Back Again

Thanksgiving vacation is over. I'm back at home and ready for the final run of academic work.

Tools of the Trade

Bought my 14-year-old nephew a fountain pen yesterday. He's writing a book, but he won't let me see it. I figured that we writers need to stick together and he needs a good tool to write with, so there it is, a student Lamy pen.

I think adults often forget the impact of small acts of confidence and small encouragements like that. I should try to remember too. When I was about eight years old, my aunt, who was teaching elementary school, asked me to do a drawing. I did a picnic with all the food and dishes laid out very neatly, and I labeled it "Picknick."

She praised the drawing and pointed out that my misspelling made sense. After all, "pick" is a word, and so is "nick." Somehow I remember that fondly all these years later.

Mama Jackson

Lots of folks may scorn the idea of Mama Jackson's candy bag. It's not spiritual. It's not health food. It promotes at least one of the deadly sins (greed). When the kids are thinking of the candy bag, they aren't focused on singing or dancing or speaking in tongues or something.

But you know, when the kids grow up and return to the church, that candy bag is one of their fondest memories.

Years ago, when I was still involved in youth ministry, I remember an article in Group magazine, a professional magazine for youth group leaders. Someone wanted to find out why Church A had poor attendance at their youth groups while Church B was doing extremely well. Charismatic leaders? Great music? Thoughtful programs? So they asked the kids and got a simple answer.

Pizza.

And every time I tell someone from outside the church how rarely we eat together and try to describe our BYOF (Bring Your Own Food) church picnics, I receive the same puzzled look. My mother gave me the look this morning. I might have been describing a ceremonial bloodletting from the look on her face.

Anyhow, as I've been getting into cooking more and more—getting good with breads and cookies—one question has crossed my mind: When will I ever have a chance to do this kind of baking for someone else? I don't have an answer. And I get pretty tired of eating from the same batch of brownies for a week.

I've strayed from my point. I was intending to end this with a suggestion that the church begin thinking of food in the same light as music. Put the same amount of effort and money into congregational eating as we have in congregational singing, and appoint a Food Czar. And my nomination would be Mama Jackson.

Cupertino weather

Why, oh why, when my computer's weather reporter cannot organize itself, does it report weather from Cupertino, California? Or Orlando, Florida? Never New York or Washington. Or Chicago. Or even Los Angeles.

Getting angry

I'm pondering the students around me in the Student Union—OK that's unfair because these are the lunch bunch and the time-wasters on the day before Thanksgiving—and I've got conflicting thoughts.

Ever since Plato and Aristotle, teachers have been lamenting that today's crop of students are lazy, useless drunks. Go back to Brideshead Revisited and you see a classic example from the 1920s. University professors are always frustrated because we are idealists and our students aren't. At least not in the departments we value.

But I need to get angry, get sharp(er) and demand excellence. I need to expect it, even of the Ashland football players. And I need to stop rewarding mediocrity. At least in Ashland the trend is started. Only about half to two-thirds of my students will pass the class, and that's because the others didn't show up, didn't turn stuff in, and didn't develop the skills necessary to write on a level appropriate to a high school graduate.

Next step? Ask for more, especially of the more able Akron crowd.

While I'm getting angry ("energized" would probably be a better word), it's time to sharpen up some other areas of life. Housekeeping. Mentoring Jared. Involvement in church. Why shouldn't I/we strive for excellence and become angry when we accept less?

Almost Free

As of about midnight last night, I am caught up with all the major grading. Minor stuff (looking at a few online homeworks) is still in my future, but I've got a very full briefcase to give back today.

Ashland is so finished that all I need to do is grade about two dozen final exams (written by someone else's students) and give back the results.

Akron isn't much more complex.

So tomorrow morning, I get to drive to Washington, using the old backroads (no Interstates for me unless I'm out of options). It will be a little sad and weird because I'll miss doing the big Christmas/Thanksgiving thing at mom's house. My sister will be in town, bunking with our brother, and I'll be in Mom's back bedroom of her new apartment. It won't be the same as past years, but I'll take a deep breath.

