A short thought--not even that, really, a question, a musing--well after most Steve Jobs mania has passed:
(Taken from Innoblog, October 7:)
One of our favorite Steve Jobs quotes came as his answer to the question: What market research did you do that led to the iPad? “None,” he replied. “It's not the customer’s job to know what they want.”
Hmm. Is this anything at all useful to church leaders of whatever stripe?
This is for the moment leaving aside the wisdom of equating church members with "customers." In my opinion, for good or ill, that ship sailed a long time ago for a lot of churches of whatever stripe. Even if one doesn't want to make that equation, is there still something of merit in the idea expressed by the late Mr. Jobs? Is it modifiable? Might the word "want" be swapped out for the word "need"? The quote seems to be cited typically as an example of Mr. Jobs's ability at innovation, or marketing, or design, or what have you; is it actually a form of leadership?
No answers here today: just questions to chew on.
Sunday, October 16, 2011
Tuesday, October 11, 2011
Random thoughts when I should be reading Calvin...
Not just Calvin, but Schleiermacher (who always needs reading twice). And there's always that bit from the Gospel of Mark that is only partly translated. And there's also Augustine awaiting.
One of the pleasures/pains of this fool's errand is that every day there's a chance for my mind to be blown. Pleasure because it's the best kind of mind-blowing; new stuff, new possibilities, ideas that will be old hat to many but are new to me. New Testament I in particular has been something else, particularly now upon entering the odd and tricky Gospel of Mark. Just one class in and everything I'd ever thought about that book (which, admittedly, was not a lot) has been upended and strewn about the room, and the mess is glorious and wonderful and amazing. My new favorite gospel, at least until we get to Matthew (I think that's next...), and then I think Luke...you get the idea. Theology I is a bit more challenging. Calvin and Schleiermacher are the twin (reformed) systematic pillars in the design of this class, with other theologians of the church's history weaving in and out at various points on various topics. (Schleiermacher ran with the Romantics just a little bit, and so I do find myself occasionally having flashbacks to some of those nineteenth-century German writers on music who occupied parts of my brain in my previous life.) History of Christianity I is in many ways closest to my scholarly heart, with my history jones that has for so many years been trained on music re-focusing and adapting to the much more ancient and complicated history of the Christian church. I get wowed on a regular basis.
That's the pleasure, and the pain too. I run close to "wow burnout" sometimes. It's sooooo much to take in and try to make sense of, coming so fast, and my slow brain gets overwhelmed trying to keep up. (I mean that word very deliberately; it's a pretty good brain all things considered, but it is not a fast one; it takes me time to digest and work through new stuff, and then more new stuff is pouring in and wowing my brain, and the whole cycle keeps running and I keep dog-paddling.)
Those who know my past know that as seminary experiences go, this ain't my first rodeo. Twenty years ago at this point I was into the first term of my final year at another school, one which is now the Voldemort of my academic experience -- "it which must not be named." That was long, long ago, in a denominational galaxy far, far away, one in which the Rebel Alliance was sorely lacking in Luke Skywalkers and got crushed by the Empire swiftly and brutally. (At this point twenty years ago I was trying to figure out if I was capable of getting up the nerve to ask this one girl out; we've been married over seventeen years now, which is to say that this prior seminary experience was not all for nought.) The Baptist Theological Seminary at Richmond which sits across the street from Union serves as a regular reminder of that experience, born as it was out of the debris. The overall negative vibe of that older experience has frankly caused me to block a lot of it out. It was that depressing in the overall.
The experiences are different enough that comparison is frankly pointless. I was pursuing a church music degree then, an M.Div. now. (It really would not kill Union, or other Presbyterian schools, to include a little more systematic academic instruction in church music in their curriculum--a basic hymnody class, for example--but that's a different subject for another blog post, well into the future.) Union is a much smaller community than that was. And PC-USA is rather different than that denomination, to say the least. And I am a rather different person, partly because of that experience at, uh, Voldemort. In a perverse way, is it possible that the whole depressing Voldemort experience is part of why this beginning of this fool's errand is so satisfying and rewarding? Was that necessary to make this work? Ugh, that sounds rather predeterministic, and I'm writing this entry to put off reading Calvin for the moment, not to be a case study in it...
Whether being put on the spot to engage in a little dramatic storytelling of the first sentences of the Gospel of Mark, or getting that job in the campus library's Instructional Resource Center, or crowding in for tomorrow's community lunch, it's good for now. I remain all too aware from that past of how things can turn ugly quickly, but that is not seemingly on the horizon for the moment.
Yes, I still miss Lawrence, and KU, and even musicology a bit. But this is not only good, it's right. Call this a midterm progress report if you like. And in the meantime I'm looking forward to seeing how my mind gets blown tomorrow.
One of the pleasures/pains of this fool's errand is that every day there's a chance for my mind to be blown. Pleasure because it's the best kind of mind-blowing; new stuff, new possibilities, ideas that will be old hat to many but are new to me. New Testament I in particular has been something else, particularly now upon entering the odd and tricky Gospel of Mark. Just one class in and everything I'd ever thought about that book (which, admittedly, was not a lot) has been upended and strewn about the room, and the mess is glorious and wonderful and amazing. My new favorite gospel, at least until we get to Matthew (I think that's next...), and then I think Luke...you get the idea. Theology I is a bit more challenging. Calvin and Schleiermacher are the twin (reformed) systematic pillars in the design of this class, with other theologians of the church's history weaving in and out at various points on various topics. (Schleiermacher ran with the Romantics just a little bit, and so I do find myself occasionally having flashbacks to some of those nineteenth-century German writers on music who occupied parts of my brain in my previous life.) History of Christianity I is in many ways closest to my scholarly heart, with my history jones that has for so many years been trained on music re-focusing and adapting to the much more ancient and complicated history of the Christian church. I get wowed on a regular basis.
