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.

Aveo

What's red, made of tuna fish cans, comes from Korea, and smells like a newly-cleaned men's room?

My rental car.

Score one for Wallace and Gromit

The Discover card bill finally posted this morning.

Hmmm. Let's see. Friday to Wednesday = five days for electronic transfer. Speed of light?

Why do I do these things?

This is yet another episode in the "online banking saga."

The lady from Chase Bank called again on Friday to urge me to pay all my bills online blah blah blah. I gave her the whole nine yards of my difficulties, complaints, and experience—that the online banking experience is slow, unreliable, and generally a pain. She promised to stop bothering me.

I felt bad. And I felt curious. So against my better judgment, I did all the stuff to pay my Discover bill online. Sent them over $200. That was Friday. As of Monday, the money had come out of my bank account. Tuesday evening, though, it still hasn't gone into the Discover account. It's stuck somewhere in cyberspace.

So I guess tomorrow I'll call the lady back and ask her to track things down. They do guarantee that it will work, after all.

I think Wallace and Gromit have lost this round. Maybe I needed one more attempt to convince me that the paper check is still king.

One lingering question concerns timing. When I post grades online, the students can see them instantly. The second I click "OK" they can find out how they did. Except for a few poor programs, most e-mail moves within a minute or so too (then there's the one that takes an hour or more). So why on earth should wire transfers of money take a week? If I had mailed the payment to Carol Stream, Illinois (Discover's billing office) on Friday, the check would have been there Monday or Tuesday, and the payment would have posted 24 to 48 hours faster than electronic transfer.

Assuming this one works.

$2000 gone missing

I was in a panic tonight after using the ATM. I knew how much money was supposed to be in my checking account, and the ATM slip said it was less. A lot less. Like nearly $2000.

Fortunately, before I phoned anyone to call them names, I got home and found the latest account statement in my mailbox. Problem isolated: a missing deposit. Where did it go??? UAkron direct deposit, usually very reliable.

Another statement from another bank. There's the money. Apparently I'd changed over the direct deposit last June and forgot that I'd done it.

Now if I can only find my missing fountain pen.

Finally getting out of jail

It's nearly three weeks since I began to feel ill. I think it was the flu, but not the swine variety. For about two weeks, I moaned, coughed, and dragged myself around with zero energy. Just barely enough of me to get the minimum work done.

I'm better now. The upside is that I can actually go places and do things. The downside is that I'm still so behind in basic stuff like grading papers that I have to do marathon sessions (often lasting until 9 p.m.) to try to catch up. And I am caught up! (Unless you count about half a dozen revised papers and a pile of short homework quiz-type assignments) It's 11:34 a.m. now. By 12:30 I won't be caught up any more. The first of 75 papers will come in.

But I'll make it. Tonight, no work in particular. Tomorrow, I'm off to the gym for the first time in three weeks. Then Saturday, I begin grading again.

The Tin Goose

According to Father Capon (author of Supper of the Lamb, among others), a tin goose is an article of kitchen equipment that is manufactured primarily to be sold, not to be used. His number one candidate is the electric stove. Not a bad nominee, though I don't mind electric ovens. Just not the stovetops elements.

I've got my own list, and it's going to grow.

Glad Wrap and Saran Wrap. It looks so fine in the ads, and I know that somehow, somewhere people actually make it work. They must. When I go to the coffee shop, I see muffins and bread that's been wrapped in some kind of clear plastic. The problem is that the stuff I buy simply won't stick to anything once it's come off the roll. My best shot is to use masking tape.

Most kitchen choppers. Flimsy devices made to sell on late-night TV. They claim to allow you to cut up an onion, but they don't actually do anything at all.

Teflon pans. First they lose their non-stick quality, then they begin to flake into the food. Why wasn't cast iron good enough? In daily use, a Teflon pan works for about a month.

The average knife. No more needs to be said.

Most kitchen coffee grinders. A batch contains fine powder, good ground coffee, and whole beans that the machine can't be bothered with.