"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

Bloggus Interruptus

Just a note that I'm still here, still around, still intending on blogging...I've just gotten very busy in the last few weeks, with a multiplicity of things.

I just got back from a day-long trip up north that was simultaneously wonderful and exhausting. I'll have more to say (about many things) tomorrow.

ELCA Homophobia, and Why I'm Done Arguing

While homophobia is something that we gay folks live with on a day-to-day basis, at least in my everyday life it tends to operate in the background, like a buzzing fluorescent light -- if you pay attention to it, it can become quite disconcerting, but if you can focus your attention elsewhere you don't notice it as much.

Every so often, though, the buzz not only buzzes but shocks me.

I hang out on the ELCA Facebook page. They do a splendid job with it; every day they post a question for "fans," or a Scripture verse or other message generating discussion. Most of the frequent fliers there seem like nice people, and I've even "friended" a couple of them.

The Troubles, though, bring out the homophobes, wrapped in Luther Rose banners and waving Bibles. I have trained myself to largely ignore these people and pay instead pay attention to the good discussions on that page. But yesterday, as the dead horse of CWA was being whipped further, one individual whose presence on the forum is largely limited to carcass-banging opined that same-sex couples hurt others -- therefore disqualifying their monogamous committed relationships as holy ones and making their legal status as families undesireable -- because our rate of STDs cost society money in healthcare costs.

This comment was so breathtaking in its hatred and stupidity that I had to break my silence -- not to argue with him, but to bear witness that his comments were both hurtful and slanderous, as well as personally insulting. But I left it at that, recusing myself from further comment. Sandal, dust, shake, move on.

This is why I am not going to go racing off to the CDC webpage to look up relative demographic rates of STDs, or wonder if the same rationale should be used to deny fat, inactive, substance-abusing people protections under the law: This indivdual wouldn't pay attention to me if I did. Because I am a gay woman -- two strikes right there -- I'm sure all this person sees when he sees my posts is the fuzzy part of an eye exam. If we were in a room and I were speaking, all he'd hear is wonk-wonk-wonk, like the Peanuts gang listening to adults.

This morning I was reading the "time travel" retrospective feature of the New York Times, from I think the year 1907, talking about the increased momentum for women's suffrage thanks to the support of wealthy and socially influential women. The thing is, though -- women's suffrage would never come to be if the discussion hadn't moved into all-male halls of power, with a tipping-point of influential men finally creating a cultural and intellectual environment where it became desireably progressive to support the vote for women. In the end, it was peer pressure that made all the difference.

And that's the way, I think, it's always been in matters of civil rights: Minorities can't rely on themselves alone to secure their rights. They have to wait for the development of critical mass on the majority side to effect change.

That is, frankly, not a comfortable place to be -- at the mercy of others. I don't like it. I don't want to think that my fate as a citizen or as an ELCA Lutheran is so dependent upon sympatico Sincere Bible Study Guys (and Gals, although not to the same extent, it seems)  winning over that bloc of recalcitrant peers. But that's reality.

I notice that someone called out the STD guy on the ELCA Facebook discussion. (Who responded, predictably, by complaining that his "bound conscience" is not being respected) . I am grateful for the support. But I'm not going to participate in that discussion further. All I can do is tell my own and my family's story when I can, in media like this blog, and trust in my heterosexual friends' ability to somehow translate that experience  in ways that their friends will understand, because -- unlike me -- the friends will listen to them.

Bedtime Stories

Fellow Traveler's sister sends her interesting birthday presents...things like a hatchet; or a coconut-monkey windchime; or a FLORIDA keychain with twirling dice; or...well, you get the picture.

This year, though, on FT's birthday, UPS arrived with a big, mysterious box from Sister-in-Law covered with multiple warnings about fragile contents. We couldn't figure out what could possibly be inside. It didn't sound like a coconut-monkey windchime; in fact, it made no sound at all when we gingerly moved it back and forth. We slowly pulled off the tape...opened the top of the box...

...and found a smallish but sleek flat-screen television. Turned out Sis-in-Law had remembered FT, many years ago, bemoaning the loss of a television she'd lent out that had never been returned.

This was a wonderful surprise. Except that we had nowhere to put it. So we stuck it in a corner of our front room, sans satellite connection, and talked about hooking it up to a DVD player, or even giving it to a deserving someone who had the appropriate hardware and television service.

In the meantime, after some mind-numbingly frustrating encounters with our satellite providers, we'd been thinking of switching. We went so far as to call our current provider and tell them we were through with them. Suddenly these frequent antagonists of ours were showering us with special offers in order to keep our business -- more channels; a free second hookup. Second hookup?

We thought about our options. We like keeping our front room fairly technology-free. The birthday TV was too small for our living room.