That's the pleasure, and the pain too. I run close to "wow burnout" sometimes. It's sooooo much to take in and try to make sense of, coming so fast, and my slow brain gets overwhelmed trying to keep up. (I mean that word very deliberately; it's a pretty good brain all things considered, but it is not a fast one; it takes me time to digest and work through new stuff, and then more new stuff is pouring in and wowing my brain, and the whole cycle keeps running and I keep dog-paddling.)
Those who know my past know that as seminary experiences go, this ain't my first rodeo. Twenty years ago at this point I was into the first term of my final year at another school, one which is now the Voldemort of my academic experience -- "it which must not be named." That was long, long ago, in a denominational galaxy far, far away, one in which the Rebel Alliance was sorely lacking in Luke Skywalkers and got crushed by the Empire swiftly and brutally. (At this point twenty years ago I was trying to figure out if I was capable of getting up the nerve to ask this one girl out; we've been married over seventeen years now, which is to say that this prior seminary experience was not all for nought.) The Baptist Theological Seminary at Richmond which sits across the street from Union serves as a regular reminder of that experience, born as it was out of the debris. The overall negative vibe of that older experience has frankly caused me to block a lot of it out. It was that depressing in the overall.
The experiences are different enough that comparison is frankly pointless. I was pursuing a church music degree then, an M.Div. now. (It really would not kill Union, or other Presbyterian schools, to include a little more systematic academic instruction in church music in their curriculum--a basic hymnody class, for example--but that's a different subject for another blog post, well into the future.) Union is a much smaller community than that was. And PC-USA is rather different than that denomination, to say the least. And I am a rather different person, partly because of that experience at, uh, Voldemort. In a perverse way, is it possible that the whole depressing Voldemort experience is part of why this beginning of this fool's errand is so satisfying and rewarding? Was that necessary to make this work? Ugh, that sounds rather predeterministic, and I'm writing this entry to put off reading Calvin for the moment, not to be a case study in it...
Whether being put on the spot to engage in a little dramatic storytelling of the first sentences of the Gospel of Mark, or getting that job in the campus library's Instructional Resource Center, or crowding in for tomorrow's community lunch, it's good for now. I remain all too aware from that past of how things can turn ugly quickly, but that is not seemingly on the horizon for the moment.
Sunday, October 2, 2011
Preacherman Uncensored?
As we've been setting in here in the Richmond area, we have been making visits to a handful of churches in the area. Some are well into town, requiring a substantial trip and paying tolls and such; a couple are less distant. As an inquirer in ministry under care of the Presbytery of Northern Kansas, I'm in the funny place of not really looking to "join" a church, as my membership and oversight technically remains back there among the sunflowers and such. Still, having a church home, or at least a church home-away-from-home, remains desirable, and so we keep looking.
Today we made a visit to a church we had visited a couple of times before, but not in several weeks. (One thing we've discovered in this process is that it's almost pointless to visit a church around here during the summer, as they virtually all seem to shut down to an amazing degree -- no choirs, reduced or altered hours of services, etc.; any picture you get from doing so will only be upended around Labor Day.) It was a bit of an odd Sunday, perhaps best characterized as too many things going on. Clearly we showed up in the middle of a sermon series (not my favorite thing, but to each his or her own). A large flute choir had come in to provide several musical elements of the service. Being the first Sunday of the month communion was being observed; not in an ordinary way, but at least nominally as part of World Communion Sunday, an event observed the first Sunday of October in a goodly number of mainline and maybe some other traditions, forwarding the notion that the Lord's table exists not only in this one particular church but in churches all around the globe, anywhere the body of Christ comes together whether two or three or by the thousands, all partaking of the same holy food and drink. (Yes, I'm oversimplifying.)
The result in this particular case was a bit of a jumble. All of the elements of this particular service seemed to trip over one another rather than flow together. The mechanics of getting from one part of the service to another were complicated a bit by the flute choir, directed by the church's organist who sometimes had to cross from one side of the sanctuary to the other, leaving a bit of a gap. The "World" part of World Communion Sunday got lost in the shuffle a bit, as only a couple of African-derived responses by the choir and the stoles being worn by the two ministers tipped off this aspect of the observance (frequently I've seen use of more music, including non-Western hymns, and more visual elements in the sanctuary). The sermon got shuffled a bit to be directly leading into communion, and billed as a "communion meditation," despite not being particularly communion-themed at all. It happens, sometimes; in the welter of extra things get out of whack.
In all of that, though, nobody told me who to vote for. Hmm.
For those who may have missed it, today was in some circles designated as "Pulpit Freedom Sunday," in which a number of pastors were pledged or maybe recruited to use this morning's sermon time to engage in direct endorsement of candidates for office or whatever other official voting matters might be forthcoming, the premise being that the whole fussy business of separating state and church in this country is a demonic infringement on The Pastor's divine right to say whatever he wants to say from the pulpit (the absence of "he or she" there is in this case deliberate, as I don't see a lot of evidence that any female preachers were involved; if any were, I apologize.) The New York Times included an article on the event, which apparently even involved recording the sermon and taunting the Internal Revenue Service with it; read it here if you like.
Now, I'm going to guess that there weren't many churches where "Pulpit Freedom Sunday" and "World Communion Sunday" were both being observed today. Maybe I'm just not doing the right mental gymnastics, but the two impulses don't seem to have a lot of overlap; "I have the absolute right to preach whatever I wanna preach" doesn't seem to fit easily with the notion that, say, the communion table is not restricted to any one church or denomination or what have you. In that sense the irony lover in me can't help but find that juxtaposition rather fascinating itself.
But my main point is the whole business about what a preacher can or cannot say from the pulpit. To cite a specific sentence, from some guy named James Garlow, "The freedom of speech and the freedom of religion promised under the First Amendment means pastors have full authority to say what the want to say."
Let that one roll around in your brain for a minute.
