Potlucks: The Original Food Rave

Today someone sent me a link to a story in the New York Times describing the phenomenon of "food raves" -- ephemerous underground restaurants, patronized via word-of-mouth, that give up-and-coming young chefs a chance to build a customer base without having to deal with the sometimes considerable licensing fees and bureaucratic hassles involved in the currently trendy pursuit of running a food cart.

My first thought, upon reading the article, was, " Good for them." My second was, "I wish we had food raves in our area." And then it occurred to me: What's another example of cooks showing off their signature dishes to a large crowd in a semi-spontaneous way?

Church potlucks.

Whoddathunk we were on the cutting edge of foodie culture?

Potlucks, at least in my state, have had to go increasingly underground because of onerous health department rules regarding advertising meals to the public; basically, if the food isn't made on premises according to state regulations, by people certified to handle food for public consumption, you can't advertise the meal outside your organization. Bulletin or newsletter blurbs are okay, for now; but mention a potluck on your church signboard or newspaper blurb and you're likely to get a frowny-faced visit from a local health department inspector. A couple of years ago our church ran press releases about our midweek Lenten worship that happened to mention a pre-service potluck, and we were promptly spanked by the Powers That Be. You can bet that schooled us.

People who know me are well aware of my liberal credentials. But these are cases where I feel real sympathy with my conservative neighbors who deeply resent this kind of nanny-ish state intrusion into what is simply a group of friends and neighbors coming together for a meal.  Especially when we all know supermarkets with perpetually sepulchral-smelling meat counters filled with irridescent steaks and gray chicken, or restaurants where we would no more order the egg salad sandwich than directly inject the salmonella into our veins, it seems inefficient, as well as petty, for local bureaucrats to make church kitchens -- at least in my lifetime experience a bastion of proud, obsessively hygienic church ladies who've never seen a church surface they didn't want to scrub with Comet, Pine-Sol or Murphy's Oil Soap, who'd likely commit hara-kiri with the ubiquitous church-kitchen electric knife if they ever inadvertently gave someone food poisoning  -- a front line of their war against food contamination.

I've worked in the public sector, engaging in what we believed was improving quality of life for citizens, catching that crusading spirit, and I truly understand how easy it is for health inspectors to see the world as one big, roiling cauldron of pathogens that they have been tasked with controlling at all costs. But -- I mean -- come on. For some reason I trust that Mrs. Tannenbaum's locally famous bratwurst potato salad isn't going to kill me. Not that I know a Mrs. Tannenbaum who makes bratwurst potato salad. Or that, if there were a Mrs. Tannenbaum, she would bring bratwurst potato salad to a potluck. Or that I know of any potlucks, anywhere, held by anyone. I'm just saying.

Affliction

Tonight we're attending what's being called a retirement picnic for one of my fellow lay ministers -- an "excellent woman," as they say, in her seventies who was a pillar of our congregation decades before going through the Lay Ministry Training Program. A little (okay...a lot) opinionated and stubborn and set in her ways...but an invaluable part of the church family; a lady who can terrify you if you fail on some point of church protocol, but who prays every single day for each of the names on our lengthy church prayer list, and who helped hold our faith community together during dark days in the late '80's and early '90's when its viability as a congregation was questionable on a week-to-week basis.

Shortly after being commissioned, this lady was diagnosed with MS. In the years that have ensued, she has faced down this foe with the same mixture of faith and cussedness that's earned her the rank of matriarch in our church. When her legs grew unsteady she (with much grumbling) began using a footed cane, then a wheeled walker, on her Sundays as assisting minister. When she was having a bad day and coudn't count on enough strength to make it through an entire service, she reluctantly allowed others on the team to help. Meanwhile, she defied her adult children at every turn when it came to driving or working in her yard. "They think they're the boss of me," she'd confide to a sympathetic listener. "I'm just going to do what I want to do." And that's the attitude she's had toward her illness in general.

This past month, though, on a weekend when FT and I were out of town, we heard that our matriarch had taken a bad spill while assisting during the service, and had decided that enough was enough; she was bowing out of the lay ministry team.

This is an added sadness in a year when a double share of life-threatening illnesses have been dealt to  our little congregation and community and wider circle of church friends. It's made me, particularly in these perimenopausal days, start thinking more about my own mortality, and priorities, and it's made me more impatient with the petty issues that junk up the life of the Church. When I hear someone going on about The Troubles in the ELCA or the color of the Communion wine or some line item in a church council meeting, I want to shake them and say, "There are people in our congregation who are fighting for their lives every single day -- and you want me to care about this? Are you ******* serious? What is the matter with you?" Although I suspect the matter is the same nervous whistling in the dark that keeps us all distracted from what's real and immediate and painful and scary.

So, anyway, we're toting two Amish pies to the picnic tonight, where we will thank our friend for her service and wish her well in the newest iteration of her ministry to our church.

Question Time

Several weeks ago, in an effort to step up the content of our church blog, I began a series called "Worship Whys," where readers could submit questions about Lutheran worship.

Perhaps predictably, the first week no one responded until the last minute; and I suspect that was a mercy question from our pastor or a friend of mine. Our people are not communicators, and they also have a fear of standing out that may override the anonymity of blog comboxes.

Things picked up a bit in the weeks thereafter. We got some questions that sounded as if they were penned by unwilling young catechumens -- "Do you have to be confirmed?"...whinge a little as you read that aloud -- as well as a series of questions from someone who sounded like a lost Baptist who'd stumbled on our blog by mistake. Fellow Traveler, who is not a Lutheran by birth, also submitted a couple of very good questions.

I knew the feature had finally arrived, so to speak, this week, when a new questioner -- someone obviously a part of our congregation -- asked, "Why is apple [sic] juice a Communion option when it's supposed to be the Blood of Christ...and who the HELL picks out the hymns?" As FT notes, once you take the snark out of them, they're good questions. So I was happy to respond to them.