Ready for vacation

Fall semester is so draining, especially with as many courses as I teach. Today's crop of students was particularly irritating—absolutely no sense that they intend to learn anything in my class, or even to have any courtesy for the other students.

Thanksgiving is looking very appealing.

I think next semester, I'll simply ask disruptive students to leave the classroom.

Social blunder

My Ashland students are writing their final in-class paper at the moment. The topic, prescribed by the Department, is "discuss how you have developed as a writer and student over the course of the semester."

One of the students asked, "What if I don't think I've developed?"

He must not realize how much that sounds like "your teaching has been ineffective." Anyhow, his grade is just a couple of points under a "pass" at this point. Maybe he didn't really change all that much.

Deadline

I promise this is my last word on men's ministries (for a while at least).

I'm seeing a problem with Jerry's "post high-school" group. When is a person too old? And how does a leader eject a too-old person?

The high school group has a natural ejection process. Almost. When high school ends, many of the recent graduates just hang around for the summer, but many of them go away to a different town for college. Problem solved—almost. There have often been students who never left town and simply wouldn't stop attending the high school group. Their friends are there; they feel like kids; and there's nothing else for them in the church.

Voilà! A new answer! Post-high school group (presumably the "kids" up to about 21 years old). But then what?

When I was in college, I attended such a group at a local Presbyterian church. One of the guys looked a bit older than the rest of us, but then again, the group had several engineers from McDonnell-Douglas. So I wasn't too troubled. He drove a really cool car. It was a 1952 Hudson Hornet, in perfect condition. I asked him how he got the thing, and he told me that after he graduated from college, he bought it with the first real money he earned. New. Fresh from the factory.

Mixed Emotions

In between teaching and grading, I've been doing a bit of reading about men's ministries. I've got sort of an emotional turmoil as a result.

Of course, like most people, I watch high school kids' ministry and ask why we can't have anything like that. Why can't we have fun, interesting, important events? Why can't we have close friendships? Why can't we actually deal with issues more important than getting new tires for the car?

Then I read some of the websites for organizations that promise exactly that sort of thing for men's groups. And I get wistful. I can't imagine anything like that happening here. It would require no less than a complete paradigm shift for a modern Ohio church to see the value of men associating with one another. The status quo (a church of women, children, and teenagers with men on the edges sort of facilitating things) works just fine, and there would be enormous political difficulties if men began to become empowered in any way.

I'm going to keep reading, thinking, and even praying, but don't expect to see anything on this blog. This idea has to fly under the radar.

Mixed Purposes

One of those moments of revelation happened recently. I was looking online for material about writing definitions and ran into some material about defining small groups (from a sociological perspective). Here's what they had:

• A primary group is a small group of people whom we associate with by living together with them.
• A casual group is a small group of people whom we associate with for companionship and friendship.
• A therapeutic group is a small group of people who are interested in changing their behavior, values, and attitudes.
• A problem-solving group is a small group of people who have a specific goal of finding a solution to a specific problem.
• An educational group is a small group of people who are interested in becoming educated on a certain topic.

And suddenly it all came together! The church small groups I've been in (men's and mixed) have tried to be almost all of these, usually in the same evening. We say we're a group of friends (casual group), but the main purpose of the beginning of the meeting is worship (probably some group classification such as "task-oriented"), then we switch to educational, and finally to therapeutic as people pour out their griefs and pains.

In my experience, the one definition that gets short-changed is the "casual group"—of the many groups I've been in, I can't think of more than one former group member I'd seek out at a church coffee hour. For the most part, we came together to get something done, and when it was finished, we went our ways.

Men's Ministry

When I got home last night (too late to do any more grading), I got to thinking about men's ministry again. There seems to be a new crop of showy, commercial attempts to fill this gap in church life (Promise Keepers is only the most visible). Lots of products for sale, mainly books and conferences.

I looked through the websites for several Mansfield churches, and, as I expected, They all have something special for kids and many have something special for women, but men's groups are rare. I only found one or two. It's tempting to visit those churches and find out what they've got.