I was under this confused notion that the First Amendment said, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances." The notion of pastoral authority seems strangely absent.
Of course, Mr. Garlow and his cohort are not truly claiming that they're going to be hauled off to jail for making political endorsements from the pulpit. Apparently what they are targeting is something far more heinous; taxes. Use of a church or a pulpit for political gain could of course be regarded as a violation of the institution's tax-exempt status, and apparently paying taxes is a far worse fate than going to jail or being executed. It seems odd to me, though, that the threat of paying taxes is somehow regarded as a threat to freedom of speech or religion. We ordinary folk out here pay taxes to various degrees, and go on functionally worshiping according to the dictates of each individual conscience and speaking as freely as we choose. I suppose if you've built up a big ol' pleasure palace as Mr. Garlow's church seems to have done, then loss of tax-exempt status is a fearful prospect indeed. But still, the degree to which that threat should be regarded as an impingement on either of those freedoms is pretty dubious to me.
And the bigger problem is this: if Mr. Garlow or his ilk truly is the servant of God he or they claim to be, then his freedom to say whatever he wants to say from the pulpit is already severely curtailed, and by a far more fearful entity than the Internal Revenue Service.
I'm admittedly new at this seminary business, but so far I can't find anything in Scripture, the tradition of the church, the teachings or writings of this or that theologian, the guidelines of my denomination or any other, or frankly anywhere that endorses the notion that having a pulpit from which to preach means having the freedom to say whatever I want to say. I am free to preach the Gospel, as far as I can see. The Good News. The message of Jesus. The Word of God. And I'm having real trouble finding "whatever I want to say" in any of that language.
Paul spends a good chunk of his first letter to Corinth elucidating how many ways he has curtailed his own freedom as a proclaimer of the Gospel ("though I am free with respect to all, I have made myself a slave to all, so that I might win more of them" in I Corinthians 9:19 would be one example). His own freedom, and his right to indulge in that freedom, is not even secondary, but so far down the list as to be irrelevant to the calling he followed under God's claim. The only thing Mr. Garlow seems to be enslaved to is a particular political party. I'm fairly sure, even though I haven't had New Testament II yet, that Paul didn't particularly mean that when he spoke of being "a slave to all."
I've had the experience of many thoughtful, skilled and inspired pastors who (though I didn't know it at the time) provided me with good models of how to speak the Gospel to issues in society, to the injustices which rule around so many corners, and to those who profit from such injustices, without bounding over the line of political endorsement or enslavement. (I will be so bold as to cite Rev. Brant Copeland, of First Presbyterian Church in Tallahassee, Florida, for being a model of this form of preacherly engagement in particular, and will hope he forgives me.) Speaking the Gospel will inevitably require a preacher to speak against injustice and its purveyors in our world. That category -- "injustice and its purveyors in our world" -- will sadly include the vast, overwhelming majority of politicians and candidates for office. Endorsing a candidate? Extremely unlikely, when one is enslaved only to the Gospel.
No, I don't hold with any notion that Mr. Garlow made any kind of slip of the tongue in using that phrase, unless you're regarding it as one of the greatest Freudian slips of all time. He was, in fact, saying exactly what he wanted to say. If that's his great mission in life, he should of course feel free to pursue it. And I'm sure that church can find another pastor.
Today we made a visit to a church we had visited a couple of times before, but not in several weeks. (One thing we've discovered in this process is that it's almost pointless to visit a church around here during the summer, as they virtually all seem to shut down to an amazing degree -- no choirs, reduced or altered hours of services, etc.; any picture you get from doing so will only be upended around Labor Day.) It was a bit of an odd Sunday, perhaps best characterized as too many things going on. Clearly we showed up in the middle of a sermon series (not my favorite thing, but to each his or her own). A large flute choir had come in to provide several musical elements of the service. Being the first Sunday of the month communion was being observed; not in an ordinary way, but at least nominally as part of World Communion Sunday, an event observed the first Sunday of October in a goodly number of mainline and maybe some other traditions, forwarding the notion that the Lord's table exists not only in this one particular church but in churches all around the globe, anywhere the body of Christ comes together whether two or three or by the thousands, all partaking of the same holy food and drink. (Yes, I'm oversimplifying.)
The result in this particular case was a bit of a jumble. All of the elements of this particular service seemed to trip over one another rather than flow together. The mechanics of getting from one part of the service to another were complicated a bit by the flute choir, directed by the church's organist who sometimes had to cross from one side of the sanctuary to the other, leaving a bit of a gap. The "World" part of World Communion Sunday got lost in the shuffle a bit, as only a couple of African-derived responses by the choir and the stoles being worn by the two ministers tipped off this aspect of the observance (frequently I've seen use of more music, including non-Western hymns, and more visual elements in the sanctuary). The sermon got shuffled a bit to be directly leading into communion, and billed as a "communion meditation," despite not being particularly communion-themed at all. It happens, sometimes; in the welter of extra things get out of whack.
In all of that, though, nobody told me who to vote for. Hmm.
For those who may have missed it, today was in some circles designated as "Pulpit Freedom Sunday," in which a number of pastors were pledged or maybe recruited to use this morning's sermon time to engage in direct endorsement of candidates for office or whatever other official voting matters might be forthcoming, the premise being that the whole fussy business of separating state and church in this country is a demonic infringement on The Pastor's divine right to say whatever he wants to say from the pulpit (the absence of "he or she" there is in this case deliberate, as I don't see a lot of evidence that any female preachers were involved; if any were, I apologize.) The New York Times included an article on the event, which apparently even involved recording the sermon and taunting the Internal Revenue Service with it; read it here if you like.
Now, I'm going to guess that there weren't many churches where "Pulpit Freedom Sunday" and "World Communion Sunday" were both being observed today. Maybe I'm just not doing the right mental gymnastics, but the two impulses don't seem to have a lot of overlap; "I have the absolute right to preach whatever I wanna preach" doesn't seem to fit easily with the notion that, say, the communion table is not restricted to any one church or denomination or what have you. In that sense the irony lover in me can't help but find that juxtaposition rather fascinating itself.