It's risky to begin an FAQ service in a church, for the same reason that it's risky to put up a suggestion box in a workplace: It's can become a vehicle for a lot of whiny passive aggression. On the other hand -- we might actually be teaching our people something. And there's not always the time or opportunity in the course of a church service to accomplish the same thing. So Worship Whys is staying on the schedule for the time being. And I'm actually looking forward to more cranky questions; because it means that people are reading the answers.

Con-Evos and the ELCA

With the disclaimer that listening to a bunch of earnest, neo-Calvinist Intervarsity/Navigators-type men (they're always men) doing theology together is my idea of what hell's waiting room must be like...you can read what they think about ELCA Lutherans here and  Internet Monk, specifically the comboxes attached to the series on problems with Evangelicalism (written by an Evangelical-to-ELCA fence-jumper) and the discussion of Lutheran baptismal theology (always good for a cagefight in them thar parts).

Actually, I think hell's waiting room would be more fun. Except maybe for the smelly BP executives dripping crude oil and dead fish over in the corner.

Trinity Sunday Mashup

Generally speaking our Worship Committee does an outstanding job, with very limited resources, in planning our music and other worship elements from week to week.

Memorial Day weekend is always a conundrum, though, when patriotic glurge regularly collides with good theology; and this weekend Trinity Sunday made the mess even worse.

So we got "America the Beautiful" as a prelude, and -- argh -- "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" as a closing hymn.

I was assisting today, and after the last note of that hymn, when it was my turn to announce, "Go in peace and serve the Lord," I put a special emphasis on the word "Lord." I doubt anyone noticed, or if they did they probably attributed it to some sort of verbal tic; but it felt good.

Catching Up

So it's finally taken a bout of procrastination -- in this case, putting off trying to write about John Calvin for our church blog's regular "Saints Alive!" feature -- to get me to post here again.

I hope you're having a pleasant Memorial Day weekend. We spent a spontaneous two-day mini-vaycay up in the Leelanau, on what we told ourselves was a reconnaissance mission for The Kids to price wine for their Michigan-themed wedding in August; we began our journey home just as the weekenders' cars started multiplying in the opposite lane, and laughed at our good fortune all the way south. When we got back home I did some gardening; we went on a ride in the country yesterday evening and treated ourselves to ice cream; today we're going to grill some steak.

(Yes, I know; all part of that big, scary Gay Agenda. If you don't watch out your spouse or significant other may ask you some late afternoon if you'd like to go out for a sundae and a spin around the scenic back roads of your county, and then maybe you'll find yourselves taking a long weekend away, and pretty soon civilization as we know it will crumble into ruin.)

Meanwhile, though, we had to do something very difficult.

Four months ago, at the behest of our pastor, we met a woman he had encountered in the course of his volunteer first responder work. She was in her early 40's; had no family or friends in the area or even in the state; had gotten here through an abusive relationship with the father of her small child and wound up in a shelter; was in a custody fight for the child and had a constellation of other personal problems. Our pastor thought that she might benefit from the influence of strong, independent women who could give her a glimpse of an alternative to the sort of dysfunctional situations she seemed to be falling into with regularity. Her stated plan was to leave Michigan for her home state as soon as she could legally do so with her child; it sounded as if she had family there to help her make a new start, and the shelter (one of the best in the state) was setting up a plan to get her temporary housing and other assistance in the other state as soon as she arrived.

Because both Fellow Traveler and I have a tendency to fuzzify boundaries when we hear sad stories and wind up being taken advantage of, we set up some initial ground rules for ourselves when engaging with this person: We weren't going to give her cash, ever. We weren't going to invite her into our home. We weren't going to run errands for her. We were simply going to be friendly voices on the phone, giving her encouragement; and because she'd asked, we were going to take her to church with us, even though it meant getting up an hour earlier and driving to another county to fetch her and take her back. We even figured that we would make Sundays into an outing and treat the woman and her child to lunch. We'd been given a timeline of about a month and a half for her legal status to be resolved, so we thought that was a reasonable commitment of time and resources. We also consulted with our council members and discretionary-fund committee and came up with the means to send the woman and her child back to their home state as soon as she was legally able to leave. Our quilting ladies gave the little family a quilt to take home with them.

But after an initial month of what we had felt was a positive experience, this happy scenario of do-gooder do-bees and soon-to-be-vindicated mother-in-distress began to unravel, for a number of reasons; without going into detail, while we had enough background into this person's history to know that the situation was complicated, we suspected that another backstory was going on, concurrent to our having gotten involved, that we were not a party to. Meanwhile, the ex-boyfriend's attorney had managed to delay hearing dates, so our short-term commitment was stretching ever farther into the future. This began taking a toll on us, our good will, even our health; we'd get home from our Sunday odyssey and promptly fall asleep, exhausted just by dealing with her multidimensional neediness. This past Sunday was particularly stressful and troubling.

The woman had an important hearing this week, so we were surprised when she didn't call us to tell us what happened. We suspected it was bad news; but when we got ahold of her, she told us she'd been awarded joint custody and had been given permission to go back home with the child; the outcome she had consistently told us she'd wanted more than anything else and that the shelter, as far as we knew, had also been planning on. But now she was waffling: "I have to make some decisions...I may not go there right away..."

At that point both Fellow Traveler and I had had enough. So we told her that we had taken her about as far as we could; that if she were going to be living where she was for an extended length of time she needed to find a church home in that community, and that the staff there -- who'd invited her to their churches in the past -- would be a good resource. We told her that we weren't planning on breaking contact with her, that we wanted to hear from her about how she was doing, that we wished her well, but that we simply couldn't maintain the weekly schedule of driving her back and forth. She didn't say much in response. And that's how we left it. We haven't heard from her since.

I am trying not to be disillusioned or bitter here, particularly because we'd been informed about much of the mess we were stepping into when we said that, yes, we'd keep track of this person. I also know that we were just two little part-time-volunteer church elves on the periphery of  what is really a very commendable, comprehensive program for families in crisis, and that this person has an entire staff of trained people working and advocating for her, who are responsible for her much more than we ever were and who have the expertise and means to assist her and her child more than we ever could.  But, that said...we're not going to do this type of favor anymore for people we don't know. If that makes us bad Christians, well...just add lack of hospitality to our Bad Behavior list.

