Naqoyqatsi

Sitting here listening to the motion picture soundtrack. OMG—Yo Yo Ma's cello is as rich as aged red wine. Philip Glass really is a romantic composer. Glass haters need to just sit and absorb "Massman" and notice that the whole thing is being carried by a saxophone ensemble.

I need to go and get some dinner, but I can't bear to be away from the speakers.

Sick and Tired

My day off (snowed in) I began to feel sick and tired. By yesterday, I was a wreck. Today much better. Tomorrow we're scheduled to be snowed in again with a layer of ice topped with six to eight inches of snow.

I'm so ready for Spring.

Snowed In. Again.

Today is Jared's day off for Presidents' Day. Tomorrow is mine. Freezing rain this afternoon changes to snow this evening and about four inches of the mess is predicted. Staying home and baking bread. No gym, I guess.

Married only?

I'm still writing a column for the church newsletter in Mansfield. Here's the latest. Wonder if they will ask me to stop after this one.

A question came up recently on a Christian forum board: Are churches biased against single people? That should translate into "is this church biased against single people?"

Don't answer too quickly. About 37 people responded to the question—and some of the responses were very heated (and bitter). The consensus: older mainline churches (Methodist, Episcopalian, Presbyterian) tend to be accepting toward single people, while newer, more informal churches are not.

This is a place for a definition. When I say "single people," I mean people who could reasonably be expected to be married, but aren't. A 14-year-old boy isn't single yet, but a 55-year-old widow is.

Anyhow, those two classes of churches show two differences.

For one thing, the older churches have more variety in marital status. Older people sometimes lose their spouses to death, and it's not as common for mainline churches to ostracize divorced people, so the result is a fair number of unpartnered adults who will probably stay that way. In contrast, the renewal churches don't have many widows, widowers, or divorced people (they usually just leave). Marriage is the inevitable destination for young people. You'd hear someone saying, "Isn't John Doe married yet?" There's not much room for the idea that John Doe doesn't intend to get married or that John Doe, unmarried, is a stable, complete person.

Another difference you see is that people go to the two different kinds of churches for two different kinds of reasons. For generations, the conservative churches have asked the question, "Are YOU saved?" We have seminars on repairing YOUR marriage, fixing up YOUR finances, and even controlling YOUR weight. Members of the older churches don't tend to be so focused on their own needs. It's the mainline churches that support such organizations as Habitat for Humanity, World Vision, and Alcoholics Anonymous, whether or not anyone in their church is homeless, hungry, or addicted.

It's this intense focus on MY needs, MY marriage, MY family, and even MY enjoyment of worship that leads people to build walls around their families and exclude the concerns of anyone whose name isn't on MY Income Tax form 1040.

That's what makes a church unfriendly toward single people: becoming a group of married people so intensely focused on preserving their own families that they can't see beyond the front door.

So where does Jesus fit into all this? Was his basic message "Join up so you can enjoy the benefits of a stable, Christian culture?" Did he encourage us to withdraw and socialize only with our own kind?

WWJD? (What Would Jesus Drive?) An SUV on the way to soccer practice, ignoring the lonely single person who has nobody to eat lunch with after church?

Feeling Better

OK. Now I can tell the tale of my computer frustrations over the last week.

B&N Nook
My WiFi Nook stopped being able to connect with the B&N home computer. Lots of investigation in FAQ files and forum boards finally gave me the answer. (An e-mail to the tech services people didn't.) The problem, they said, was with my credit card. I needed to unregister my Nook and reregister it. Strangely, I did nothing to the credit card information, and now it works fine.

Akron Learning Management
My Akron students use a software program that puts my whole course in one place. Setting it up is a pain, but there's a convenient utility that moves one section's materials to another section. Problem? Only most of the material moved. And I didn't find out until students began having trouble. Of course, the IT guys did warn me last October in a one-line comment buried deeply within an FAQ file: it only looks like it worked, but if you don't do these eleven extra steps, it won't.