But my main point is the whole business about what a preacher can or cannot say from the pulpit. To cite a specific sentence, from some guy named James Garlow, "The freedom of speech and the freedom of religion promised under the First Amendment means pastors have full authority to say what the want to say."
Let that one roll around in your brain for a minute.
I was under this confused notion that the First Amendment said, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances." The notion of pastoral authority seems strangely absent.
Of course, Mr. Garlow and his cohort are not truly claiming that they're going to be hauled off to jail for making political endorsements from the pulpit. Apparently what they are targeting is something far more heinous; taxes. Use of a church or a pulpit for political gain could of course be regarded as a violation of the institution's tax-exempt status, and apparently paying taxes is a far worse fate than going to jail or being executed. It seems odd to me, though, that the threat of paying taxes is somehow regarded as a threat to freedom of speech or religion. We ordinary folk out here pay taxes to various degrees, and go on functionally worshiping according to the dictates of each individual conscience and speaking as freely as we choose. I suppose if you've built up a big ol' pleasure palace as Mr. Garlow's church seems to have done, then loss of tax-exempt status is a fearful prospect indeed. But still, the degree to which that threat should be regarded as an impingement on either of those freedoms is pretty dubious to me.
And the bigger problem is this: if Mr. Garlow or his ilk truly is the servant of God he or they claim to be, then his freedom to say whatever he wants to say from the pulpit is already severely curtailed, and by a far more fearful entity than the Internal Revenue Service.
I'm admittedly new at this seminary business, but so far I can't find anything in Scripture, the tradition of the church, the teachings or writings of this or that theologian, the guidelines of my denomination or any other, or frankly anywhere that endorses the notion that having a pulpit from which to preach means having the freedom to say whatever I want to say. I am free to preach the Gospel, as far as I can see. The Good News. The message of Jesus. The Word of God. And I'm having real trouble finding "whatever I want to say" in any of that language.
Paul spends a good chunk of his first letter to Corinth elucidating how many ways he has curtailed his own freedom as a proclaimer of the Gospel ("though I am free with respect to all, I have made myself a slave to all, so that I might win more of them" in I Corinthians 9:19 would be one example). His own freedom, and his right to indulge in that freedom, is not even secondary, but so far down the list as to be irrelevant to the calling he followed under God's claim. The only thing Mr. Garlow seems to be enslaved to is a particular political party. I'm fairly sure, even though I haven't had New Testament II yet, that Paul didn't particularly mean that when he spoke of being "a slave to all."
I've had the experience of many thoughtful, skilled and inspired pastors who (though I didn't know it at the time) provided me with good models of how to speak the Gospel to issues in society, to the injustices which rule around so many corners, and to those who profit from such injustices, without bounding over the line of political endorsement or enslavement. (I will be so bold as to cite Rev. Brant Copeland, of First Presbyterian Church in Tallahassee, Florida, for being a model of this form of preacherly engagement in particular, and will hope he forgives me.) Speaking the Gospel will inevitably require a preacher to speak against injustice and its purveyors in our world. That category -- "injustice and its purveyors in our world" -- will sadly include the vast, overwhelming majority of politicians and candidates for office. Endorsing a candidate? Extremely unlikely, when one is enslaved only to the Gospel.
No, I don't hold with any notion that Mr. Garlow made any kind of slip of the tongue in using that phrase, unless you're regarding it as one of the greatest Freudian slips of all time. He was, in fact, saying exactly what he wanted to say. If that's his great mission in life, he should of course feel free to pursue it. And I'm sure that church can find another pastor.
Thursday, September 29, 2011
Oh, my, did that just happen?
For those who follow baseball with much passion, Wednesday's waterfall of decisive games, epic comebacks, and grotesque collapses was a once-in-a-fandom event. That kind of thing Just. Doesn't. Happen. Teams don't lose nine-game leads for playoff position in September. It's impossible to be that bad after having been so good, right? Nothing is impossible, my friends; after that display even skiing through a revolving door begins to look conceivable.
For most the headline-grabbing event is the long, horrific fall of the Boston Red Sox. Atlanta Braves fans are in the unenviable position of either suffering in silence or interjecting, "Hey, what about us? We fell apart just as badly . . . oh, wait . . . ." And in truth there are reasons that the Red Sox collapse is in fact a bigger deal, which we shall address anon. But to the Braves first.
Earlier in September the Braves had an 8 1/2-game advantage in the chase for the wild card position, the final playoff spot in the National League. The St. Louis Cardinals, the team trying to close that deficit, looked a bit disoriented and lost, and the Braves were riding their old-style formula of devastating pitching (now with a real bullpen, something the Braves teams of the '90s never quite mastered) and occasionally scoring a run or two to win the game. After Wednesday's games, the Braves resided one game behind the Cardinals, looking at an offseason beginning sooner than anyone had anticipated.
At least as of the time their game ended, no one had frittered away such a large last-month-of-the-season lead and missed out on the playoffs, ever. But if one were going to look for a team susceptible to such a collapse, the Braves weren't the worst candidate to pick. So much of their success was bound up in their pitching, particularly a bullpen featuring a couple of young flamethrowers in Jonny Venters and Craig Kimbrel, that if for some reason that pitching hit a rough patch there was no Plan B. The kind way to say it is to call the Braves "offensively challenged." Chipper Jones should cruise into the Baseball Hall of Fame someday, but he's on the downside of his career and so frequently injured or banged up as to be a shell of his former self. Last year's rookie phenomenon, Jason Heyward, practically re-wrote the definition of "sophomore slump," to the point of losing the confidence of manager Fredi Gonzalez and being replaced for long stretches of time by a career minor-leaguer who had never really hit in the minor leagues. (Here's a little-appreciated truth about baseball, particularly hitting: you can't get out of a slump by not playing.) Dan Uggla, the slugging second baseman acquired in the offseason, played as if the last letter of his name had been replaced with a "y." Aside from rookie first baseman and possible Rookie of the Year Freddie Freeman (no relation), there wasn't a lot of dependable offense there. If the pitching faltered, even a little bit, the Braves were in trouble. And that's exactly what happened. It was hardly a total collapse, but Kimbrel and Venters became a little bit more hittable, the starters couldn't spare the rest of the bullpen by pitching eight or nine innings, and the Cardinals got hot at the right time to take advantage. Now Cardinal fans can extend their good-byes to Albert Pujols a little bit longer.