(Slightly off the subject: back in the Youth for Christ days, we had a good handful of high school ministries going, mainly attended by guys. Even that group fell into the children's ministry trap, and ended up focusing on inner-city children below ten years old, totally forgetting the high school ministry—except for the prison ministry part of YFC.)

End of the day

I'm sitting here at the church, waiting for Jared to be finished with his Bible study. It was supposed to end at 8 p.m., and now it's 8:20. That's about typical, I guess.

I had hoped to get back to the apartment and finish grading about six papers before bed, but I'm not so sure of that now. The grading cycle is very wearing on a teacher, both because of the sheer work and because (especially this late in the semester) I feel like a failure looking at the wretched quality some of my people put out. I've got to keep telling myself that 13 weeks isn't enough time to work many miracles. Keep saying that. Especially when the miracle recipients aren't exactly interested in the process.

So here I sit. I think I'm sort of on the wrong end of the various liberation movements. Back in the day (which means about 1965) men were considered to be the "normal" people and everything was tilted toward them (back in 1965, "men" wasn't exactly "us" yet for me). Now I look at the church (and ours isn't that different from many other churches) and see that there's a lot of emphasis on ministry to girls and women. Lots aimed at elementary school children, junior high kids, high school kids, and (new this year) the odd post-high-school age slot that might have gone to college (perhaps about 20 to 25 years old). Notice anything? Anyone left out?

Yes, I know that adult males are seen by the paranoid hystericals as a threat. And I know that we're dull, but necessary because we earn much of the money and drive people places. It would be nice, though, if there were some way for us to get in on things. Maybe something more than the annual Men's Prayer Breakfast (that occasionally misses a year or two).

Springerle

I decided to get into baking this year, and (as is usual with me) I dove into the most complex recipe available. Springerle cookies—hard, anise-flavored German cookies with images imprinted in their faces.

My mother always made them, and my brother misses the things terribly. The cookies were a basic reason behind my purchase of a KitchenAid mixer, though I've found other uses for it too.

The recipe calls for "four cups of all-purpose flour," and I decided to be gourmet about it and shunned the store-brand flour. Instead, I bought something called White Lily All-Purpose Flour. That sounded gourmet.

All went reasonably well until the end of the mixing process. It just didn't look right. I called my sister, and she confirmed that Mom always complained that the dough was like cement. Mine was like soft frosting. I scooped it back into the mixer bowl, got out the flour bag, and then chanced to look at the side of the bag. There's a substitution. To use this flour in ordinary recipes, you have to use more—something like half a cup more in my recipe. I kept adding flour by the handful until I got something approximating cement and went forward with the process. They are out of the oven now, cooling. I wonder if I'll be able to get them off the cookie sheet.

It turns out, by the way, that White Lily is a Southern specialty, mainly used for their extremely light biscuits. It's not really a general-purpose flour at all. Who knew?

Somnambulists

Christmas is here, and so I played one of my favorite music videos for my students, the Trans-Siberian Orchestra's version of "Wizards in Winter." I darkened the room and pumped up the volume.

Half of my students sat through it staring at their desks. Only one or two actually saw the thing. Nobody actually thought it might be enjoyable or fun or anything.

Here's what they missed (my copy has much better quality than this YouTube version) Christmas Lights

A couple of nuts and bolts

I mentioned Grace & Peace Fellowship in a previous post. Here's a link to their homepage. I was there at the beginning, in Ted and Gladys Smith's living room on Washington Street, back in the days when one had to walk up to a stranger's door on Sunday morning and simply open it (because the talk and noise inside was too much to allow people to hear door knocks) to attend Sunday worship.

I've added a label, "church food" to the bottom of my church food posts (duh!). Click that and you can ignore all the rants about electronic banking, etc.

Next Step for Queen Mary

That whole "everything is a sacrament" idea came from reading Robert Farrar Capon's books, for example Supper of the Lamb. It really does change the way I look at such disparate things as marauding deer and encroaching weeds.