"Let's put it in the bedroom," suggested FT, "on top of the dresser." Our dresser is a frequent collector of stuff; a TV would end that. I pondered all the studies that warn about watching TV in bed; how it interferes with one's sleep and with interpersonal harmony. But then I thought about the falderol that we usually go through before we go to bed, with the pets and the lights and the appliances, and how nice it would be to be able to get all that stuff done and then wind down, in the comfort of a nice, warm, comforter-laden bed.

So that's what we did -- we had Satellite Guy hook up the TV to sit on our dresser.

I have to tell you -- we're loving this. Not every night, mind you, but especially on those cold, rainy, windy evenings when you just want to cocoon.  None of the doleful predictions about sleeplessness, anxiety or disconnection from one's partner have come to pass. We're like a couple in the 1960's marveling at the novelty of having a second TV right in our bedroom. Ain't technology grand?

And if one of us falls asleep, the other is free to carry on, without the need to shake the sleeper awake and summon her to bed.  And the awake person can spend a few minutes watching television that the sleeper does not enjoy -- professional football, cheesy paranormal reality shows, educational programming on arcane topics. It's a beautiful system.

Did I tell you that we're really easily amused?

One technological taboo is still in place, though -- teh Internets is not allowed in the bedroom.

The Failed Experiment

Of all my many goals for this special year, this year of intentional freedom from paid employment, one has just not panned out. It is, for all intents and purposes, kaput.

That's my online class in webmeistering.

There: I've said it and I'm glad.

I have found that I simply do not possess whatever aptitude it takes to spend hours reading lines of code. It was taking me frustrating, rest-of-life-derailing eight-hour days to finish simple assignments. And I wasn't getting any sense of proficiency or accomplishment out of the thing; just futility, especially with the knowledge that most of this stuff is not memorizable; and that chances are it will become obsolete about the time I "get" it.

With the crystal clear vision of hindsight, it is now apparent to me that I could have taken the money for my course and instead leveraged it into decent web design software that would still let me be creative while doing the heavy lifting for me. "Work smarter, not harder." D'oh.

And, to put things into perspective: I already have a decent amount of real-world experience helping out on two websites that Fellow Traveler and I set up for our church and our gym, just for the fun and experience, as well as experience developing an integrated online presence for our church. So this academic defeat is, in the grand scheme of things, a bumpy detour on the road of life, not a dead end.

Gays and Guys' Guys

So today is the big referendum day in Maine regarding marriage-equality Proposition 1.

I was thinking about that yesterday, and about the ways in which the Yes on 1 agitators are attempting to manipulate emotions in Maine, and about the Sincere Bible Study Guys I mentioned in a previous post. They're usually about 30-something, usually dads of smaller children, very down-to-earth and manly-man; the kind of guys who want a "yes" to be "yes" and a "no" to be "no," who mean what they say and say what they mean; who'd pull you out of a burning house or crashed automobile without blinking.  But they seem to find teh gay, as a class, pretty intolerable.

What's up with that?

One of my best buddies when I worked up north, Zen Congregationalist Marine -- one of the five males who worked in our overwhelmingly female company -- was a guys' guy who nonetheless had an easy way with the ladies (perhaps because he was the baby in a large family of mostly sisters), and was quite happy to act as the office Dear Jake in explaining to his female coworkers What Guys Think. One day the topic swung around to homophobia, and another friend of mine mused that straight men seemed a lot more uncomfortable dealing with gay men than straight women are discomfitted interacting with lesbians.

ZCM explained that many men are at heart terrified of being solicited for sex by another man -- or, worse yet, being sexually assaulted by another man -- and that this fear tends to short-circuit rational thought about homosexuality in a lot of male circles.  When straight women meet gay women, they tend to accept them as members of the larger sisterhood of double-X chromosomes; for straight men, encounters with or even thoughts of their gay brothers seem to conjure up...well, the laundry-room scene in The Shawshank Redemption.

"Well, welcome to our world," responded my female friend, rolling her eyes. "Women have to deal with unwanted sexual advances and sexual predators all the time."

ZCM shrugged. "I'm just sayin'."

Some time later, after a day working out of town, ZCM confided to us that, en route home, he had been propositioned by a stranger at a freeway rest stop; some middle-class guy who looked like he was on his way to a Rotary meeting.

"What did you do?" we asked. ZCM was a burly lumberjack type who'd been in military intelligence during the Vietnam era, who probably possessed a frightening personal-defense skill set; despite his mild-mannered civilian persona, we wondered what exactly had transpired in that men's room.