Only an hour or two later, the Red Sox got the Braves off the hook, just a little bit, with their "yes we can!" answer to the Braves' "can you top this?" moment. Boston completed a nine-game collapse with a loss to the Baltimore Orioles, while the Tampa BayDevil Rays defeated the New York Yankees. That rather mere description does not do justice to Wednesday night's turn (and turn again, and turn again...) of events.
Up to the ninth inning of their game, the Red Sox led, 3-2. In the meantime, the Rays trailed the Yankees as much as 7-0 before beginning their comeback, which was not completed until the ninth inning with a barely-fair home run by one Dan Johnson, whose sole purpose in baseball seems to be to destroy the Red Sox. In 2008 he hit a crucial home run in the Rays' pennant push, and did it again late last season. In between, Johnson spent the 2009 season in Japan and most of the 2010 season in Durham, NC, home of the Rays' AAA farm team. This spring something odd happened; the minor-league lifer actually got to leave spring training with the major-league team instead of shuffling off to Durham. Faced with this unexpected karmic windfall, Johnson responded by mustering a batting average barely over .100 (in a sport in which a .200 average is a good sign you should seek alternate employment). Quickly he was shuffled back to Durham, there to bide his time until the odd baseball quirk known as September roster expansion allowed him to return to the majors, in time to destroy the Red Sox yet again.
With the game thus tied, matters continued into extra innings, in which the 12th inning finally brought triumph in the form of a barely-fair home run from a much more conventional source, Evan Longoria, the Rays' most highly-renowned player. This home run occurred just in time for Red Sox players to see it on their clubhouse TVs upon trudging dejectedly in after their ninth-inning loss, due to a sharp single by Robert Andino, who is now in the process of receiving a vulgar middle name in perpetuity from Red Sox fans, in the manner of Bucky Effing Dent (1978) and Aaron Bleeping Boone (2003). Andino's single, appropriately enough, ticked off the glove of Sox left-fielder Carl Crawford, finishing up his own horribly disappointing first season in Boston as the recipient of a very pricey free-agent contract, allowing him to escape the horrors of playing for Tampa Bay.
Let the irony wash over you for few moments. Enjoy that? Good.
Now as to why the Boston collapse was so much more of an attention-grabber than Atlanta's:
The Red Sox, despite a history of being the plucky underdog to the Evil Empire in New York, are in fact their own Evil Empire these days. Their payroll isn't a whole lot smaller than that of the Yankees, and their fan base has acquired the same level of smug obnoxiousness as that of the Yankees, despite trailing in World Series championships twenty-something to two. Their chief offseason acquisitions before this year were classic examples of a large-market club plucking away the premium players small-market teams can no longer afford; Crawford from the Rays via free agency and first baseman Adrian Gonzalez from the San Diego Padres via trade. With such offensive improvements added to what was believed to be a solid pitching staff, the Red Sox were widely picked to waltz through the American League and into the World Series. ESPN.com surveyed a group of forty-five writers, analysts, former players, etc. and all of them--yes, all forty-five--picked the Red Sox to win their division, forget that messy wild-card stuff. (The Braves were a frequent, but by no means consensus, pick to win the NL wild card; in other words, they ended up about where those ESPN foofs picked them to end up.)
It should be pointed out that as of September 1, those forty-five experts appeared to be right on the money. The Red Sox were in fact in first place, something not true of the Braves in their division; this simply adds another level of incredulity to the overall collapse.
Meanwhile, the Rays, to put it mildly, spend less on their roster. A lot less. By all accounts the Cardinals in the NL were much likelier playoff candidates in the AL. The Rays, despite playoff turns in 2008 and 2010, were not expected to make the playoffs at all this year. Since nobody goes to games in St. Petersburg (the Tampa Bay area does not deserve this team) and the stadium, a goofy-looking lopsided dome, isn't a moneymaker in the mode of iconic Fenway Park, the Rays operate with a limited budget. Besides Crawford, the Rays bid goodbye to one of their top starting pitchers and virtually all their relief pitchers over the offseason, for budgetary reasons. Their two on-the-cheap free-agent signings were Johnny Damon, most notable for rocking the Jesus look during Boston's 2004 World Series run, and the erratic Manny Ramirez, who ended up "retiring" five games into the season due to being busted for performance-enhancing drugs.
So, on paper at least, the disparity between Boston and Tampa Bay was more impressive, by far, than the disparity between Atlanta and St. Louis. And yet there Boston was, looking if though they had suffered some sort of collective mind-wipe that left them unable to remember how to play baseball. The Rays had a good month of September, but not great; such was the magnitude of Boston's slide. The Rays play at Texas Friday night, the Red Sox go home to wonder what happened.
