Sermonating

At our church we lay ministers get a monthly opportunity to deliver the sermon. This month is my month, and this Sunday is my preaching Sunday.

I've preached on Christ the King Sunday before, so between the lessons and the experience I'm on pretty familiar territory.

Sunday's lessons are rich in irony, from the "God is on our side" Psalm identifying the king's earthly reign with the Reign of God to that dramatic text in the Gospel of John where the rabble seems to fall away in the periphery as Jesus and Pilate, the representatives of heavenly and earthly authority, confront one another; where God With Us speaks truth to power not in the person of the prophet Daniel's awesome vision but in the battered and bloody person of a tortured prisoner in an occupied land. The festival day is itself ironic, born at the ascendancy of fascism, a nationalism worse than the nationalism that had just laid waste to much of Europe.

But this is tricky stuff, in a local culture where God and country are often knotted together in ways that make conveying the subversive nature of the Gospel sound like treason to all that is right and good. I briefly thought about sketching out a swastika on a sheet of typing paper and taping it to the pulpit as an illustration of what happened in our own faith tradition when Church let itself be coopted by State, but reality-checked myself shortly thereafter. There has to be a good way to communicate the implications of "Jesus is Lord" to people who love their country, who in many cases have served their country in the military, some of whose kids are off in the Middle East fighting a war of dubious wisdom on behalf of that country, who on some levels feel beseiged by outside forces challenging their beliefs and practices and presumptions about many things. The good news that Caesar isn't Lord of All may, on some level, sound to them like the bad news of one more brick being kicked out of an increasingly shaky wall that keeps them on the other side of chaos.

I'm not sure exactly where I'm going with this whole thing yet. But I'm going somewhere with it.

Apples of Our Eye

One of our best Amishing stories happened a short time ago:

We were driving home from a trip to a local apple orchard, where we'd bought some cider and a bag of apples. We decided to go home via the back roads, past a couple of Amish families who maintain roadside stands, to see what they had to offer that day.

As we stopped at one stand, a young girl came out to wait on us, soon followed by a smaller child who couldn't speak English. (Small Amish children speak a Swiss dialect of German at home, and only learn English when they start attending school.) The barefooted kids were so charming, and grimy, and seemed so serious about closing the sale. So as we bought a couple jars of canned peaches from them we offered them a couple of apples from our bag, along with our money. Their faces lit up. The younger child devoured his in a few gulps; he ate like a kid with competition at the dinner table.

"Maybe your other brothers and sisters would like apples too," offered Fellow Traveler. "How many do you have?"

"Ten!" announced the girl.

Gulp.

We just gave them the rest of our bag.

Bugged

You know it's not a good day when Fellow Traveler, the University of Michigan's most ardent fan, takes to her bed at the beginning of the game.

FT woke up in the middle of the night with nausea and a gutache. She was marginally functional in the morning, but after attempting soup for lunch she threw up again, and decided to go back to bed.

We are desperately hoping that this isn't the H1N1 virus, since neither of us has had the opportunity to get vaccinated for it yet. (We did get our standard flu shots back in September.) FT wondered if she could have possibly picked up the bug at the emergency room the other night when she had to have the sliver in her toe removed. Because of her ostomy, she has to be careful avoiding influenza, especially the barfy/diahrrhea-y strains; aside from the misery these symptoms cause in someone who's missing a significant chunk of her gastrointestinal system, the potential for dehydration and inability to take in nutrients has all sorts of negative implications for maintaining a healthy electrolyte balance. (We travel with gallons of V-8 juice, which is loaded with potassium and other important minerals -- more than sports drinks or other fortified foods/beverages.)

We reviewed our diet over the last couple of days. The only food she has eaten that I haven't was chili sauce on a couple of coney dogs we ordered for takeout yesterday. She didn't eat anything that might cause a blockage, a potential problem for ostomates that leads to nausea and stomachache. "It feels like the flu," she explained. "Nothing mechanical. It feels like a bug."

It's a moot point anyway. She's in bed; I'm half-watching the MSU game and wondering what useful household tasks I can accomplish without making annoying noises. Poor Gertie, who picks up on when one of us is sick, is lying next to me with furrowed brow. It's a warm, sunny November Saturday, but it pretty much sucks at our house right now.

Friday Five: Very Superstitious Edition

It's Friday the 13th -- time for a spooky RevGalBlogPals Friday Five!