We have a wonderful life; we have a summer busy with family responsibilities; and we have a commitment to one another, to help and support one another. We want to invest more time and energy in one another and our life together.

People Fatigue

It's been an unquiet few weeks here in Lake Wobegon.

In the absence of our pastor, we lay ministers have been stepping up our duties, including taking on much of the chaplaincy tasks our pastor normally does himself. Our interim has made himself available for providing Communion and doing the more heavy-lifting assignments, but we're the ones who've been keeping him informed about what's going on with whom, and doing other hospital and shut-in visits.

So far I've done two of these, and found them to be meaningful, un-onerous work -- but probably only because I've had fairly easy visits, one with a family member during another's surgery and one with a member of the congregation I get along with fairly well, who's having some big medical problems right now. The other lay ministers are so much closer geographically to a lot of our regular shut-ins -- and in some cases are related to them -- that I've been a bit out of that loop, but am not complaining.

But meanwhile, Fellow Traveler and I have been ministering to individuals who lie outside the formal boundaries of our churches. One is a woman referred to us by our pastor, whom he met in the course of his first-responder work, prior to his bypass surgery. She is an abused partner engaged in a very nasty custody battle with her former significant other. She is getting excellent assistance in a safe place, but our pastor thought she might need some affirmation and advice from women. So we've been doing that; have been bringing her to church, taking her out for Sunday dinner, helping affirm her good choices and trying to keep up her good spirits -- all the while knowing that there are two sides to every story, and understanding that both parties in this relationship made choices that got them where they are now. FT and I go through alternating waves of satisfaction and exhaustion dealing with this lady; by the time we drop her off Sunday afternoon and head home, we're usually both completely spent for the rest of the day.

And then a high school friend of FT's with whom she reconnected on Facebook -- an individual who had a rough start in life, who went into the Army to escape his home and wound up a disabled veteran whose physical and emotional injuries have impaired his work life and relationships for decades -- tried to commit suicide; that despite FT working hard to get him his veterans' benefits (which he hadn't even filed for until recently) and get him connected to VA help for PTSD. We rushed to the hospital where they'd taken him -- a cross-country adventure across the state -- prayed with him and talked to his spouse. FT used a connection at the VA to get him transferred to a facility with expertise in PTSD, and went to bat for him when the hospital he was in tried to keep him there and charge his wife's insurance for the bill. (This family would never be able to pay the copays for several days in ICU.) We've been tracking our friend's progress this past week, and almost found ourselves on the road again when the VA facility released him without a way to get back home. (He was able to rent a car; and was empowered enough through his therapy to say, "You know, I really want to do this myself.")

I'm pretty much over any savior complex I may have nurtured under the surface. This is tough stuff; and, again, it has sapped much of the energy out of us. FT, who has her own PTSD to contend with, spent most of the day after the hospital drama in bed; I've been feeling unwell in ways that I've been trying to blame on my blood pressure medication but may have some psychosomatic component as well.

This is really hard work. And one of the hardest things is not stepping over boundaries; of remaining objective and dispassionate enough to not be completely overwhelemed by other households' tragedies and traumas. That's something they never taught us much about in lay ministry training, maybe because the goal of that particular program was more modest than the reality of what some of us are doing in our congregations.

We're having another "helping" day tomorrow...but we're having Family Movie Night tonight. Don't be surprised if we don't answer the phone or get on Facebook.

"It's Who We Are; It's What We Do"

Today on Facebook my friend Chris posted a link to this discussion on the Duke Divinity School's Call and Response blog about what, if any, practices are mandated by the Christian faith. Blogger Scott Benhase identifies the following as some baseline normative Christian practices with Scriptural and historical chops, that cross denominational and doctrinal lines:

• Participating in the Eucharist on the Lord's Day
• Offering hospitality
• Forgiving sins against us
• Testifying to the faith that is in us
• Serving the poor

Of course we Lutherans' brains tend to short-circuit at the very thought of tying our Christianity in a conditional way to doing stuff. Because, we argue, it's not about earning points by doing stuff.

Here's the thing, though. What if the "doing stuff" is not about earning points at all, but rather inviting people in our faith communities into a series of basic intentional practices that will help them live into their baptismal promises?  Is there a way we can articulate this that won't degenerate into a merit- or shame-based to-do list?

Discuss, please! What do you think of this list? What, if anything, would you add to it or subtract from it?

Photo by Bill Potter, Lutheran Church of Honolulu

Welcome to the Neighborhood

Update on Our Little Parish: Our pastor, thanks be to God, came through surgery with flying colors, is recovering in the hospital and should be home sooner rather than later.

Meanwhile...I've been busy. (As may be evident by my sparsity of posts.) I spent Monday and Tuesday at church answering the phone and doing other tasks related to our pastor's absence, and filled in for him at our last Lenten service this week.

And yesterday I helped welcome our interim pastor to our humble church home. He is commuting from across the state two days a week to act as a pastoral resource, which is partly about doing stuff that we lay ministers aren't authorized to do and partly about, as I remarked only partly tongue-in-cheek, making sure that the inmates don't wind up running the asylum in the next six to eight weeks.

Actually, our interim is a long-time friend of our pastor who, I'm sure, has heard an earful about our congregation over the years. But there's always a first day on the job, and when he walked into the office yesterday morning -- into a scene that included two of our church matriarchs fussing with bulletins and Fellow Traveler installing a new phone system -- I detected the tentativeness of unknowing.

So I took him on a grand tour of the facilities. I shared important names and phone numbers with him. I gave him a heads-up on some of our seriously sick and afflicted. And, as noontime rolled around, Fellow Traveler and I invited him to lunch down the road at the local diner.

The little unincorporated community where our church has been on a downhill slide ever since the end of the timber era, but it still maintains a post office, two churches and a restaurant. The restaurant, as we informed our interim, is the place to meet everyone and learn everything about anything going on in the general area. 