If you've waded through this whole thing waiting for some grand theme or mini-sermon to top it off, you are about to be grandly disappointed. There is no grand theme. Such unfathomable swings and falls defy thematization. (I'm certainly not going to bring divine intervention into it; I do believe God has a flair for the preposterous, but this?) Folks, stuff happens. Wildly improbable, statistically unthinkable things happen, and trying to extract some lesson from it is a bigger fool's errand than my own. Enjoy it, if you're a fan of the Rays, Cardinals, or underdogs; suffer through it, if you're a fan of the Braves, Red Sox, or corporate oligarchies or whatever. This is that thing that sport (particularly baseball) does, every so often, that makes them irresistible to those who love it. It certainly doesn't happen every season. Most years a team like the Red Sox prevails, and handily, while the Rays go scraping for change between the sofa cushions. But not this year. Sometimes the underdog wins, and there's not a whole lot to do but shake your head and wonder, and enjoy.
For most the headline-grabbing event is the long, horrific fall of the Boston Red Sox. Atlanta Braves fans are in the unenviable position of either suffering in silence or interjecting, "Hey, what about us? We fell apart just as badly . . . oh, wait . . . ." And in truth there are reasons that the Red Sox collapse is in fact a bigger deal, which we shall address anon. But to the Braves first.
Earlier in September the Braves had an 8 1/2-game advantage in the chase for the wild card position, the final playoff spot in the National League. The St. Louis Cardinals, the team trying to close that deficit, looked a bit disoriented and lost, and the Braves were riding their old-style formula of devastating pitching (now with a real bullpen, something the Braves teams of the '90s never quite mastered) and occasionally scoring a run or two to win the game. After Wednesday's games, the Braves resided one game behind the Cardinals, looking at an offseason beginning sooner than anyone had anticipated.
At least as of the time their game ended, no one had frittered away such a large last-month-of-the-season lead and missed out on the playoffs, ever. But if one were going to look for a team susceptible to such a collapse, the Braves weren't the worst candidate to pick. So much of their success was bound up in their pitching, particularly a bullpen featuring a couple of young flamethrowers in Jonny Venters and Craig Kimbrel, that if for some reason that pitching hit a rough patch there was no Plan B. The kind way to say it is to call the Braves "offensively challenged." Chipper Jones should cruise into the Baseball Hall of Fame someday, but he's on the downside of his career and so frequently injured or banged up as to be a shell of his former self. Last year's rookie phenomenon, Jason Heyward, practically re-wrote the definition of "sophomore slump," to the point of losing the confidence of manager Fredi Gonzalez and being replaced for long stretches of time by a career minor-leaguer who had never really hit in the minor leagues. (Here's a little-appreciated truth about baseball, particularly hitting: you can't get out of a slump by not playing.) Dan Uggla, the slugging second baseman acquired in the offseason, played as if the last letter of his name had been replaced with a "y." Aside from rookie first baseman and possible Rookie of the Year Freddie Freeman (no relation), there wasn't a lot of dependable offense there. If the pitching faltered, even a little bit, the Braves were in trouble. And that's exactly what happened. It was hardly a total collapse, but Kimbrel and Venters became a little bit more hittable, the starters couldn't spare the rest of the bullpen by pitching eight or nine innings, and the Cardinals got hot at the right time to take advantage. Now Cardinal fans can extend their good-byes to Albert Pujols a little bit longer.
Only an hour or two later, the Red Sox got the Braves off the hook, just a little bit, with their "yes we can!" answer to the Braves' "can you top this?" moment. Boston completed a nine-game collapse with a loss to the Baltimore Orioles, while the Tampa Bay
Up to the ninth inning of their game, the Red Sox led, 3-2. In the meantime, the Rays trailed the Yankees as much as 7-0 before beginning their comeback, which was not completed until the ninth inning with a barely-fair home run by one Dan Johnson, whose sole purpose in baseball seems to be to destroy the Red Sox. In 2008 he hit a crucial home run in the Rays' pennant push, and did it again late last season. In between, Johnson spent the 2009 season in Japan and most of the 2010 season in Durham, NC, home of the Rays' AAA farm team. This spring something odd happened; the minor-league lifer actually got to leave spring training with the major-league team instead of shuffling off to Durham. Faced with this unexpected karmic windfall, Johnson responded by mustering a batting average barely over .100 (in a sport in which a .200 average is a good sign you should seek alternate employment). Quickly he was shuffled back to Durham, there to bide his time until the odd baseball quirk known as September roster expansion allowed him to return to the majors, in time to destroy the Red Sox yet again.
With the game thus tied, matters continued into extra innings, in which the 12th inning finally brought triumph in the form of a barely-fair home run from a much more conventional source, Evan Longoria, the Rays' most highly-renowned player. This home run occurred just in time for Red Sox players to see it on their clubhouse TVs upon trudging dejectedly in after their ninth-inning loss, due to a sharp single by Robert Andino, who is now in the process of receiving a vulgar middle name in perpetuity from Red Sox fans, in the manner of Bucky Effing Dent (1978) and Aaron Bleeping Boone (2003). Andino's single, appropriately enough, ticked off the glove of Sox left-fielder Carl Crawford, finishing up his own horribly disappointing first season in Boston as the recipient of a very pricey free-agent contract, allowing him to escape the horrors of playing for Tampa Bay.
Let the irony wash over you for few moments. Enjoy that? Good.
Now as to why the Boston collapse was so much more of an attention-grabber than Atlanta's:
The Red Sox, despite a history of being the plucky underdog to the Evil Empire in New York, are in fact their own Evil Empire these days. Their payroll isn't a whole lot smaller than that of the Yankees, and their fan base has acquired the same level of smug obnoxiousness as that of the Yankees, despite trailing in World Series championships twenty-something to two. Their chief offseason acquisitions before this year were classic examples of a large-market club plucking away the premium players small-market teams can no longer afford; Crawford from the Rays via free agency and first baseman Adrian Gonzalez from the San Diego Padres via trade. With such offensive improvements added to what was believed to be a solid pitching staff, the Red Sox were widely picked to waltz through the American League and into the World Series. ESPN.com surveyed a group of forty-five writers, analysts, former players, etc. and all of them--yes, all forty-five--picked the Red Sox to win their division, forget that messy wild-card stuff. (The Braves were a frequent, but by no means consensus, pick to win the NL wild card; in other words, they ended up about where those ESPN foofs picked them to end up.)