"I'll tell you," he replied. "I said, 'Look at you. You're sneaking around in a public bathroom, for God's sake, begging for sex. That is just pathetic. And it's dangerous -- for you and for your wife if you have one. If you're gay, then why don't you just get honest with yourself and everyone else and say, "Hey, I'm gay," and find a good man in the gay community, and settle down?'" He said that the stranger, who had stood transfixed as ZCM delivered his little urinal-side homily, slowly backed out of the men's room, fled as fast as he could to his vehicle and sped off.

I wish Zen Congregationalist Marine could talk to every Sincere Bible Study Guy in this country, and share this particular story with them; how a real, straight, manly-man guys' guy deals with his worst gay fear realized.

Maid Women

We made a big decision at our house a couple of weeks ago.

We came to the conclusion that we were tired of stressing out about housekeeping -- a task that neither of us finds any joy in performing, and that our busy lives don't give us a lot of time to do.

We counted our pennies and decided that it was worth it to economize elsewhere in order to hire someone to help us with the house once or twice a month. We knew someone from church who keeps houses for a living, who has also had personal experience with Fellow Traveler's medical issues and attendant cleaning needs, whom we trust and whom we knew would appreciate the business, and asked her if she could help us out.

So now we have a housekeeper.

Today was her second day on the job, bringing up the neatness level of our house to our desired baseline so that we can dial back to a less intensive maintenance schedule.

Having a housekeeper is wonderful. It's also weird.

It's odd, of course, to give someone such access to our home on a regular basis. And it's odd to have a housekeeper who's a friend. We sometimes don't quite know where to draw boundaries. How much do we chit-chat, for instance? And about what?

Our housekeeper also makes us both feel very inadequate about our own housekeeping skills even in a maintenance capacity. Like many people with housekeepers, we "pre-clean" before she arrives; and still she spends hours here, saving us from ourselves. We already had what we thought was a rather formidible arsenal of cleaning products and tools, but after surveying our supply she gave us a wish list of technologically superior supplies she prefers -- ouch. And she finds things to clean that completely escape our attention. Today she asked us if we had an old toothbrush. When we asked why, she said she needed it to brush the mesh at the end of the faucet, to clean off the hard-water deposits. This is not something we would have thought of on our own, ever. She performed some sort of magic on our stove cooktop that erased accumulated scorch predating Fellow Traveler's purchasing this house. We feel kind of dumb.

Mollie the cat is not at all happy about this new turn of household events; when the housekeeper shows up, Mollie heads for the closet in the guest room and stays there all day. Gertie is less angsty, but still isn't really sure that she likes this lady coming into our house. And I noticed today that within about a half hour of her leaving, Gertie had all her toys out of the box and onto the floor again.

On the other hand...clean house. And we're now motivated to keep it that way.

Con-Evs Invade New England!

I was all set to get angry about this story .

"Please don't let them ruin Vermont before we get there," I muttered to Fellow Traveler as I summarized the article, about a new influx of politically and theologically conservative Evangelical missionaries to New England, trash-talking the liberal church tradition there and eager to manifest some new rightward-turning Great Awakening.

Take a combination of militant moral superiority and the annoying enthusiasm of a dog that won't stop humping your leg, and cross that with the knowledge that these same individuals want to disempower and marginalize me by any means necessary while destroying my family -- well, let's just say that I have serious issues with these sisters and brothers in Christ. I don't believe that their primary purpose is a sudden desire to save souls in New England; I think their goal is political and social domination of that region. Because in their jihadian heads, it's all the same thing.

While it gives me no pleasure to say this, two days ahead of All Saints Day: I would rather spend the rest of my life as a puzzling but accepted religiously observant oddity in an overwhelmingly and cheerfully irreligious society than spend one minute under the rule of a Southern Baptist or Orthodox Presbyterian vision of God's kingdom come to earth. And I will do everything I can as a citizen in a democracy to keep the latter from ever happening. And if it did anyway -- O Canada.

But I digress. Anyway, I'm reading this article, and I feel the smoke starting to curl out of my ears...but then I started thinking about Fellow Traveler's life in Maine. She spent about a dozen years there. She's got stories.

A picture developed in my mind. I saw an earnest young theological heir to Jerry Falwell or D. James Kennedy, re-wrapped in tats and a jazz patch in an attempt to appear hipster, standing at a Maine farm-field gate. I can hear the Mainer speaking to the eager young missionary.

"New church? Don't need a new church. Got an old church in town. Bean suppah Sattaday night."

And suddenly I was in a good mood again.

OMG! Facebook Idolatry!

My attention was recently directed to a post on the blog Pretty Good Lutherans, discussing the fact that ELCA Presiding Bishop Mark Hanson has a Facebook page.

Since Lutherans are a pugnacious bunch, and since we have always seemed to have a Puritan rump -- what Garrison Keillor calls the Dark Lutherans -- in our midst, it is completely unsurprising that some people find +Hanson's Facebook presence an affront -- specifically an invitation to idolatry.