The diner is housed in an old false-front building from the village's short-lived glory days; one walks into a kind of lean-to, then opens the door into an atmosphere thick with the mingled aromas of cigarette smoke, brewing coffee and fried onions. I had thought that our presence would be the most newsworthy event of the moment; then I saw the perky, clipboard-bearing young Health Department inspector striding into the kitchen, followed by several pairs of customer eyes, and knew we'd probably only get second billing on this day.

We took our seats behind the booth of one of the church-bulletin ladies, who was having lunch with a crusty old parish patriarch  and next-door neighbor to the church who holds court at the diner for much of the day. We exchanged pleasantries, then got to talking with our interim about the neighborhood.

As I was trying to play helpful co-hostess during the meal, though, I kept hearing loud snippets of conversation from the next booth:

"Well, someone had better tell the new preacher to turn off the goddamned lights in the church when he leaves! People keep leaving the goddamned lights on!"

"Shhhh...not so loud..."

"I had to call my boy the other night and get him to stop in and turn off the goddamned lights."

"Shhhh..."

A few minutes later I felt a poke in my shoulder. I turned around to find  the old man waving a large, screwlike device in my face.

"Here. Take it. Where you think that came from?"

I didn't know. I fiddled with the interlocking parts.

"That's what the doctor took out of my hip the other week 'cause it was sticking outta me."

I dropped the screw on the table. I looked around for the Health Department inspector.

"Wow...that thing titanium?" inquired a nearby diner.

"Yup."

"That's expensive. Maybe you can sell it."

We proceeded to hear about the replacement procedure, in detail.

Then we proceeded to hear, also in detail, the deficiencies of the gentleman's visiting nurse in dressing his healing wound. Another diner contributed his thoughts on wound hygiene. Gangrene, pubic hair and scabbing all made a conversational appearance.

"That's enough," the old man's luncheon guest murmured.

"Too much information!" echoed the waitress.

After lunch, the interim said, "I really want to thank you two for introducing me to this place."

The thing is -- he was smiling. And I think he meant it.

Ministry Rubber: Meet Road

My adventures in lay ministry are about to take a new and more intensive turn.

Our pastor is on the docket for open-heart surgery in less than two weeks. He had been experiencing fatigue and shortness of breath during his volunteer first-responder runs that were worrisome to him, more than something attributable to simply physical exertion or stress, so his doctor put him through some diagnostic tests...and found that he has a severely blocked artery needing a double bypass.  This appears to have been  a shock for all concerned.

So we've been given ten days to get a contingency plan together for how our church is going to run during the almost three months that we can reasonably expect our pastor to need for convalescence.

We had a meeting last night -- the pastor, the lay ministry team, the church council -- and we came up with a plan. What's good is that it's not going to rock the world of our congregation more than it has to be. After some pow-wowing with our synod, our pastor is going to invite his clergy colleague -- someone with expertise in interim ministry who's also comfortable working with lay ministers and who, through our pastor, is very much in tune to how things work in our parish -- to supervise and mentor us lay ministers for the months to come. We envision a weekly staff meeting. This pastor will also be available to do the sort of heavy-lifting pastoral duties that we are not authorized or trained to perform. But weekly worship and the everyday chaplaincy and visitation tasks of the parish, as well as the sort of drop-in/call-in support and referral work that goes on during the week, are all going to be our lay-ministry dog, Charlie Brown, as much as possible. We are also serving the secondary but important function of running interference for our pastor and his wife, who are already getting fatigue by the constant stream of well-wishers coming to the parsonage door, and who will really need their private, recuperative time after the surgery.

As you  might recall, our pastor went on sabbatical last summer, an experience that gave us all a taste of how to "do church" in his absence. So we aren't deer-in-the-headlights here. In fact, after our meeting-of-the-whole, we lay ministers stayed afterward and hammered out a pretty comprehensive schedule for Sunday and Wednesday worship.

But it is a sobering situation, and a sobering responsibility. We hope we're up to it, and can invest the entire congregation in the process of keeping things going smoothly into the summer.

If you have a moment, send up a prayer for our pastor and his wife, and for our ministerial team.

Where Are the Musical Lutheran Chicks?

There are murmurings around our church that Rachel Kurtz, one of the singers/songwriters on the Lutheran youth/campus ministry circuit, might be coming to our area this summer and stop by for a gig.

This would be great.

It's got me to thinking , though: Where are the rest of the women in Lutheran contemporary music?

Is it because contemporary Christian music is in general an unfriendly place for a non-Evangelical female Christian? Is it because male musicians have more appeal for high school and campus ministry types?

I don't have a theory. Just askin'.

Tastes Great...Less Filling?

I wasn't going to blog about this, because it's really not my business how other people work out their salvation with fear and trembling...but it's been bugging me for almost two months now; and the guy has a public blog, so he's got to expect that what he writes will generate opinion one way or another. Anyway...

Mark Herringshaw is a pastor at North Heights Church, fka North Heights Lutheran Church, a congregation with roots in the so-called charismatic renewal movement of the 70's and that, apparently, after a kind of mutually uncomfortable gadfly existence within what's now the ELCA, finally split to do its own thing under the umbrella of the socially conservative, charismatic Alliance of Renewal Churches. A visit to its website made me think of an Assembly of God megachurch, but with Sacraments. Something like that.

 Anyway, Herringshaw is also a blogger on Beliefnet. And last month, when people's minds were on New Year's resolutions, he began a series on his blog called The Eucharist Diet.

Okay. I'll lay out my cards. I don't particularly understand or enjoy charismatic Lutherans, based on my encounters with same. So I came to Herringshaw's blog with an established negative animus. But I tried to give him a hearing. Here's what he has to say, at the beginning of his project:

Jesus said that I should hunger and thirst for righteousness, and if I do I will be filled. He said that he had food, to another kind of food, that we know nothing about. He said that while the need bread, we don't live on bread alone, but on God's words. And Jesus himself is called the "Word." We live first and last by consuming Jesus himself... He is the Eucharist. When I feed on Jesus, the inner empty places are filled. I need be a glutton for nothing but Jesus!