Ashland Anti-Virus
I've got material on an Akron server, so when I wanted my Ashland students to see it, I simply posted a link. It's a University server, and neither Norton nor McAfee anti-virus finds any problem. Trend Antivirus does though, and the only way I learned it was when my students couldn't read the files. And Trend only causes trouble when I (or my students) try those sites—never when IT people do.

MS Word
This one is probably my fault. A student wanted to copy and paste an Internet citation into a paper, so I told him that the best way was to find "Paste Special" and choose "Unformatted Text." It works that way in PowerPoint. It works that way in Word for Mac. It works that way in previous versions of Word for Windows. It even works that way in NeoOffice and Open Office. I hadn't counted on Microsoft Word's new, thrilling experience that takes your documents from good to great in less than five minutes. One thing they did to make it thrilling was to eliminate the "Paste Special" menu in favor of a fade-away menu that appears very briefly when you do an ordinary paste. "Good to great" only took thirty minutes of Internet searching and experimenting. I should have known that Microsoft never actually makes anything easier. My bad.

I'm better now. I have made a couple of vows:

• I'll totally avoid the new Word for Mac, and won't even use Word much any more. My nerves can't stand it.
• I'll actually drive to the Ashland campus and find a Windows machine to test out any links I post for their students. (My time isn't that valuable, anyhow.)
• And I wrote a very slick, sexy hack to avoid using that part of Akron's site altogether.
• The Nook? Still a weird piece of software, but I can work around that one too.

Gone

Crown Tower Coffee. It was always overpriced and had some weird merchandise. Who really wants to pay luxury prices for laundry detergent and clothes pins? But I did like their food items and their wine. Coffee went downhill after the founder died, though. I think the women who ran it after his death weren't really roast masters, and the flavor always seemed flat and vacant. Nevertheless, I'll miss the touch of civilization they brought to Mansfield.

Aspen Bread & Bagel. Their location and oddly cold glass-and-aluminum decor worked against them, but they were a great place to eat. Like Crown Tower, their cookery skills seemed to decline in the last few months. Their bread was distinctly doughy and underbaked. But I will miss their Mediterranean sandwich. It was always surprising to me that they closed at 3 p.m. and never opened on Sunday—thus keeping me from being a customer several times a month.

Fried Nerves

I've been battling the Internet (and particularly the IT departments at two different schools) for the last couple of days. My nerves are shot. I'm at a point where almost everything makes me angry—whether the anger makes any sense or not.

I don't think I'll say much about the anger, except that ordinary operations that should have been easy and time-saving have become very difficult, convoluted things and the IT departments usually tell me that the malfunction is my problem.

Side bonus thought: Nearly every error message that you run into and nearly every IT person you encounter is trying to save face for the computer world and shift the blame. Example: My Barnes & Noble Nook stopped connecting with the Internet. After digging through some blogs and FAQ files, I learned that the error message means that something went wrong with my credit card and that the solution is to un-register and re-register the Nook. OK, the procedure worked, but:

1. The procedure has nothing to do with credit cards. My credit card information wasn't even part of the operation.
2. The guilt-inducing message makes me think that B&N found out that I'm a deadbeat.
3. And it's certainly not their fault! The fact that this is a very common glitch has nothing to do with them!

Worship Three Ways

I've been reading Evangelicals on the Canterbury Trail: Why Evangelicals Are Attracted to the Liturgical Church by Robert Webber. (Footnote: "Evangelicals" here is used in the older 1970s sense of "Biblically conservative, but not Fundamentalist". Nowadays, the word conjures up television preachers and anti-intellectualism, but that wasn't the connotation when Webber wrote this book.)

Webber actually graduated from the same seminary I did, about four years previously. I remember his name but unfortunately never met him. It's my loss. Anyhow, he got me thinking about three ways that worship occurs on Sunday mornings.