1. How is this Friday the 13th looking for you?

It's looking like Day 2 of our epic Clean the Refrigerator marathon. Yesterday was devoted to throwing out assorted biology experiments that had migrated to the back of the fridge, to ruthlessly culling all condiment bottles and jars with unknown expiration dates and to washing out the crisper drawers. Today I am continuing to scrub shelves -- Fellow Traveler kindly removed them for me while I was off getting spiritually directed -- and together we'll put the thing back together, with considerably fewer contents. The frightening thing is...I am enjoying this, or at least the anticipation of looking into a clean refrigerator. Maybe it's perimenopause.

2. Have you ever had anything unlucky happen on Friday the 13th?
I seem to remember actually breaking a mirror on a Friday the 13th many, many years ago, much to the distress of my poor mother. I don't recall any other negative repercussions, though.

3. Did your family of origin embrace or scorn superstitions? 4. Are there any unique or amusing ones from your family, region, or ethnic background?
As noted, my mom -- and her mother as well -- were terribly superstitious. You name it -- breaking mirrors, spilling salt, horseshoes hanging upside down on a nail -- it all scared the bejeezus out of them. But their family had a rough, rough life with a lot of misfortune, so it's perhaps understandable that they'd project their experience onto handy externals. My dad's side of the family pooh-poohed a lot of this stuff, but they had their own pet superstitions. They considered it unlucky, for instance, if girls whistled -- "Whistling girls and crowing hens/both will come to no good ends" -- and my dad was actually quite irritated at my maternal aunt for teaching me how. Dad hunted rabbits and always had a rabbit's foot hanging up in the barn. And -- I find this interesting -- my father's side of the family considered black cats to be good luck on the farm, and would be happy when Mama Barn Cat produced a black kitten in a litter. Both sides of the family embraced inherited folk traditions regarding the health of man and beast, and the potential "hexing" powers of hostile others -- tying a bit of thread in a knot around a wart, then taking and burning the thread, or tying red fabric on a cow's tail to keep the evil eye from afflicting the herd.  Looking back at all this, I'd love to know more about German and Eastern European folk magick and follow the folkloric trail from there to here.

5. Do you love or hate horror movies like "Friday the 13th"?
I don't like the mad-slasher/undead mass murderer genre at all. I do like psychological ghost stories/thrillers; I was one of the people who thought The Blair Witch Project was an entertaining movie, and will watch shows like Ghost Lab even though I know they're hokum. (For anyone interested, YouTube has a series of short videos from, apparently, a disgruntled former employee or hanger-on that demonstrates some of the un-paranormal funny business going on behind the scenes on that series.)

Extraordinary Time

For everyone who's just about had it with  the "green and growing season" -- I love this!

Our Trip to th ER

Oy! It's been one of those days.

Actually it was a very good, kick-back day. Contrary to the common wisdom predicting rain, it was fairly sunny and warm today. We went to the local apple orchard for a final bag of local apples, took Gertie to the Recreational Area and then came home to grill some lamb steaks.

I think I had my shiraz in hand when Fellow Traveler came limping through the patio door, grilled meat on a plate, gasping, "Red alert! Red alert!" I didn't understand what she meant, but I grabbed the steaks as she hopped to the sofa.

"My toe!" she gasped. "This hurts so much!"

FT, who has had major abdominal surgery and spent over a month in the hospital, is a pretty tough cookie when it comes to pain. But now she was nearly in tears.

"Look at my toe!"

To my shock, when she raised her foot I saw a splinter well over an inch long completely embedded in the underside of her big toe. There was no end protruding from the skin; but there was blood.

Somehow, as she'd been walking to the door with our dinner, her foot hit the patio in such a way that a loose sliver of wood  pushed its way down the length of her big toe, deep under the skin.

"I think I have to go to the doctor now."

First she called the nearest VA hospital for guidance. If you're a fully service connected veteran it's expected that you get your healthcare at a VA facility, but our local VA clinic closes at 5:00 pm. A clueless nurse at the other end of the helpline didn't seem to understand what was going on.

"Well, if your local clinic is closed then you have to come here. There's no doctor on duty right now, but we can call one in."

"Your faciity is an hour away, and I can't drive. We have a local hospital 10 minutes away."

"You can't find someone to drive you here?"

The VA is loathe to give patients a go-ahead to get treated outside the system. But given the alternative of driving 8 miles up the road to our local hospital's urgent care and driving an hour to Saginaw, to have someone remove a splinter from a toe -- it was a ridiculous choice.