So I am here beginning an adventure. For the next six months I will follow this discipline and write about it. Here are my five rules for The Eucharist Diet:

1. I eat anything I want... AFTER...
2. I ask God if it is right for me... AND...
3. I ask God to bless my food so that it feeds my body... AND...
4. I ask God to feed my soul with what food cannot fulfill... AND...
5. I eat the Lord's Supper with another follower of Jesus each day.

As I read this, I thought, "Well, so far so good; not as off-the-wall as I'd suspected." I even thought it would make a good Lenten discipline, at least for anyone who has access to daily Eucharist.

But as the weeks progressed and I kept reading Herringshaw's updates, my weirdness meter kept ticking up. Was this a spiritual exercise, or a diet plan? Was there an inherent suggestion, in the updates, that some sort of correlation exists between getting on the "Eucharist plan" and losing weight? Really? Seriously?  What's the difference between that attitude, on the part of a pastor, and some poorly catechized layperson saying, "This Lent I really need to lose about 10 pounds so I can fit into my summer clothes"?

I checked out Herringshaw's website and noticed that, among other things, he seems to have a similar faith in the magickal powers of prosperity thinking.  Hmmm.

Like I said, at the end of the day how Herringshaw chooses to walk his Christian walk is nonnamybeeswax. But for me trying to conflate the Sacrament of the Altar with a personal weight-loss plan would be like...well, like conflating Holy Baptism with a candlelight bubblebath. Call me ungracious or non-Spirit-filled or a blue meanie, but...I don't get it. Maybe the rest of you do.

Church Tourists

It was approaching Valentine's weekend, and it looked as though we were going to have a fairly standard, quiet family celebration; Fellow Traveler had requested pasta bolognese for V-Day, so I was pouring through cookbooks looking for a good recipe, and she had volunteered to make appetizers and dessert.

Then, Wednesday morning over coffee, FT suddenly said, "Wasn't that place where we had the good bolognese up north?" I thought for a moment; yes, I seemed to recall that too.

"So -- what if we just called up the Red Lion Motor Inn (our new home base in Suttons Bay when we travel in the Leelanau) and made reservations, packed our bags and just spent a long weekend up there?"

Well...knock me over with a feather. Of course that sounded like a swell idea. So off we went, Gertie in the back seat, for an excellent adventure in northern Michigan.

I am not going to detail every place we visited while on what turned out to be an almost-five-day adventure; suffice it to say we went up and down the Leelanau coastline and everywhere in between to soak up as much local culture as time would allow. But I will share our experience in church tourism.

For all the vacations and excursions to the kids' homes that we've made in our years together, FT and I have almost never had an opportunity to worship as visitors in other churches. There's always been some monkeywrench thrown in the works that's kept us from doing it during our other Leelanau trips, and other than our Christmas Eve Mass in Brooklyn the kids' somewhat jealous stewardship of our time with them limits what we do when we travel out of state. But we had promised ourselves we'd go to church this weekend no matter what.

So we did, despite some sleety-mushy snow blowing off the lake. We carefully made our way up to Northport, at the very tip of the Leelanau finger, for breakfast at one of our new discoveries, Kamp Corners Coffee inside the old Northport mill. (Toasted bagels slathered in salmon spread...real English-style scones, served with clotted cream on request...excellent coffee...a cozy setting at one end of a venerable old Northport building that has been renovated into a rental hall for weddings and parties.) We then headed to Bethany Lutheran Church on Nagoba Avenue, one of the main streets running through town. (As you can see, the photo to the side was not taken on the day we visited.) This is a very old church whose pastel interior seems to reflect a creative tension between Scandinavian sparseness and Germanic fussiness; an inlaid  painting of Jesus' ascension, framed in carved, gilded wood, provides a focal point in the otherwise plain design.

As you might expect in the middle of February, the congregation was down to about 25 -- maybe a third of whom were in the choir. A decent mix of ages, though, I thought, and a healthy gender ratio; sistahs may be doin' it for themselves these days, but I always feel sad, and a little alarmed, when I walk into a church filled with all women. Despite the small number of worshippers, though, these folks sang, and sang well, and FT actually got to participate in a sung liturgy from the ELW.

FT is not a cradle Lutheran, so some of the service was new to her, not the least of which was a Service of the Word on a Sunday morning; bummer. Because all the local churches are missing their snowbirds, this congregation is pairing up with the Episcopal church down the street for Lent, and it was rather amusing to pick up on the unspoken but nonetheless palpable angst on the part of the congregation that, for the next four weeks, they'd be expected to celebrate the Eucharist every Sunday for the sake of their Episcopal guests. ("What is up with that?" asked FT afterward, so I had to give her the short course on Pietism and liturgical renewal and general old-Lutheran cussedness regarding change of any kind.) We pondered the novelty, for us, of canned Prayers of the Church written right in the bulletin. We enjoyed the children's sermon, and were in fact happy to see kids present, in this community that's lost a lot of the younger population to economics-driven flight out of state. And we were happy to be welcomed in a genuine way by everyone from the usher to the nice lady who sat in front of us to the older gentleman who appears to have the role, found in nearly every congregation I've ever been part of, of Mr. Congeniality -- the guy who comes across the aisle to shake your hand and say, "So where you from, and what brings you up here today?"

We had a great morning there. We will be back.

Oh...and the bolognese, at Gusto's in Suttons Bay, was delicious.

Beginning Lent

Everybody Hurts .

Bring Out Your Dead

We spent most of the daylight hours in church on Sunday.

It was all good stuff. In the morning we had a three-fer adult baptism -- we've been seeing a lot of those lately -- so church ran long. After a quick lunch and an errand in the neighborhood, we were back in church that afternoon for a half informational meeting/half brainstorming session on how our church "does" funerals and how we can help families, both in the church and those with little or no connection to our parish, during a time of transition in our society -- largely based on economics -- regarding how we care for our dead.

