Holy Peeps!

That many biblical commentaries and preaching preparation tools are now found online is, in some cases, a wonderful thing. But to the procrastinating pre-Easter preacher, spending a significant portion of your Good Friday surfing the web can be a nightmare, a hellish gauntlet of temptation and distraction. Which is why I spent a good portion of this morning looking at things like this instead of writing my sermon:

For millions more photos like these, see the Washington Post's slideshow here.

OccuPeeps D.C. is the winner of this year's Peeps Show, the sixth annual contest of Peeps Dioramas hosted by the Washington Post. Click the link in the caption and you can also see "Peepius Maximus," a peeped-out replica of the Roman Coliseum, and "Just Peeped" a peeped-itization of the Royal Wedding, plus many, many, MANY more.

God help me.....

No literally, God, please help me, I really need to get some work done on this sermon.

Holy Hell Redux

Thanks to thisischurch.com for this awesome image. If only I had a chasable and could be this cool.

But why this sudden flurry of postings, Madame L??

Well, children, this week is a week we like to call "Holy Week." A week during which lots of churchy things happen which require Madame L's attention. Sadly, Madame L. suffers from a terrible syndrome which causes the volume and significance of the tasks before her to be inversely related to her interest in doing them. So, for instance, if today was the day she was meant to write the most important sermon of the year, her interest in sermon writing would decrease by a degree equal to its amount of importance. This is very painful for Madame L, and she has to watch very closely to make sure she doesn't find herself doing other silly, unrelated and completely unimportant tasks such as pricing out magnetic nametags online and blogging on the internet.

That is a sad, sad story, Madame L.

Yes, yes it is. 

Why can't I just pastor pastors?

I just led what I considered to be a solidly mediocre Maundy Thursday service.

Nothing was wrong with it, mind you. It had all the elements of Maundy Thursday: scripture, moving music, singing, communion, departing in silence. But it lacked some x-factor of worshipful panache that I was looking to create.

Surprisingly, I don't feel overly disappointed about it. But I am sitting here in my office wondering how I can learn from this and remembering an important lesson which has been a difficult one for me to absorb in ministry: they're not all pastors.

I am a pastor. Which has all its own issues and idiosyncratic things about it. But one thing that is likely true is that I was drawn to this vocation because of something meaningful I personally experienced in the realm of religious life. But not everyone who goes to church or who practices a religion pursues a religious vocation. Only some of us do. So I am forced to believe that there must have been something about me that made me more open to spiritual formation than another person might have been. I don't think it would be going to far to say that many pastors are drawn into this work because we are predisposed somehow to having a spiritual imagination.*

What I am working to appreciate right now in ministry is that not everyone has this. In fact, I would surmise that most of the folks sitting in the pew have imaginations of different sorts than my own. Some may be like me, but many are not. And it is a huge challenge to consider how I am to inspire them, to form them, to challenge them, without understanding what it is like to be them, in a spiritual sense. Should I lay it on extra thick? Go completely over the top in terms of input and stimulation in order to get their attention**? Or are there ways I can play off of or reflect on my own experience that can help draw others into it? Should I rely on the strength and duration of my tradition, believing that the communality of our liturgy has power over and above what we give to it in this moment alone?***

Another, scarier question, and this is meant with the utmost sincerity, does it even matter? I mean, if I should report for duty on a major religious holiday and not feel moved in the ground of my being by what takes place there, I might feel deprived and disappointed. But those are the types of experience that carry meaning for me and that I need to keep inspired. If I didn't look there for my spiritual nourishment, or if I didn't need more spiritual nourishment than those around me, how would I see things differently? What would be important to me when I came to worship?

Maybe this is all in my head. But there are days when I long for the insulated cocoon of seminary, where other people who imagined like I do got together to worship in creative ways and felt awed (perhaps arrogantly so) by their own ability to create engaging and meaningful rituals, completely  unaware of (or even disinterested in?) in the folks outside who pass by, absorbed in their own imaginations, unaware that today was Thursday. 


*Some believe that we were drawn to this profession in order to work out our issues or complexes, which may also be true. But doesn't "pre-disposed to spiritual imagination" sound so much better?
**This seems to be the strategy of many part of the evangelical tradition, and it seems to have worked in many cases, though I question the depth of its formation.
*** This is where I think the Roman Catholics are RIGHT ON. I am looking to learn more from their wisdom in this regard....

WARNING: EXPLICIT CONTENT...AND ALSO AWESOMENESS

My father warned that this might be too much for some of you, but I thought it too good not to share. So here's Jesus the Christ comin' at ya for Holy Week with some of his typically compassionate and inclusive antics (FYI: this is a paraphrase.):

I cannot locate the origin of this image, but I send you thanks and props, whoever you are!

Raptor or Racket?

Is it at all possible that I am genetically part velociraptor? With retractable claws of murderous capability? Or is it the case instead that the women's hosiery industry is a COMPLETE racket designed to frustrate and bankrupt professional women across the globe? I simply ask because when I put on new nylons for the first time and an immense hole rips through the toe and all the way up to the thigh, I am puzzled as to why a garment designed to be donned foot-first would be unable to withstand the friction of a well-manicured toenail.