Idolatry? Really? Seriously?

After snorting a few cc's of coffee out of my nostrils reading some of the frowny-faced comments regarding the good bishop's page, I went to my own list of "fanned" Facebook pages. There I found:

Bob Dylan
The New York Times
Green Mountain Coffee Roasters
NPR
Sonic
The Old Fraunces Tavern
Trader Joe's
The Indigo Girls
Irshad Manji (progressive Muslim activist and author of The Trouble With Islam)
The Detroit Tigers
Michigan State University
Dow Gardens
Tell Dick Cheney to Shut the Hell Up
Bronner's CHRISTmas Wonderland
The Hunger Site
The Deadliest Catch

There are about 20 other persons, businesses and institutions I've "fanned."

Out of all these...there aren't any that I would call  the ground of all being, none that I would consider my ultimate concern; none that I pray to, burn incense before or otherwise venerate. Bishop Hanson seems like a swell guy and all, but -- I mean, he's on the same list as Sonic limeade. Come on.

Tongue-Tied

Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers and sisters, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness. For all of us make many mistakes. Anyone who makes no mistakes in speaking is perfect, able to keep the whole body in check with a bridle. If we put bits into the mouths of horses to make them obey us, we guide their whole bodies. Or look at ships: though they are so large that it takes strong winds to drive them, yet they are guided by a very small rudder wherever the will of the pilot directs. So also the tongue is a small member, yet it boasts of great exploits. How great a forest is set ablaze by a small fire! And the tongue is a fire. The tongue is placed among our members as a world of iniquity; it stains the whole body, sets on fire the cycle of nature, and is itself set on fire by hell. For every species of beast and bird, of reptile and sea creature, can be tamed and has been tamed by the human species, but no one can tame the tongue—a restless evil, full of deadly poison. With it we bless the Lord and Father, and with it we curse those who are made in the likeness of God. From the same mouth come blessing and cursing. My brothers and sisters, this ought not to be so. Does a spring pour forth from the same opening both fresh and brackish water? Can a fig tree, my brothers and sisters, yield olives, or a grapevine figs? No more can salt water yield  fresh. -- from the Epistle of James

I'm still chewing on our epistle lesson from last Sunday.

Maybe that's because, as if on cue,  current events have been filled with stories of intemperate people -- Joe Wilson, Kanye West, Serena Williams, Glenn Beck, et al -- shooting off their mouths in public. Granted, James is speaking to the Christian community, not the world at large; but it's the same problem, with the same consequences.

But I've also been thinking about other examples of people, particularly people with spiritual or social gravitas, using words in a destructive way.

I regularly read an opinion column by a political writer who constantly writes hand-wringing jeremiads about The End of the World As We Know It. Multiply him by every other influence in the media and the world of letters for whom every change in demographics, in politics, in the environment, in society, is a catastrophe. Yes, sometimes change is unfortunate; yes, it's natural to mourn the loss of the familiar and feel anxiety about the new. But a constant drumbeat of "The sky is falling" -- does that not have the power to send others, especially anxious others, into despair? Or -- when the sky does not in fact fall -- cynicism? How does one balance the need to talk about perceived "bad news" with the need to keep people's hope alive? "Without a vision the people perish."

Likewise, I've been thinking about a tendency that I find in myself; an impatience with biblical literalists that gives me almost a kind of impious pleasure in kicking over their right strawy cradles of simpleminded interpretation. Getting into pissing matches with aggressive Bible bangers is one thing -- but is it really so important to overwhelm the doe-eyed newbie in Bible study with historical-critical analysis in response to one of her innocent comments about a text? What is the desired outcome here? What's the more likely outcome? Am I really concerned about learning happening? Is there a better way to respond -- one with less risk of knocking over a spiritually vulnerable person's applecart of faith?

See, folks -- the lectionary does work. If presented well, the texts keep percolating in your brain long after Sunday.

Recovering From Work

I had a dream the other night -- actually, a full-tilt-boogie nightmare -- about my previous job. I woke myself up shouting out at some critical point in the dream; my pulse was racing, and my molars hurt, apparently from their grinding together in my sleep.

I can honestly say that I have never hated a job so much before -- and that includes my disastrous term as a secretary in a college office, whose voluntary leaving I celebrated by burning my job paperwork.  And it had nothing to do with my work tasks per se, which I often found enjoyable -- in the end it was all about the people.

It's taken me almost seven months to even begin to feel "normal" again -- to feel smart and competent and happy to wake up in the morning. It's also taken me almost seven months to reconnect with a couple of friendly coworkers; before that, I just didn't want to be that close to the job.

A sobering thought for me, though, is...how many stories of quiet desperation are never told? How many of the people living those stories do not, like me, have the opportunity to opt out, at least for a time, and regroup?