Our pastor thinks that families are increasingly choosing, or being forced by economics, to take back more responsibility for caring for their dead; finding alternatives to funeral-home-planned funerals and burials; having to do more with less time and less money. So part of our discussion was about our church's capacity for assuming some of that burden; offering to host visitations at our church, for instance. We talked about the increasing popularity of cremation and increasing tendency for people's remains to wind up somewhere other than a cemetery, and how a columbarium and/or a memorial wall and/or memorial garden might be a creative way to respond to that as well as to ease the pressure on our rapidly filling church graveyard.

We also began talking about how to assist our unchurched neighbors in bereavement while at the same time providing some guidance and boundaries in terms of funeral protocol (as in, "Highway to Hell" as funereal hymn, tequila shots in memory of the deceased and other DIY rituals are not appropriate elements of a Christian funeral) and cost-sharing. We can pull off a pretty cheap funeral for a truly financially hurting family; but there are other equally thrifty alternatives in our community, so we don't want to become patsies for people who pretty much want to throw Gramps into the nearest hole and fuggetaboutit.

Spending almost two hours talking about subjects like the logistics of hosting the dead in our sanctuary overnight ("Might not be a good idea on a lock-in weekend," someone deadpanned) might not sound like the most pleasant way to spend a Sunday afternoon...but Fellow Traveler and I came away from this feeling like our congregation is going through some good, healthy growing pains that are goading us into better people and a better faith community.

Hangin' With the Saints

Since I began our church blog, one of the regular features I've established is Saints Alive -- little hagiographies of the people who show up in the ELCA and TEC calendar of commemorations. I began by sprinkling our usual weekly rota of features with a bio on that individual's commemoration day, but recently switched to giving the saints their own day on the schedule.

Like most Lutherans, my knowledge of the saints was pretty spotty before embarking on this project. The names were recognizeable, sure; but I couldn't have told you anything of substance about most of them. And, deep down, I suppose I held the sort of knee-jerk inherited reservations about paying too much attention to the sainted faithful: that much of their actual stories have been obscured by imaginative embellishment; that they themselves would say, "Don't pay attention to me; pay attention to Christ"; that focusing on extraordinary, rock-star Christians takes away from the quiet, faithful everyday discipleship of the majority of believers; that -- oh, dear -- celebrating the lives of the saints might make one favorably disposed to a theology of [shudder] works-righteousness.

But after several months of laying aside my enculturated skepticism I've got to tell you all -- I love these people. I look forward each week to learning more about them; especially the less celebrated among them.

Just this week, for instance, I learned about Ansgar of Hamburg, the patron saint of Denmark...one of the ironies of Christian history, since both Denmark and Sweden proved almost impossible missionary nuts to crack for this poor man. He just couldn't catch a break. He toiled for decades to spread the Gospel in the Scandinavian countries, but with little success -- and wound up losing his own diocese to war and the vagaries of politics. After he died, much of the Scandinavian missionary effort fell apart and stayed that way for two more centuries. Ansgar should be the patron saint of every failed mission startup, every pastor who's had to oversee the dissolution of a congregation, everyone whose ever had a great idea for following the Great Commission that's completely blown up in their faces.

Gladys Aylward: another great saint, of modern times (who became the subject of a very good movie, Inn of the Sixth Happiness, starring Ingrid Bergman). Here was an English parlor maid with no means or education, who after attending a revival meeting was struck with a sudden conviction that she needed to go to China as a missionary. Rebuffed repeatedly by various missionary societies as being an unacceptable candidate, she persisted in this dream until she finally wheedled her way into a job helping an elderly missionary in China; she took her whole life savings, leveraged it into train fare and rode through Asia to get to this remote outpost. Aylward eventually took over the mission, won the trust and affection of her neighbors, eventually founded an orphanage, and during the Japanese invasion of World War II helped save 200 orphans from almost certain death by leading them on an arduous trek through the mountains to safety. And those are just the highlights of a remarkable career. When Inn of the Sixth Happiness came out the Newsweek film critic, apparently not understanding that it was based on a true story, panned the movie as being too fantastical to be compelling -- when in actuality the movie wasn't real enough in terms of adequately portraying Aylward's life.

And -- speaking as a feminist who isn't afraid to use the F word -- how can one not be impressed by the witness of such strong women of history? -- women who usually had to contend against the institutionalized sexism and vocational limitations imposed on them by the very Church that now celebrates them as exemplars of Christian life? I am constantly amazed by the courage, persistence and tough-mindedness of the women who've wound up in the Church's saints' days and commemorations.

It makes me wonder what we Lutherans have lost, in terms of inculcating a sense of identity and aspiration, by more or less kicking the saints of the Church to the curb. And our odd treatment of God's people in history -- our focusing almost solely on Bible stories, then ignoring the next thousand-and-some years of Christian history to fast-forward, sans context, to Luther nailing his theses to the church door 'n' stuff, then fast-forwarding again to the present day and telling one another and our kids, "We're all saints! Yay, team!" -- sorry, but if my kid came home from a history class with that kind of syllabus, I'd be having A.Talk.With.The.Teacher.

But, anyway...I am having a wonderful time hangin' with the saints, old and new. And as the famous hymn says, "I mean to be one too."

Gordon Ramsay: Church Consultant

Our household's new boy crush this winter is amped-up, foul-mouthed celebrity chef/restauranteur/ubiquitous television personality Gordon Ramsay.

We've gotten hooked on BBC America's version of Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares, in which, each episode, Gordon lands on the doorstep of a moribund eating establishment and proceeds to run the staff through a kind of restaurant bootcamp for a week. He departs for a month, then returns to see if the owners and staff have taken his advice to heart.

It's formula television to be sure, staged and edited for maximum entertainment effect. But despite this, we find Ramsay to be sincerely passionate about food; about the hospitality business; about the importance of honoring local food traditions and supporting local farmers and food artisans; about mentoring people, especially young people, who have the requisite talent and motivation. And he truly seems to want to help the hapless restauranteurs he encounters who have, in his words, gotten themselves in the shit. Yes, he's quite an exciteable fellow; but as my mother used to say, "I'm yelling because I care."