Presbyterian/Rational
At Covenant Seminary, we were taught to pull together three-point sermons that could be easily outlined by people in the congregation. Half an hour or more of sermon/lecture seemed about right, and the main point was to explain and teach. Calvinism takes a lot of teaching, and Calvinists worry a lot about fine points of doctrine. I have to admit that I never did quite give my heart to the business of explaining single predestination (somehow, in that doctrine, God decides in advance who will be saved, but does not decide who will be damned). It's all very logical, very academic. I never could exactly explain why listening to a lecture fits under the definition of "worship" either. Webber quotes a visiting preacher who referred to the hymn-singing and all the rest as "preliminaries," and that's how it felt. At least we did get to sing the grand old hymns, all the verses. Depending on the congregation, 1890s emotionalism (for example, the hymn "I come to the garden alone") was also very popular.

Summer Camp
The tradition I am just now leaving had its roots in the Jesus People. Singing and dancing in the meadow, and no real advance planning—that's divine worship. You can't worship without a guitar and the Holy Spirit is dishonored by such things as forethought. (It's typical that nobody knows exactly what will happen on a Sunday; yesterday's basic song list was still in rough draft form 30 minutes before the service.) In the singing department, newer is better: of yesterday's ten songs, the oldest was written in 1990. Repetition is also really valued: One of yesterday's songs consisted of the verse "O, draw me, Lord" repeated three times, followed by the words, "and I'll run after you". If the song is sung as written, you do that five times, but the worship leader got excited and repeated the whole operation, so "O, draw me, Lord" got repeated thirty times. The order of worship typically amounts to six or eight songs sung without any particular theme or introduction, followed by a lengthy sermon that urges us all to give our hearts to Jesus and a call to come down front for prayer at the end.

Liturgical
Yes, it is all figured out in advance. Buy a copy of the Book of Common Prayer and it's all there, except the hymns. But it changes. We just celebrated the sixth Sunday after Epiphany, and that governs everything from the colors in the church (green at the moment) to the Scripture we read to the hymns. You're not going to get "O Come, O Come, Emmanuel" during Epiphany. Yes, there's a sermon, but it's not really the most important event of the morning.

For me, the most vivid change was a change in focus. Lots happens in the Episcopal Church, but it's really not a performance. I cannot imagine anyone applauding during Sunday worship. I'm not there to learn something or to take home something good. It's more of a meeting with God. Lots of times in other churches I've gone back to my seat with the little thimbleful of grape juice and sat there pondering my own spiritual state. That's what I was supposed to do. But now when I kneel at the communion rail and someone helps me take a sip of the eucharistic wine, something really different, powerful, and unexpected happens. (No, it's not the alcohol. I drink wine at home.) I often wish I could just stay put there for a while. I don't want it to end. It all really happened. He's really here. I can't focus anywhere else.

Saturday

Saturdays are the times when my brain takes a holiday. It always feels like the work is done for the week and I should do other stuff like shopping and hanging out at Barnes & Noble. Today is no different. Though I know that I've got a pile of academic stuff to do (at least 35 papers waiting for grades), I can't imagine getting down to that very soon. Maybe tomorrow, in spite of my lip-service supporting the idea of taking the Sabbath off.

I do get creative sometimes on Saturday. Yesterday I wasted the entire afternoon trying to get some good out of a program called Gimp. It's an open-source image manipulation program. I'm used to Adobe Acrobat (at least I was a few years ago), but this was a challenge. At least it's installed on the laptop and I have a few beginning ideas. But mostly the afternoon was a loss. Today I took a different approach to the problem I was trying to solve. I spent the morning writing a very clean, simple website for the Ashland church. Here's a rough draft of it. The reaction from Rev. Ashby should be interesting—the woman in the picture is much older.

I doubt if I can resist much longer. The outdoor temperature is up to a sizzling 31° so off I go for an afternoon of fun: Target, Barnes & Noble, YMCA, and finally Grace Fellowship to get the songs for tomorrow.

Coming Clean, volume 3

I look at the traffic statistics on this blog, and I realize that I don't have to worry that much about offending people. Not many are reading.