It should be pointed out that as of September 1, those forty-five experts appeared to be right on the money. The Red Sox were in fact in first place, something not true of the Braves in their division; this simply adds another level of incredulity to the overall collapse.
Meanwhile, the Rays, to put it mildly, spend less on their roster. A lot less. By all accounts the Cardinals in the NL were much likelier playoff candidates in the AL. The Rays, despite playoff turns in 2008 and 2010, were not expected to make the playoffs at all this year. Since nobody goes to games in St. Petersburg (the Tampa Bay area does not deserve this team) and the stadium, a goofy-looking lopsided dome, isn't a moneymaker in the mode of iconic Fenway Park, the Rays operate with a limited budget. Besides Crawford, the Rays bid goodbye to one of their top starting pitchers and virtually all their relief pitchers over the offseason, for budgetary reasons. Their two on-the-cheap free-agent signings were Johnny Damon, most notable for rocking the Jesus look during Boston's 2004 World Series run, and the erratic Manny Ramirez, who ended up "retiring" five games into the season due to being busted for performance-enhancing drugs.
So, on paper at least, the disparity between Boston and Tampa Bay was more impressive, by far, than the disparity between Atlanta and St. Louis. And yet there Boston was, looking if though they had suffered some sort of collective mind-wipe that left them unable to remember how to play baseball. The Rays had a good month of September, but not great; such was the magnitude of Boston's slide. The Rays play at Texas Friday night, the Red Sox go home to wonder what happened.
If you've waded through this whole thing waiting for some grand theme or mini-sermon to top it off, you are about to be grandly disappointed. There is no grand theme. Such unfathomable swings and falls defy thematization. (I'm certainly not going to bring divine intervention into it; I do believe God has a flair for the preposterous, but this?) Folks, stuff happens. Wildly improbable, statistically unthinkable things happen, and trying to extract some lesson from it is a bigger fool's errand than my own. Enjoy it, if you're a fan of the Rays, Cardinals, or underdogs; suffer through it, if you're a fan of the Braves, Red Sox, or corporate oligarchies or whatever. This is that thing that sport (particularly baseball) does, every so often, that makes them irresistible to those who love it. It certainly doesn't happen every season. Most years a team like the Red Sox prevails, and handily, while the Rays go scraping for change between the sofa cushions. But not this year. Sometimes the underdog wins, and there's not a whole lot to do but shake your head and wonder, and enjoy.
Friday, September 16, 2011
Just shoot me
For a long time the idea of writing a blog was something, to be honest, I would have sneered upon most mightily. It isn't hard to find blogs out there that are little more than vanity pieces, with too much of this and not enough of that and lousy grammar to boot. It got better, and with time I was less disinclined to read blogs by others, even if writing one myself was still not a consideration. As I stumbled onto blogs written by friends of mine, even if friends I hadn't seen in quite a while, it became something that helped me catch up with folks I had lost touch with, to my regret (mind you, there were plenty of folks I lost touch with who, when contact was re-established, I quickly figured out might have been best left in the past. That happens).
So why does Notes on a Fool's Errand exist? (And should that title have been italicized or in quotation marks?) A few reasons. In part I wanted some way to keep some folks up-to-date on how the fool's errand is going, particularly folks back at the "home church" in Lawrence (though I don't live there, my supporting church and presbytery are back in Kansas). Letters would probably be more polite, but stamps aren't cheap and there's no guarantee the Postal Service will survive my time at Union. Besides, there might be some folks out there in other places besides Lawrence who might like to know what's going on too (probably not, but I can hope, right?).
A secondary reason is for the sheer practice in writing, more specifically a non-academic mode of writing. I certainly had to do a good bit of writing in my previous career, and at times I could be quite good at it. That is, though, a rather different mode of expression; the writing of research presentations necessarily has a bit more formality and some elements of Joe Friday ("just the facts, ma'am") to it, although I confess I wasn't always adept at keeping to that formula. Any writing (primarily the writing of sermons, though maybe other things, ... who knows?) that I do going forward (after the student years) will of necessity be a little less formal, a little less academic, and (shudder) sometimes a bit more personal. No, writing a blog isn't like writing a sermon, and I'll be the first to say that my experience in academic writing will be incredibly beneficial going forward. There are, though, some elements of that mode of written expression that I have not tapped into in a while, and writing this isolated little blog may help in re-awakening those elements in me.
One week of fall term is in the books. Academically I'm going lose a bit more eyesight this fall from all the reading, but I do believe it's going to be an exhilarating experience. All of my classes -- New Testament I, Theology I, and Church History I -- are just teasing me with how much intellectual and, yes, even spiritual stimulation may be forthcoming even as I lose my mind or suffer the inevitable destruction of my faith that so many people attribute to seminary study (yes, that was a tongue-in-cheek remark). As much as I'm sure I could have gotten a stellar seminary education at the other schools to which I applied, I am more convinced than ever that I'm in the right place and among the right people. I have got to find a job somewhere, but other than that I am excited, eager to plunge forward, and even happy.
Personally that's a great thing. For the writing of a blog ... I don't know. "Still content, still happy, still excited" isn't much of a blog entry. And one of the things I really don't want to do with this blog is to "write angry." Good Lord, there's enough of that out there. (For that reason you'll seldom see me writing about politics these days; even this disclaimer sentence is beginning to make my blood boil.) Is misery necessary to write a blog? Or is that one of the stereotypical things that I was reacting against in the early days of disdaining blogs? Or am I just flat-out incapable of making contentment and fulfillment sound interesting?
There is, though, something else I want to avoid in writing this stuff, the thing that provokes the title (no, it is not meant to be taken literally, any more that it was meant so as the title of a cheesy sitcom some years back). Please, dear Lord, deliver me from smugness.