I told Fellow Traveler that I heart Gordon because I suspect I have an inner Gordon of my own who yearns every so often to be let loose on the world. FT, who after her time in the military and at the university spent many years managing food service in places ranging from airline catering companies to urban hospitals to care facilities for aging nuns, has a professional's insight into many of the issues that Gordon tackles on his shows, so for her they're like Old Home Week without the responsibility and stress. (And she freely admits to getting her Gordon on, at least in terms of intimidation if not vocabulary, during her career; her children joke that in a just world she'll wind up in a nursing home whose kitchen staff consists of her fired employees.)

I sometimes wonder what would happen if Gordon would apply to churches the same kind of tough love he applies to failing restaurants. Especially in the climate of the ELCA, where official pronouncements all seem to float amid a word cloud of fuzzy therapy-speak, and where intracongregational relations so often involve triangulation, obfuscation and innuendo ("Pastor, some people are saying..."), what would it be like to have Gordon Ramsay entering into the life of a congregation for a week and goading people into brutally honest communication and active engagement? Can you imagine him, say, critiquing the average church council meeting?

"What the b***** hell? You've gone on for 15 minutes now, and you haven't actually said a b***** thing! Christ Almighty, grow a pair of f****** bollocks and say what you mean!...'Somebody' doesn't like the changes to the Sunday School program? Somebody? Oh, for Christ's sake!  It's b***** well you, madam. You are the somebody. So stop the f****** whingeing and own your own statements! What the hell! You're all f****** adults in a business meeting, not toddlers in a creche, pissing yourselves in your nappies! Grow up! Let's start all over again..."

Or imagine Gordon critiquing an ushering staff on a Sunday morning:

"There's a visitor looking lost -- where the hell are you? Over here counting bulletins? What the f***?  What does an usher do? What does an usher f****** do? You greet people as they come in! You help them find a seat! You make them feel welcome!  You don't stand mooning about here in the narthex, you berk, poking through the b***** bulletins! Shit!  Useless...absolutely useless. Here, let me show you how it's done..."

Gordon attending a confirmation class:

"Turn off that b***** cellular before I take it out and stamp it into f****** bits! What the hell! This is a confirmation class, not a f****** pyjama party! Did you even hear what the pastor just told you about the Apostles' Creed? Did you? Did you? F****** unbelieveable. I'd tell you to go off and join the b***** heathen, but you're there already because you're about as f****** ignorant about Christianity. Jesus. Pay attention. All right then. Here's what we're going to do..."

It's fun to imagine, anyway. And I notice that, in his show, Gordon always pairs his Law with Gospel -- after getting his pupils' attention by verbally reaming new orifices into them, he offers to teach them another way; and models it, and sticks with them until they seem to be getting the hang of it.

In an era where we're all so afraid to offend, maybe it's just refreshing to occasionally come upon a character willing to sin boldly in service to helping other people be who they can be...who acts as a therapeutic rubber band snapped on the wrist of our psyches, making us sit up and take notice.

He yells because he cares.

Stealth Church

It's difficult to know even where to begin to blog after spending a week of nonstop activity in Florida -- and I'm still bringing my brain up to speed after a day of recuperative collapse here at home -- but since I'm a church geek, perhaps I'll start there.

We didn't get a chance to visit the ELCA church just a couple of blocks from our resort, because Saturday and Sunday were our busiest family-and-friend days. I enjoy intramural church tourism, so that was a bummer. As far as that goes, even in a tourist-focused community like the greater Orlando/Kissimmee area, it's hard to spit without hitting a church of some kind -- on the 192 main drag, usually a Spanish-speaking Protestant congregation operating out of a storefront.

What I found amusing, though, were the stealth churches. On our one free morning we decided to have lunch in a nice little Chinese place in the Watertower Plaza of Celebration, the Disney-engineered planned city between Kissimmee and Orlando. Despite the Disney connection, the plaza was refreshingly free of theme-park-icity, and actually seemed to be more geared toward locals than tourists. As we drove around the neat yellow blocks of storefronts we came upon one with a sign reading "The Hub"; underneath was a subtitle something like "A Place To Connect," with information about meeting times. A logo reading "Celebration!" was off to the side. Then, in the billboard equivalent of 5-point type, like the kind on the back of your credit card bills, was something about "Church." My keen analytical mind kicked into gear: Aha! A church that doesn't want you to know it's a church!"

After we got home I tried looking up this outfit online. Apparently it is a kind of satellite ministry of Celebration Community Church, a non-denominational congregation whose theological orientation was difficult to ascertain, even after wading several pages deep into its website and into its "What We Believe" section. I'm guessing Southern Baptist in a cabana shirt with a happy-face pin on the collar. I'm also guessing that, after getting involved in the congregation enough to feel comfortable enrolling in a "Lifeshaping" class ("I went to Pilates this morning, and then after dinner we're all going to Lifeshaping..."), one would find out that if you're female your role in the congregation is pretty much relegated to Kinder und Kueche, and that if you're gay or lesbian...well, let's not even go there.

My reaction to all this twee coyness and equivocation: Oh, cut the crap already. Or as our church-estranged Orlando kids, whose livelihoods are based on creating convincing worlds of illusion and who can thus spot fakery in a nanosecond, would say: Really? I mean, seriously?

On Monday, while visiting St. Augustine, Fellow Traveler and I paid a visit to the St. Augustine basilica in the middle of the old town. (Son-in-Law's comment, when we've gone church sightseeing before: "I'm always afraid I'll spontaneously combust if I step inside.") Here we got unabashed old-school Roman Catholic: crucifixes, candles, statues of Our Lady and the Infant of Prague, holy cards of tortured saints. A hint of lingering incense.

It is what it is. Hallelujah. As are the multitude of shabby little Pentecostal tabernacles and white clapboard churches dotting the backroad Florida countryside. As are the ecclesias along 192.