Lonely 1
When I look back over the decades in my former church, the dominant emotion is loneliness, on three levels. The obvious one is personal and immediate: in social terms, the church is all about women, children, and teenagers, so my age group is pretty much forgotten. Men's only legitimate social interaction is with their wives. Of course, that also means that families are isolated from one another too. One gets the idea that plain old fun is a problem unless it's sort of a bait. Youth groups have fun so the kids will show up and listen to the program. The Alpha Group has fun so newcomer families will want to stick with the church.

Lonely 2
I think the image of the ecclesiastical Marlboro Man somehow hooks up with several other themes. Yes, men are supposed to be strong, and not need help. So many of the church leaders are somehow involved in psychological counseling professions that the ethics of those professions leak over into the church—and it's really unethical for a counselor to initiate contact with a client, so when bad things happen to a church member, the leaders wait hopefully for the member to make an appointment. And ultimately, it's all about Sunday worship. If the group can do well at singing and dancing, the griefs of one individual don't count that much. Whatever the causes, over the last decade or so, when family and business troubles weighed me down, when family members died, when I was just tired and worn, I always knew I had to work it all out on my own.

Lonely 3
John, the last surviving Apostle, apparently died in about 100 AD. This new manifestation of the church started in about 1970. During the gap, nothing happened. At least that's the attitude I keep running into. Wisdom from ancient writers is useless and so are expressions of worship. It's all very lonely to be part of a church that's shipwrecked and afflicted by amnesia.

The loneliness eventually just overwhelmed me. I wasn't suicidal, but I needed a church connection that didn't continually whisper, "You're all alone, you know."

Coming Clean, volume 2

When I was in Washington, I bought a copy of The Episcopal Handbook. Hilarious little how-to. One of the questions they ask is whether coffee is the third sacrament (the answer is "yes, probably").

I've got to admit that the coffee hour was one of the main things that attracted me to St. Matthew's. Now when I say "coffee," that's really a poor description. The menu at the most recent included (and I'm sure I'm missing something):

• Home-made chicken rice soup
• Home-made rolls
• A cheese and sausage tray
• Chips and nacho sauce
• Date bars
• Fruit
• Coffee

By local standards, that was a fairly slim "coffee" menu. There always seems to be more than enough, and you're always welcome to sit at anyone's table. "Coffee" takes at least an hour after church. It's an extremely important part of what happens there. I recently took a couple of loaves of bread to a potluck, and people are still talking about them. (As bread goes, it wasn't that wonderful, but I feel very good every time someone brings it up again.)

I think the welcome there is an extremely strong draw. When I showed up for the first time, the priest actually remembered that I'd visited two years ago. They seem honestly glad to see me, and that hasn't diminished now that I'm a "regular." (Later I'll talk about the odd string of coincidence when I walked in the first time.) OK—it's an extremely small group (like 30 or so), but I'm still impressed that they keep offering me ways to participate. It takes a bunch of people to make Sunday happen. Aside from the food and the invisible things like cleaning, there are greeters, a reader, a couple of torch-bearers, someone to carry the cross, and a few others. And it's assumed that these responsibilities will rotate throughout the congregation. Not a spectator sport at all.

Anyhow, the welcome is strong, and from what I hear, that's an Episcopalian characteristic.

Snow Depression

I was snowed in three days last week—didn't leave the apartment at all. Last night Jared came in (after running his truck into a snow bank) and announced that he simply wasn't going to school today. (He repented later.)

It's gotten to a point where the idea of leaving home in a heavy snowstorm with a layer of ice already on the road just doesn't sound like fun any more.

So this afternoon when Akron had a blue sky, the wind died down, and the temperature shot up to 15, I felt like I was in heaven.

Snow depression. We eat too much, sleep too much, spend too much time on the computer, drink, and generally hate ourselves in the morning. I'm feeling guilty because I haven't done all my grading. It's probably time for the gym—a warm, brightly lit place where I can move around.

Computer "Upgrades"

Once—just once—I'd like a for a computer upgrade (especially in Windows) to actually make things better. Failing that, at least not to lose abilities the older system had.