The nurse -- who still had no idea even of where the VA's own satellite clinic in our area was located, let alone where we live -- finally gave the go-ahead for FT to go to urgent care.

And so we went.

Our local hospital's ER has the reputation for lackadaisical walk-in care, but for some reason we seemed to hit the place at the right time of the evening, and FT was ushered right in. After an excruciating Novocaine injection, the on-call doctor excised the splinter. It was huge -- bigger than I'd originally estimated. "That is one big piece of wood," he marveled.

Amazingly, we were back at home after only about an hour. FT's appetite had understandably disappeared during this ordeal, but we did finish off our bottle of shiraz. She's now sitting with her bandaged foot propped up, waiting with some trepidation for the numbzit to wear off.

An old Chinese curse wishes, "May you live in interesting times." I think a corrolary curse is, "May you have an interesting day."

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.

Friday Five: New and Improved Edition

This week's RevGalBlogPals' quiz challenges us to name five things we especially like when they're new. Hmmm. Let's think about this. The smell of a new baby has already been used as an example (and G-bambino is still in utero, although not for very long, so this is anticipatory, not actualized). Okay -- here goes:

1. Newly baked bread. (Maternal Grandmother said that day-old bread was better for the digestion...but we know better.)
2. The smell of a new automobile. (Yes, it's unhealthy to sniff the inside of new automobiles, but...I don't care.)
3. A new Old Farmer's Almanac -- I know this is very hokey, but it gets the new year off to a good start.
4. A newly scrubbed bathroom; there's something about the chemical freshness, the gleam of the mirror and porcelain, the squeakiness of the shower tile, the soft drape of a new set of towels, that makes you feel all domestically accomplished and hygienic -- even if it all only lasts for five minutes.
5. A new stack of library books, especially if they've been collected in a random, intuitive manner. There's a lot of potential in there.

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.

Happy All Saints' Day

The Opposite of Reformation

Arlene (not her real name) rode my schoolbus. She was about three years older than me; friendly girl, always very fashion-forward, and radically uninterested in scholarship -- a natural disinclination accentuated in her teen years by the copious amounts of ganja she and her friends smoked during lunchtime in their shag-carpeting-lined Chevy vans over in Student Parking.

Arlene was in my American history class, which at the time was state-mandated for high school graduation. This was her third trip through the course. I remember one day, after the unit on World War II, when the teacher passed out our graded exams, and we could see that Arlene's bore a prominent red "E." We heard her sigh over her exam, and saw her out-of-order eyes try to focus on the the document before them. "So, like, who did win World War II? Like, it wasn't, like, Hitler? Damn."

There was no fourth American history class for Arlene.  About a decade later I ran into her cashiering at a supermarket in the next county, apparently a responsible taxpaying citizen despite the less-than-glorious end of her academic career.

The virtues of perseverence aside, there often comes a point, in certain endeavors, when you just have to cut your losses and stop trying. John Shelby Spong seems to have reached this point, at least according to his recent manifesto announcing his refusal to further debate homosexuality, the role of women in the Church and other issues whose resolutions are so self-evident that it's pointless to discuss them further.

I first read Jack Spong when I was in college. I thought that his Rescuing the Bible From Fundamentalism was brilliant. Over the years I thought he'd gotten a little too strident, a little too self-promoting, a little too eager to assume for himself the mantle of modern-day Reformer. But I rather liked this particular segment of his manifesto:

I do not debate any longer with members of the "Flat Earth Society" either. I do not debate with people who think we should treat epilepsy by casting demons out of the epileptic person; I do not waste time engaging those medical opinions that suggest that bleeding the patient might release the infection. I do not converse with people who think that Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans as punishment for the sin of being the birthplace of Ellen DeGeneres or that the terrorists hit the United States on 9/11 because we tolerated homosexual people, abortions, feminism or the American Civil Liberties Union. I am tired of being embarrassed by so much of my church's participation in causes that are quite unworthy of the Christ I serve or the God whose mystery and wonder I appreciate more each day.

Many of us can relate to that sentiment. Just yesterday I was reading a gentle, patient attempt by a seminarian to try and exegete "clobber verses" in Romans for the benefit of Sincere Bible Study Guy (those of you who frequent Bible studies will be acquainted with this Typ) who seemed incapable of understanding what she was saying. She may as well have been typing in Japanese characters. It wasn't a case of "I passionately disagree with you." It was more like the Peanuts films where adult voices are represented as a discordant "WONK-WONK-WONK." I caught a brief mental glimpse of Arlene, back in history class, staring slack-jawed at the chalkboard, probably working out the lyrics to Stairway to Heaven while our teacher was lecturing about VE Day. Another year, another lecture, wouldn't have made a difference.