Here's a unique marketing concept for churches desperate for outreach: Stop the bullshit. Please. Stop trying to pretend that you're a "lifestyle center" or "gathering place." Stop the lying-by-omission on your signboards and in your websites.  You're not fooling anyone.

Authenticity. Being who you are, not what you think other people want you to be. What a concept.

Still Not Getting It

After a bit of holiday respite, I notice that the ELCA Facebook page is once again filling up with people angsting over the Churchwide Assembly vote allowing congregations to call partnered gays and lesbians as pastors/other rostered leaders.

Obviously I have a bias here; I have a dog in this fight, not so much for myself but for my sisters and brothers who are called to these vocational paths as well as to their relationships.

But can someone please explain to me why solidly heterosexual congregations in Outer Possum, North Dakota are freaking out over the thought that a congregation in NoCal or Ann Arbor or Manhattan might call a partnered gay person as a pastor? Can someone explain to me the use of words like "anguish" by these people in describing their state of upset?

Here's why I ask this.

This evening we are entertaining one of Fellow Traveler's high school friends, a fellow veteran, whom she found on Facebook about a year ago. He'd been seriously underserved by the VA, and FT has been helping him navigate through the system to quallify for the benefits he has coming to him, particularly for what is most surely PTSD that dates all the way back to the Vietnam era, as well as for possible Agent Orange exposure.

He's at our house today because this morning, somewhere en route to his "comp and pen" exam, he checked out. He tried calling his home but no one answered. He'd lost FT's and my phone number. He wound up calling another high school friend who is also on Facebook, and asked her to ask us to call him. And she did -- IM'd us in a panic. (All the Farmville and viral cut-and-paste silliness aside, Facebook can be a wonderful thing.)

When FT finally got ahold of her friend, he had made it to the VA, but had no idea of how he'd gotten there. He was crying over the phone, and not always coherent: "I can't remember driving here...I can't stop shaking...I don't think I can do this." FT jumped in the Jeep and drove the 40 miles to the clinic to help him; when she got there the nurses told her they were so concerned  about his not having someone with him to take him home that they were going to admit him as an inpatient. FT got her friend calmed down; spoke to the staff on his behalf; helped him get his VA ID card and some meds to tide him over for a couple of days, and insisted that he stay the evening at our home instead of attempting the four-hour drive back home. She had intended to have him park his car at the VA and ride back with her, but he chose to follow her back this far. We had supper, and now we're just watching TV, chatting, trying to keep things light.

Anguish is thinking about your Vietnam tour of duty in the dark of the morning, on a four-hour drive, and suddenly finding yourself there in the jungle with your friends getting blown up next to you by unseen enemies all around you, and  your heart pounding its way out of your chest, and your suddenly losing your ability to think or even to breathe, and your winding up in a hospital parking lot two hours later not remembering how you got there.

Amguish is sitting in a room with a VA doctor who's trying to find reasons to not grant you service connection, describing your experience all over again, along with the details of your entire military career and along with all the physical and emotional pain, all the failures and humiliations you have suffered, for the next 30 years because of what happened to you while you were in the Army.

Anguish is not being able to string words together into sentences, or remember instructions that someone gave you 30 seconds ago, or sleep through the night. Anguish is waking up each morning wondering what strange physical symptom is going to plague your body that day. Anguish is having panic attacks that come out of nowhere and leave you shaken and gasping. Anguish is knowing that your loved ones, the people closest to you, don't know what's wrong with you -- not really -- and not being able to explain it to them in a way they can understand.

That, dear readers, is anguish.

Getting upset because someone else's ELCA congregation may call a partnered gay person as a pastor, getting upset because you think the ELCA hasn't gotten it right about "the homosexuals," isn't anguish. I don't know what you're feeling, folks, but it's not that.

Chalking the Door: Church Goes Domestic

Yesterday on the way home after church I stopped by a local dollar store and picked up a packet of chalk...for our first ever household Epiphany blessing/chalking of the doors.

I've never done this before. But over the past couple of weeks I've experienced an odd convergence of personal e-mails, Internet rabbit-hole meanders and readings that all seem to lead to discussions of this custom. "Hmmm," I thought. "Maybe the Universe is telling me something."

If this is an unfamiliar custom to you: In many countries households mark Epiphany by a general blessing of living quarters and, in some cases, by a ritual marking of main doorways as a means of blessing all who enter in the coming year. This idea of blessing resonates with me on any number of levels.

I was thinking about Epiphany anyway this weekend, and how at least in Lutheran circles, like so many other festivals that fall in mid-week, it's disappeared into the ether; and as a result laypeople lose opportunities to learn/refresh their memory of important Bible stories, history of the Church and major themes of Christian theology and worship. Yes, it's true; we're not in the Middle Ages, and the logistics of conducting worship services for all these special days, not to mention trudging off to them, simply isn't doable for most of us. But there is a means for preserving this wisdom and tradition: The so-called "Domestic Church."

I know that my more cerebral coreligionists are probably rolling their eyes right now. But I'm unabashedly riding this particular hobbyhorse this year. Just as we need more biblically literate laypeople in the ELCA, I think we need to inculcate a sense of everyday spirituality in our people -- ways to engage hearts as well as minds in our beliefs and heritage and practice. (Our Jewish friends are way ahead of us in this regard.) I believe that we are hardwired for ritual; and, to paraphrase one dog trainer, if you don't give people a ritual, they'll make up one of their own, and you won't like it.

I am also aware that some readers may have a difficult time observing traditional Christian holy days with questionable factual basis; who, for instance, respond to the issue of Epiphany by questioning the historicity of the Magi, sneering at the layers of folkloric embellishments to the biblical text, and so on. Well, that's okay; been there, done that. But maybe -- just maybe -- it's okay to turn off the historical criticism for a few minutes on any given day, and just play with the stories of faith, because they're our stories to tell to one another, generation to generation.

And if you'd like to chalk your door this Epiphany and ritually give the gift of blessing and goodwill to everyone who enters your home in the year to come, in Christ's name, here's how that works.