And while we're on the topic, who the hell invented nylons anyway?!??! I mean, I understand where tights come from ("Damn, this skirt that my patriarchal, misogynist culture has forced me to wear to feel feminine doesn't actually do anything to keep the lower half of my body warm! In fact, quite the opposite. What's a girl to do?" Tada: tights.). But given that tights in antiquity were surely made from a material like wool, when did we also decide that a paper thin, transparent, rip-prone material would be best suited to replace said tights?

Well, I did a little "research" (READ: searched Wikipedia) where I just found out that Nylon became popular in the 1940s as a replacement for silk when access to silk became limited by our involvement World War II (Japan being among the world's major silk producers.) Turns out the effects of war are more far reaching than one might imagine...

But I digress. The really interesting part was in the section about how Nylon got it's name. I quote: "In 1940, John W. Eckelberry of DuPont stated that the letters "nyl" were arbitrary and the "on" was copied from the suffixes of other fibers such as cotton and rayon. A later publication by DuPont explained that the name was originally intended to be "No-Run" ("run" meaning "unravel"), but was modified to avoid making such an unjustified claim and to make the word sound better." Right. Because it would have been completely unjustified. Because it is the nature of nylon to run. But I'm glad they reconsidered the name while continuing to market a product which makes no sense. Jerks. I may consider swiping you with my velociraptor claws.

None of this, of course, has cleared up my confusion about why we are STILL doing this. Given we have long resolved our issues with our brothers and sisters across the Pacific, is it not possible that we might go back to the old school days when I didn't have to put tape over my toenails in order to get to work on time?




* I also learned that Nylon first appeared in toothbrushes, but can also be used for making rope, parachutes, ballistic fibers (whatever those are), meat wrapping and sausage sheets (which is sometimes what I feel I am using it for on my fat-ankle days...just kidding. I don't really have very fat ankles. But I stand in solidarity with those who do.) But seriously, am I really eating nylon when I have a sausage at Costco? Sick.

No-mentum

Fortunately or not--jury is still out on this one*--I've had quite a bit of time this month to reflect on some things. Apparently, one of the best antidotes to something like pneumonia is to do nothing, a task which is, unfortunately, not well-developed among my many gifts. Though I do love a good afternoon nap here and there, days on end of sitting and doing nothing makes me feel restless, irritable and sullen. Happily, I have identified the source of this as malaise as the loss of momentum I would like to henceforth deem no-mentum.

Momentum, I have realized, is what gets me through life. Perhaps it is my type-A personality, but my best days are most certainly those on which I am flying from one thing to another, propelled forward by perpetual motion that is busyness and accomplishment.** The days I go from a few hours in the office to teaching a class to leading a bible study to a meeting of the worship committee to a hospital visit to an evening of socializing with friends...these are the days on which I feel most truly alive: the days when it feels I am moving forward. But it's not just days, I have realized in my asthmatic-induced hermitage; it's a lifetime. Most of my life I have felt propelled from one thing to the next by the sheer velocity of the speed I was already going: the whirr of high school whipped me right on into the tumult of college which tossed me into a first job which hadn't even ended before the second arrived and helped me to hone my skills and interests so I could could apply to graduate school where, once accepted, I was swept up in the tornado of that time and place and constantly preparing for my first "real" job which I started a few days after I graduated and went on for a few years until a few days before I came to this one. 

But there is a catch. And you know what it is if you bothered to read the footnote. Perpetual motion, as it turns out, doesn't actually work. Things, though inexplicable theoretically, slow down eventually. And my newest insight is that I will too, not only through bronchial trauma, but because the milestones of my life are bound to be fewer and further between in my next 30 years as they have been in the first 30. It seems the perpetual motion of my relatively balanced existence at this moment can surely not slingshot me all the way. And so what has been a carnival ride must now become a distance sport, for which I may need to develop a different set of skills and priorities.

If there is one thing I have learned in my current post--and I am grateful to those who have shared their journey with me--it is that one of the most difficult realities of human life is that reality of aging. Getting older, from all I can observe in those whom I serve, is TOUGH business: not for the weak of heart. And crafting a life of meaning, relationships with substance, and a set of principles which sustain one when the momentum of life slows to a crawl, is a task for the wise, one of which I hope I will become as I settle into the reality of no-mentum as lifestyle, not lethargy.






*Though one juror, the one with whom I happen to co-habitate, has weighed in. His decision? As my mother used to say, "I'll give you three guesses and the first two don't count."
**I will admit to you--because this is the web and feels anonymous though I need to remind myself that it is NOT--that I just wikipedia-d "perpetual motion machine" to confirm that no such a thing has yet been invented. Clearly, I haven't been reading the science section of the paper recently  or really ever in the last 15 years. You will be glad to know it has not....some problem with "over-unity." Read more here.