So part of me is with Jack Spong: Over it; moving on. But another part of me resists giving up. How can a Church be "ever-reforming" if reformers decide, "To hell with it," and recuse themselves from the conversation?

And...I can't help but wonder if Spong is really capable of carrying out his own resolution. My money is on "no."

O The Horror!

Halloween wouldn't be Halloween without terrified Real Christians[tm] whimpering about Satan and his demonic minions lurking under every rock and behind every curtain. Evidently, according to the frequently amusing blog Stuff Christian Culture Likes, Harry Potter is still on the fundie short list of Tools o' the Devil.

If that's not frightening enough...turns out that we Lutherans are also in league with Satan.

I know; making fun of Real Christians[tm] is too easy, and not scary unless it's Election Day.

But here is something really, really frightening, especially if you possess a Y chromosome or an unsteady hand.

Hope you had a fun Halloween. Go ahead -- eat the rest of the chocolate.

The Bishop and The Boys' Club

Like many of my fellow ELCAers, and as someone of German heritage, I was delighted to hear that a woman, theologian and Bishop of Hanover Margot Kaessmann, had been elected to become head of the Evangelical Church in Germany.

Kaessman has some impressive street cred. Active in the church since her youth, she has been a parish pastor; a scholar and teacher; a EKD official; a member of the World Council of Churches' Central Committee. (She resigned from the WCC in protest after the WCC appeared to be waffling on its commitment to ecumenical fellowship, in deference to its more conservative members.) She has been an active opponent of right-wing extremism in Germany. She has been a strong advocate for progressive social policies as well as an advocate for re-spiritualizing the German church by placing more emphasis on prayer, Bible study and devotional life. She is also a mother of four, and a survivor of breast cancer.

I didn't know anything about Bishop Kaessman before reading about her online. But, interestingly, most of the information I just shared with you was nowhere to be found in most of the articles announcing her election as head of the EKD. Oh, no.

"German Protestants on Wednesday elected Margot Kaessmann, a divorcee and the Lutheran bishop of Hanover, to lead them, the first woman to take the post and only the third woman to head a major Christian church," reported Reuters. This meme was repeated in several other online news features...that and a reference to her as "Mother Teresa crossed with Demi Moore."

What decade are we in, again? I mean, when I was in grade school a "divorcee" was an exotic and dangerous creature whose stereotype was clad in jungle-print stretch pants and indolently puffed on alimony-funded Pall Malls while adolescent boys leered and decently married housewives tut-tutted. But we're not living in 1967 anymore. So why is the lead sentence in an important news story, from a respected news syndicate, about a respected woman with a lengthy curriculum vitae and significant spiritual as well as professional gravitas identifying her principally in terms of her marital status, and then adding insult to injury by completely ignoring her personal story as a church leader?

The worst part of this: The reporter who wrote the story is female.

At least she didn't refer to the Bishop as "perky."

Friday Five: "Lifesavers" Edition

Hmmm...it's been awhile since I've tackled a Friday Five. (Or blogged, for that matter...great to be back!)

This week's Friday Five asks us about our personal "lifesavers" -- things that keep us afloat when life tries to drag us down.

1) Your lifesaving food/beverage.
Those would be, respectively, chocolate and coffee. For me coffee is necessary every morning before I can truly assume a locked and upright position, physically and mentally. (This is maybe why my goal of early-morning yoga hasn't yet happened -- for some reason it seems wrong to precede yoga with a cup of joe, but on the other hand without the coffee I am in a defacto Corpse pose.) And chocolate's natural mellowing agents take the edge off sadness, frustration and anger. I've recently developed a real taste for chile-infused dark chocolate, which seems to amp up all those good qualities.


2) Your lifesaving article of clothing.
When I am safely esconced in my home, my favorite thing to wear is a pair of men's flannel night pants, preferably plaid. I'm not making a statement about the constructs of gender; it's just that the guys' styles have more room to move for someone who likes sitting cross-legged. In the summer the flannel gets a little lighter and is paired with a T-shirt; in the wintertime the flannel gets thicker and is topped with a hoodie. It's a human cocoon. I like it.