One of my enduring memories of Grace & Peace Fellowship, the church in St. Louis where we had 52 potluck dinners every year, was that nothing was fake. We had real china dishes, not paper plates. Squeeze margarine was forbidden. Bread was the genuine stuff. Dinner was more than a way to get fed after church; it was a theological decision to share our lives and express our understanding of the Kingdom of God. And "potluck" really meant potluck. There was no arranging. Nobody assigned main dishes, etc. Whatever people brought we ate.

One problem we had, which is similar to a problem in Mansfield, was quantity. People like to think of a potluck as a free meal. More than once at our local church, I've seen a family of four show up for dinner with a two-cup portion of green beans (or sometimes two cans of beans still in the can!) as their potluck contribution. It would be interesting to see what supper is like in that house. Do the four people somehow get by on the equivalent of two cups of beans? Or do they eat something else? Perhaps more.

Next question

Let's assume we've got the idea that God actually likes the natural creation and likes the idea of people sharing food. What's next?

Perhaps I've been unjust in accusing national radio personages of preaching isolation, but the message came from somewhere. One of my friends tells me that a church elder approached him at his wedding reception (this was a decade ago or more) and said, "Now it's time for you to dump your friends and concentrate on your wife." My dear friend W was a frequent companion for coffee, evenings of TV, and hikes in the park. Then he found a wife and I never heard from him again. And anyone who has been to a GFC potluck remembers the whole idea of "family tables," particularly if you have been told that you can't sit with someone because they are trying to reserve a table for their own family.

Now the threatening question: does an emphasis on hospitality split and endanger families?

It is really difficult to have a rational discussion on this one, particularly because the conservative side of the USA spends a lot of attention on paranoid, hysterical rhetoric. It seems that absolutely everyone who isn't on my Form 1040 is an enemy. Everyone is aiming at undermining the core of MY family. Nobody is on my side. I need to be very bristly and keep everyone on the other side of the door. Maybe with a gun.

Nothing could be much further from the spirit of the New Testament. The New Testament believers seem to have been open, friendly people who would share their belongings with others, people whose lifestyles were so attractive that nonbelievers were attracted even before the theology and tracts began. Apparently, they actually thought God would take care of them when they spent their money and time on strangers.

Or consider the example of Jesus. He had close friends and was such a frequent dinner guest that the more "proper" religious folks were scandalized. It wasn't just the preaching. Religious authorities objected to his social life. He acutally liked being with people, even the less clean ones.

OK—now the real next step

Few of us actually know anyone. Even among fellow church members, a dinner invitation would be a frightening matter of picking a random name from the church directory. So we need something a little less intimidating, something that doesn't seem to challenge the encapsulated nuclear family structure. The next step must:

• not make me feel like I'm going to be judged
• not raise the defenses of those who are afraid that everyone wants to invade their family space
• feel natural—at least to some extent
• somehow build on existing relationships
• somehow be an on-ramp to something more.

The one-shot "dinner with a stranger" thing last summer was a pretty good idea, but it only happened once. How about something continuing—perhaps as simple as having coffee after church in a place where people can actually sit down? Maybe even with generous cupcakes and muffins?

Turning the Queen Mary

One friend responded to my post about church hospitality and said it would be like "turning the Queen Mary." I hope the comparison isn't too close because the Queen Mary has been immobile since 1967. If a ship isn't going anywhere, it can't be turned.

I can think of a lot of places to begin, but one is a change in our attitude toward the meaning of stuff.

What, exactly, does the physical universe mean?

A lot of Christian answers have been proposed, many focusing on the Christian's task of avoiding "the world, the flesh, and the devil."

Neo-Amish Abhorrence
Some of us have taken the attitude that asceticism is the way out of the world-flesh-devil trap. White bread is always better than chocolate cake—on a moral level. Doing anything just for the fun of doing it is to be avoided because, at root, a Christian must avoid all frivolity. I don't know what it would be like to get an invitation to this sort of household for dinner because dinner parties are, by definition, fun, and to be avoided.