Years ago, I had a computer lab (yes they were all Apples) in which I could press a two-key combination and every computer in the room would see what was on my monitor. Then they upgraded. The student computers were no longer subordinate to mine; now the students had to opt into the system and they could take control of any computer in the room. Total chaos.

Then there was the Microsoft Word upgrade that hid almost every common function and made every user into a beginner again. Apparently all of the old abilities are still there, but some of us have never found them.

Fast forward to this semester. Windows 7. Old friends ("My Computer") are now tucked away in obscure sub-menus and the system has lost the ability to open PDF files.

Worst of all are the stealth improvements: things that changed and don't give a signal to their reduced abilities. I use a "Learning Management" package at Akron. Always in the past, I could set up a course, then copy the course to other sections. Not now. It looks great and about 80% works. But it can't deal with uploaded files. They simply don't move.

And in every change, I end up looking stupid. Students all assume that I'm a software engineer and have kept up with the up-to-the-second changes and glitches that are imposed upon me every month.

Coming Clean, volume 1

I suppose I should come clean on this one. After about 30 years as a semi-faithful member of the church here in Mansfield, I'm now attending St. Matthew's Episcopal Church in Ashland quite regularly. No, I'm not a member there yet. That takes a class and being received by the bishop.

One friend asked what pushed me over the edge. I think I'll keep that one to myself (or perhaps for later); I'd rather talk about my history.

Before Mansfield, almost all of my church experience was very "high church." On the East Coast, even the Presbyterians (my original home) are fairly formal and liturgical. There's very little sense of "God, my best buddy" and even today, people who worship on Sunday morning are very unlikely to rate the event on its "fun quotient." In a sense, the Washington National Cathedral has been a second home since I was a boy (and yes, it's Episcopalian). In college, my spiritual home was Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship, an organization with strong Church of England roots, and I often attended a Lutheran church near campus. Seminary was a conservative Presbyterian seminary, where the essential question was "what's true?" not "what feels good?" or "what promotes Americanism?" or "what safeguards my consumerist lifestyle?" During those years, I was part of a church that was deeply involved in community service, in study, and in worship. Yes, we did sing Bach chorales and had a small pipe organ in our storefront church.

All of this helps to explain why a return to a more formal, more liturgical church that's deeply rooted in church history just feels right. I recently took a personal inventory and realized that almost all of the spiritually important moments in my life were somehow Episcopalian. Maybe (if someone asks me to narrate them) I'll say more some day.

Anyhow, I think I should avoid negativism here. But I feel I should begin explaining myself a bit.

New background, new beginning

I'm not dead.

Fall was extremely busy. Six sections of English. New roommate. Trying to keep my head above water.

The semester change in December just flew by. Prepping for two new courses. Then another new one. Then that one got killed. Then prepping for yet another. All while visiting Mom and trying to keep my head above water.

New semester and I'm teaching only five sections, but three completely different preps.

Depressed
I spent some time this morning reading about two years of posts on this blog and I saw the same themes coming back over and over:

• Frustration with the church here
• Loneliness for other Christians
• Feelings of being excluded from the warm heart of Christendom

OK—to be fair, there's a lot about the agony of online banking and the way colleges work, but all that is minor. If I would simply write paper checks and keep one step ahead of the game, those two would go away.

The most difficult, and the one that caught me off-guard, was the exit of our pastor in Mansfield and of the last remaining elders from the "old days," thus completing a change-over in the church to something quite different from what we had. My daughter phoned me and said, "Dad, you've just got to leave that place!"

New beginning
I've been doing a lot of reading over the past couple of months and spent a lot of Sunday mornings at a small Episcopal church in Ashland. The welcome there was instant. The worship is well thought through and deeply grounded in Scripture. I feel as if something that was broken in my life is now repaired (or at least on the way there).

To be quite frank, one reason I stopped blogging is that I was bored with myself and my continual complaints. Now I think I have something to say again, and I'm hoping it won't be the stream of negativity.