged by colonialism and civil war! Look at the pretty lion!”), and so I feel a bit stymied about the dual desire both to go to Africa and not to go as a typical tourist.

I made friends with a Rwandan man in 1991 and was never able to find him after the genocide there. I think of him often. His name was Esdras. He was a Tutsi professor who lived in Kigali. I fear that he and his family were killed, but I don’t know.

In my D.Min. program I have become friendly with a Zimbabwean pastor who would like to take a group of us to Zimbabwe to help train pastors there this summer. I’d really like to go but Zimbabwe is a very scary place of late. I don’t know if I have the courage.

I saw “Blood Diamond” last week and it awakened all those feelings about Africa and got me thinking again about how I might connect with Africans here in the Boston area (perhaps through a refugee organization like the IRC) or go there. (It was a very good movie, I thought.)

And now I am reading “They Poured Fire On Us From The Sky,” which is a harrowing account of the Lost Boys of Sudan. I can’t recommend it highly enough to all of you. Perhaps the most powerful thing about the book is the soft, measured tones of its chapters as written by three of the boys who endured the evils and privations of the war. I have found that I have a dull ache in my heart all day and am starkly aware of the pettiness of my everyday concerns as compared to their unimaginable agonies. I took a break from reading to work on my sermon (pretty futile — I kept weaving the book into the sermon and it didn’t work) and then later to eat some lunch. I opened SELF magazine for a break and found myself staring dumbly at its pages, spooning white beans and rice into my mouth and trying to overcome the cognitive dissonance brought on by mentally traveling from the tragedies of sub-saharan Africa to the vapidity of the typical American woman’s magazine. Couldn’t do it. I was in a daze most of the day, in fact. Still kind of am.

There isn’t much to say here, except that I’d very much like to hear from those of you who are working on African human rights issues here or abroad.

I’m fascinated by the fact that people all over the world who have no ethnic or ancestral connection to a place nevertheless can feel a powerful draw to it. I think of my little cousin Calvin off in Japan now, a place I will probably never visit, but he couldn’t miss it. I think of my strange sense of resonance with Scandanavia and Africa. No family connections whatsoever; what’s that all about?

It’s late but I’m pretty sure I won’t be able to sleep until I finish that book. Good night.

Housekeeping

Good day, all,

First of all, some lovely person sent me a copy of a sermon they gave and asked me for feedback. I listened to about five minutes of it back in August and loved it, and it got lost in my transition to a new computer. If you’re out there, Lay Preacher Lady (from Minnesota, I think?), please forgive me and resend your sermon. I’d really like to hear the rest of it.

Second, to the person who earnestly suggested that I take two days off a week because that’s really important for real restoration of self, I think that’s a great idea but that’s now how life works for me or any other clergy person I know. Most of us have Letters of Agreement stating that we shall have one day off per week and one day free of “non-emergency parish business” which we generally use as our writing and worship prep days. I get four weeks of vacation and four weeks of study leave per year.

Transitions

As I was driving away from a nursing home this afternoon I realized that as I get older, transitions between the different demands of ministry (which are, in fact, the thing that keep this work so constantly rich and fascinating)are more and more difficult and depleting to achieve. There was a time when I could go from the bedside of a sick or dying person right to a committee meeting, home for a quick meal and then jump into the study to start some worship planning or writing.

I find to my dismay that try as I may, I simply can’t do that anymore.

Maybe it’s a good thing. Maybe it means that I’m more present where I am and that the wide chasm between the the energy in, say, the hospital and a church social event is too broad to jump with my old alacrity. I find that when I expect an instant transformation from pastor to Minister, I get disoriented and just want to hide out because I know I’ll do or say something insensitive or out-of-it. Honest to God, I don’t know how anyone does this work without theater training: I can’t think of how many times I’ve walked into a room absolutely pretending that I’m fine, ready, and truly present when I’m grieving some sadness shared with someone in the parish. Oftentimes the energy of the group inspires and rejuvenates me and I go home feeling up and connected, but that half-hour to hour of transitioning can be really tricky to navigate. For one thing, I look around the room and think “who else just came from some emotionally draining situation to be here tonight?” That can be very distracting, because as we get to know our congregations better and better, we learn that the answer can often be, “Everybody!” And yet the Church calls us out to do the work of the covenanted community, and we respond. Thanks be to God, and dammit it to hell, if you know what I mean.

How do you transition from one emotional setting to the next?

I find that it helps to schedule pastoral calls in the afternoon and then some mindless errands immediately after them, or to head home to prepare dinner. Instead of seeing three people, I now only try to visit one or two and then move quietly around the kitchen (careful with those knives!) preparing nourishing food before heading out for evening meetings or the study (or just winding down for the day when the schedule allows). Through my thirties I was able to make several visits back-to-back, rush out for take-out food, run home and check mail/e-mail and rush out the door for the evening. No way, Jose. Not any more.

Similarly, I’ve noticed that I’ve become less and less coherent and able to get much work done on Sunday afternoons. Thank God I am not asked to teach or attend meetings after church except on very rare occasions. After presiding over a worship service I am more blotto than I used to be — good only for one-on-one chats with people (I love to stand at the periphery of coffee hour and watch the crowd hum but I can’t for the life of me concentrate on conversations unless they’re at least a few feet away from the food tables). When I hear of ministers who are expected to lead worship service (or services!) and then attend board meetings in the afternoon I have utmost sympathy. I honestly don’t know how they do it.

Living in New England with such distinct natural seasons helps me to lean into this aspect of my aging with more acceptance and not to fight it too much. We have to know our strengths and weaknesses, and it’s also only fair to notice how we change through the passing of time. I was talking with a Methodist colleague this afternoon about maybe (just MAYBE) trying to adjust our expectations for winter time, encouraging our communities and ourselves to slow down as the days get considerably shorter and the dark and the cold urge us indoors for more reflective pursuits. I adore the busy buzz of autumn, spring and summer and tend to get mopey and lonesome in the winter, but maybe it’s time to lean into that reality, too.

I just finished reading Barbara Kingsolver’s marvelous book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, where she reminds us that it’s neither ecologically sound nor spiritually mature to insist on bananas in January in the northern hemisphere. This makes me think that if it’s not good stewardship of the earth to demand kiwi fruit in Massachusetts in December, it’s also not wise stewardship to demand springtime brightness from myself as October rolls in. Nor is it wise to expect a 42-year old to have the same resilience as a 29-year old, or to get hung up about it. That almost-42-year old knows a lot more than that kid in her late 20’s knew, has buried a lot more beloveds and somberly marked their names as “deceased” on the church rolls, and has hung around a lot more hours with Lady Death and Mister Trouble. I used to be able to get up from the table after a lunch date with them, leave a few bucks for the check and get right on to the next thing. Nowadays I linger over coffee, haggling over the bill, and arguing, always trying to get them to schedule our next lunch for a much later date than they have in mind.

Fine is Not Good Enough!

I just decided that my sermon, which I actually wrote during my sermon-writing day (Thursday) — minor miracle! — isn’t good enough.

I’m re-writing the whole thing.

I think to myself, “It’s probably FINE.”

But then I’m just too stubborn. “Fine” is not good enough.

It’s just that you get a vision in your head of what something should or could sound like, how it could unfold so much better. And that vision bugs at you while you’re doing other things, so you might as well stop what you’re doing and capitulate to the Muse. That’s how I think of it.

Back to the salt mines!