Didacticism
Everything is here to "teach us a lesson." A trillium isn't just a beautiful flower, The point of its structure is to give us something to use in teaching people about the Trinity. Dinner with this crowd is like a Seder service. Everything has a meaning, which must be exhaustively (and exhaustingly) explained.

Recruitment ploy
The only point of life is to bring people into the Kingdom, so everything is part of a great advertising come-on. It's all very similar to those Ponzi organizations like Amway. We're only interested in getting you in. God's only interested in getting you in. Dinner with these people is wonderful, but once you sign on the dotted line, you're pointless. No more dinners. (Note: Does this sound like the way churches use the "Alpha Course"?)

It's all burning soon
In some people's view, the entire physical universe is some sort of short-term experiment on God's part. It's pointless to worry about global warming because the world won't even be here in another five years. So drive your Ford Expedition. It's God's will for us to dominate and use up the natural creation. I suspect that dinner with these folks would have an enormous abundance—even waste—but there's not a great deal of respect for stuff in this view. This one doesn't seem to see God's love for his creation, and easily goes to Wal-Mart and craft show accumulation. Dinner? Pre-packaged mixes.

Everything's a sacrament
Christians over the ages have battled about the number of sacraments. Seven? You're Roman Catholic. Two? A Protestant. Dozens and dozens? Perhaps you're an Episcopalian. Saint Augustine defined a Christian sacrament as "a visible sign of an invisible reality." If we really follow that one up, coffee, brownies, and a friend is some sort of sacrament, a sign of God's love and provision. And if we get off the theology that sees God as a grim, nasty preacher and begin to see him as he really is—a lover—we've got something. His first words after creating the earth were "Mazel tov!" ("Good luck has occurred.") And, being Jewish, the next obvious thing to do would be to pour a glass of wine to celebrate.

Shifting from Episcopalian to Presbyterian, the first question of the Westminster Shorter Catechism is "What is the chief end of man?" The answer: "Man's chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever." I like the "enjoy" part of that, and surely part of the "glorifying" is to love what God loves. To be really blunt, God loves wine and bread and a good dinner and friendship.

Moment of Revelation

Christmastide is here, and along with it all the great music. One that I love listening to is Sir John Tavener's "The Lamb." Spooky, haunting choral music. The versions I have are included in collections that have a lot of Latin, so I never did listen closely until this morning. It's William Blake's poem, "The Lamb."

Another "Oh My Gosh!" moment.

(Yes, yes, I know. You all knew all of this already.)

Terrorism vandalism

At the risk of overdoing things, I share my thoughts on terrorism.

Apparently (though I don't want to add to the jump-the-gun hysteria) that Army doctor is guilty of killing 13 at Fort Hood. And according to some witnesses, he shouted a Muslim slogan as he began his attack.

I began wondering about terrorism just after the September 11 attacks, and I asked myself just what they were attempting to prove. Classic warfare, for example the US attacking German positions during WWII, focuses on taking out military targets to achieve military objectives. We blow up bridges so troops and equipment can't come to fight us. More recently, and more problematically, we use rocket attacks to attempt to kill the leaders of guerilla armies.

But what was the September 11 attack trying to achieve? What would the Army doctor's attack accomplish? Nearly 3000 people died on September 11, but there were certainly a lot of New Yorkers (and Americans) left. My internet connection faltered slightly because Web had a major hub in the World Trade Center. Discover Card gave a grace period of about a month to cardholders because so many records were screwed up. That's about it. The USA was nowhere near being brought to its knees. Fort Hood, one of the largest military installations in the world, has more than 33,000 people. Killing a couple of dozen, none of whom were exactly key to the operation, didn't cause a hiccup in the ongoing military operations.

The closest analogy I can come up with is schoolyard vandalism. To the twelve-year-old mind, the best response to a teacher who is giving a bad grade is to let the air out of her tires. That's certain to deal with the child's problem in spelling. And of course, it will deal a death blow to the entire educational enterprise and the child will have peace. Nope. And the child is probably smart enough not to claim credit for the tire vandalism because he knows he'll simply be sent to the office.