3) Your lifesaving movie/book/tv show/music.
If you're speaking in terms of spiritual and other profundity, I would have to say the Book of Common Prayer's Daily Office; the prayers and Scripture readings ground me even if I'm only half-attending to them, even if I don't get through an entire prayer, even if I don't want to be reading them. In terms of welcome mindless distraction, I do loves me my Deadliest Catch. In terms of general "making any day go better" -- I enjoy music of all kinds; and when I'm down or depressed, nothing beats the blues.

4) Your lifesaving friend.
The first three years of my school career I was a geeky, unloved and frequently bullied loser. Sometime during the third grade, though, I was befriended by a group of boys who shared my academic interests. We remained fast friends for the rest of our public-school careers, even when we got to middle school and found ourselves rising to the top of the school pecking order. Many years later, working in northern Michigan, my coworkers in my department -- fellow overeducated, underpaid former  liberal-arts majors -- and I developed a close friendship that extended beyond working hours; it would have been a lonely decade without those pals. And, of course, my most lifesaving friend is Fellow Traveler, who's not only saved me from loneliness and self-absorption but has expanded my life in so many ways.

5) Your lifesaving moment.
I had an actual, physical lifesaving moment when I was about 2 1/2. While my parents were distracted by one thing or another during a typical day on the farm, I -- playing "Jack in the Beanstalk," I later explained -- crawled up our farm elevator and fell into the interior chimney of our almost-empty corn crib. I could have easily -- easily -- fallen to my death; instead I landed on a pile of old corn cobs, where I wailed indignantly until our neighbors, called by my frantic parents, came and somehow extracted me from the wire tube at the center of the corn crib. One of my less dramatic but no less profound  psychological lifesaving moments came when I went away to college -- that day I felt a freedom that, for too many reasons to relate here, I'd never felt before. And another lifesaving moment was that moment I came out to myself -- that sense of utter relief and self-affirmation that is sometimes frankly very hard to convey to straight people.

Bonus question (my own): What is your favorite Lifesavers flavor? I'm not even sure if they make this anymore, which tells you how often I eat Lifesavers these days...but I used to just love the mango melon flavor inside the tropical-fruits pack.

Daffodils for All Saints

This week I visited the family graves; something we've always done in my family around this time of year to remove weathered decorations and tidy things up for the winter.

I was on a mission. I came armed with gardening tools, some grass seed and a large bag of mixed daffodil bulbs.

Part of my goal was aesthetic: Local and family custom to the contrary, I hate artificial flowers and other assorted manufactured junk on graves. Fellow Traveler and I have warned our extended family that if our graves ever look as if a dollar store vomited on them we are personally coming back to haunt them, and not in a good way. So this year I said "No mas" even to the relatively small and tidy bouquets of silk flowers I have dutifully placed on the relation's gravesites these past years.  Now I'm looking forward to coming back in the spring and seeing bright, cheerful, real flowers. Especially for my Aunt Marian, who was a skilled and enthusiastic gardener; I think they're a fitting tribute to someone who enjoyed them so much in life.

But there's another reason I've suddenly become interested in cemetery perennials.

Fellow Traveler and I have been talking about the possibility of moving out of Michigan. Not anytime soon; not until our house is paid for, at least; but someday. We want to live somewhere with open spaces and four seasons but with progressive values, where our relationship is respected legally as well as socially. We honestly don't see that ever happening in Michigan, a state that used to have a progressive reputation but that in our perception is slipping ever farther backward into the redneck zone.

In our frequent travels to cemeteries to humor Gertie's need for steeplechase games around grave monuments, I notice the untended graves of persons whose families are apparently no longer in the area to care for them. When we were in the Upper Peninsula we came upon an old graveyard, up by Seney, filled with several dozen flat, weathered wooden plaques inscribed simply with the names of men; we figured they were lumberjacks or other itinerant workers who died there in the northern forestland, far from home and family ties. It's a sad thing; but inevitable in our mobile age. On the other hand, I'm always a little cheered when I find a clump of iris or daylilies or violets atop an old, otherwise forgotten grave; once upon a time someone cared enough to leave something lasting, ever-renewing, there before they themselves left.

So I've planted my daffodils. With any luck they'll multiply like the daffodils back at Cold Comfort Cottage.  And even if we leave this area physically, they'll help us continue to honor the ancestors who remain here.

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.

In Which We Explain It All...

A seminarian friend of mine sent this. It's just so...funny.