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.

School Bus

I was looking again at the news article about the school bus accident in Missouri. I drove a bus there for about a decade, and the location is very familiar to me. The accident took place at the bottom of a long, sweeping curve on I-44. Even an old yellow sloth (my busses were all Nixon-era Fords) could get up a respectable 65 mph, and there was nothing in particular in front of us. It's summer, and the kids are in high spirits, on the way to Six Flags. It feels good to just let the sloth roll.

It's one of those wrecks that shouldn't have happened, and it wasn't really the fault of the 19-year-old kid who rear-ended the truck. The bus driver had no excuse. I know how well I could see, even in those old busses.

It's a bitter reminder of the life-or-death nature of just going somewhere for some fun. This afternoon I drive to Columbus. I think I'll take it a bit easier and watch the traffic a bit better.