Yes, Muslims in the Middle East are victims of terrible privation, some of it at the hands of Israelis and Americans (and lots of it at the hands of fellow Muslims who differ only slightly in some theological fine point). And yes, the concept of tribal warfare is high on their list, so any member of their tribe has a right to kill any member of our tribe and it's somehow a fair transaction.

But ultimately, this bloodletting is about as reasonable as breaking the school's windows because the child can't learn the multiplication tables.

The beat goes on

Yesterday was payday at Ashland University, so I asked a colleague how they tell us about our direct deposits. Easy. They send an e-mail a couple of days before the actual payday. The problem was that I didn't get an e-mail.

So off I went to the business office, and there was my check, waiting for me.

Enemies and hospitality

I've been thinking deeply about hospitality and the lack thereof in the Mansfield church.

When I moved here from St. Louis, way back in 1977, I was coming from a tradition where hospitality was one of the treasured characteristics of the local congregation. We had a potluck dinner every Sunday, 52 times a year. Parties were common. People would go to each others' houses for dinners, for dessert, for an evening of board games, or for an evening watching TV together.

None of that happens in Mansfield. I doubt if, throughout the congregation, more than six shared dinners happen in any month. Maybe there's one potluck a year. Maybe we miss a year. (We do use congregational meals as fundraisers: big pots of generic spaghetti for $5 per person.) To be perfectly fair, there's a congregational dinner in March (catered) and many years a Christmas and/or "Halloween" party. But often those don't happen.

Why so little action?

Some would say it's because people are too busy, and I can believe that. Nearly everyone home schools or has kids at the private Christian school, and both are extremely time-consuming, but I don't think that excuse covers those whose kids are out of school.

Dr. Dobson and some local leaders have pushed the idea that family is so primary that absolutely any outside activity is wrong (and of course, having a friend over for dinner is a deduction from the intense one-on-one time of the family).

Some say that entertaining is too expensive—though the price tag for a pot of coffee and a plate of brownies from a mix isn't that high.

And of course, there's the pietistic thread in the local church, saying that no human activity is worthwhile unless it's specifically (and didactically) religious. Thus we have all those past barbecues that turned into hymn-singing evenings and the New Year's party that's just a prelude to a prayer meeting. And to tell the truth, there are just so many of those meetings that a person can stand in a month.

But I think there's a more basic reason we avoid hospitality.

I think it's fear.

We've been soaked in the idea that outsiders are a threat, and we've bought it. Of course, there's the threat that if one were to invite a Jew or a Muslim for tea and cakes, somehow there would be a theological battle or perhaps the Christian faith would be shown up as false or something. So of course the Jew and Muslim are off the guest list. And if we invite the nonreligious neighbor in, he might do something nonreligious—might tell an inappropriate story or something. And if our kids got to know that Jews, Muslims, and the nonreligious can occasionally be interesting people, our kids' faith would be weakened. They wouldn't see the Christian faith as the only lifeboat in a sea of terrible people.

But that's not what I want to talk about.

We're afraid of other Christians. Not just the demon Catholics or the accursed Presbyterians or the heathen Lutherans. Our very own kind.

I've been told that people are afraid to come to my place because it's an apartment (which means "tenement" which means "housing project" which means you'll get knifed in the hallway). One of my few visitors asked to see the expiration dates on the food I was offering. I've never had enough money for a cleaning lady, so my carpet is needing shampoo right now.

And of course, almost every fellow church member I can name has some sort of food allergy, food fad, or some other food fetish going. One can't be anywhere near anything artificially scented. Another must never eat anything containing any form of sugar. Yet another exists entirely on mangosteen juice. And of course, there's an implied judgment (you put SUGAR in your cake???). It doesn't take much of this stuff before a person simply locks the front door.

I know others have suffered similar insults. Chapters such as Romans 14 and I Corinthians 8 really don't carry much weight around here. It's sad, really. "Keeping oneself unstained from the world" by avoiding all human contact outside the nuclear family is kind of boring.