You've read that kind of thing, you know what I'm talking about. The kind that cannot cut some slack. The kind that has gotten rather comfortable with a position of moral or ethical superiority, and brooks no real-world frustration or disappointment in others. The kind that takes too much pleasure in an unhealthy dollop of schoolmarm scolding of those who don't live up to the blogger's standards. Frankly I'd rather write angry than write smug. So if you catch me in that, that's where the title of this post comes in. I may not react that well to it, but I will emphatically need the chastisement if I am guilty of that, so bring it on.
If one week is able to teach anything, it has taught me how little I know. Not that I can't learn it, but how much I do have to learn. And of course I'm aware that this is not an original insight (I promised way back in post number one that I wouldn't have many original things to say, didn't I?), and as a professor I was certainly aware that learning and growing had to be a lifelong pursuit. I am thoroughly jazzed at the learning to come. At the same time I am humbled. I know so little. There is so far to go. I'm in no position to be lecturing to others. But then, really, who is?
So why does Notes on a Fool's Errand exist? (And should that title have been italicized or in quotation marks?) A few reasons. In part I wanted some way to keep some folks up-to-date on how the fool's errand is going, particularly folks back at the "home church" in Lawrence (though I don't live there, my supporting church and presbytery are back in Kansas). Letters would probably be more polite, but stamps aren't cheap and there's no guarantee the Postal Service will survive my time at Union. Besides, there might be some folks out there in other places besides Lawrence who might like to know what's going on too (probably not, but I can hope, right?).
A secondary reason is for the sheer practice in writing, more specifically a non-academic mode of writing. I certainly had to do a good bit of writing in my previous career, and at times I could be quite good at it. That is, though, a rather different mode of expression; the writing of research presentations necessarily has a bit more formality and some elements of Joe Friday ("just the facts, ma'am") to it, although I confess I wasn't always adept at keeping to that formula. Any writing (primarily the writing of sermons, though maybe other things, ... who knows?) that I do going forward (after the student years) will of necessity be a little less formal, a little less academic, and (shudder) sometimes a bit more personal. No, writing a blog isn't like writing a sermon, and I'll be the first to say that my experience in academic writing will be incredibly beneficial going forward. There are, though, some elements of that mode of written expression that I have not tapped into in a while, and writing this isolated little blog may help in re-awakening those elements in me.
One week of fall term is in the books. Academically I'm going lose a bit more eyesight this fall from all the reading, but I do believe it's going to be an exhilarating experience. All of my classes -- New Testament I, Theology I, and Church History I -- are just teasing me with how much intellectual and, yes, even spiritual stimulation may be forthcoming even as I lose my mind or suffer the inevitable destruction of my faith that so many people attribute to seminary study (yes, that was a tongue-in-cheek remark). As much as I'm sure I could have gotten a stellar seminary education at the other schools to which I applied, I am more convinced than ever that I'm in the right place and among the right people. I have got to find a job somewhere, but other than that I am excited, eager to plunge forward, and even happy.
Personally that's a great thing. For the writing of a blog ... I don't know. "Still content, still happy, still excited" isn't much of a blog entry. And one of the things I really don't want to do with this blog is to "write angry." Good Lord, there's enough of that out there. (For that reason you'll seldom see me writing about politics these days; even this disclaimer sentence is beginning to make my blood boil.) Is misery necessary to write a blog? Or is that one of the stereotypical things that I was reacting against in the early days of disdaining blogs? Or am I just flat-out incapable of making contentment and fulfillment sound interesting?
There is, though, something else I want to avoid in writing this stuff, the thing that provokes the title (no, it is not meant to be taken literally, any more that it was meant so as the title of a cheesy sitcom some years back). Please, dear Lord, deliver me from smugness.
You've read that kind of thing, you know what I'm talking about. The kind that cannot cut some slack. The kind that has gotten rather comfortable with a position of moral or ethical superiority, and brooks no real-world frustration or disappointment in others. The kind that takes too much pleasure in an unhealthy dollop of schoolmarm scolding of those who don't live up to the blogger's standards. Frankly I'd rather write angry than write smug. So if you catch me in that, that's where the title of this post comes in. I may not react that well to it, but I will emphatically need the chastisement if I am guilty of that, so bring it on.
If one week is able to teach anything, it has taught me how little I know. Not that I can't learn it, but how much I do have to learn. And of course I'm aware that this is not an original insight (I promised way back in post number one that I wouldn't have many original things to say, didn't I?), and as a professor I was certainly aware that learning and growing had to be a lifelong pursuit. I am thoroughly jazzed at the learning to come. At the same time I am humbled. I know so little. There is so far to go. I'm in no position to be lecturing to others. But then, really, who is?
Thursday, September 8, 2011
Service Day
Part of the orientation schedule here at Union, inserted between two days of the kind of orientation stuff you might find at any institution of higher education, is Service Day. Incoming students (and some returning students and faculty) head off for an afternoon of work at one of six social service groups in the Richmond area. Given my choice I signed up for an afternoon at the Central Virginia Food Bank.
This Food Bank (under the umbrella of a group called FeedMore) serves as a clearinghouse where food is collected, preprared, and packaged for distribution by other groups, from Meals on Wheels to Children's Cafe to any number of others. A busy day might involve three thousand or more food packages moving through. Our group may well have put together several hundred meals today; in the middle of working you really can't tell.
There were occasional moments of threatened comedy. My first station involved packing and loading fruit cups for distribution. These had already been filled, but needed to be covered. The Food Bank has been able to acquire machines to stick those plastic filmy covers on things like fruit cups and meal trays, and I (along with Brian Blount, the president of Union Presbyterian Seminary) was on the receiving end, loading fruit cups onto trays to be taken to another station for packing. The trick is that once the machine gets going, it's not easy to stop. Even if switched off it takes several more seconds to stop, in which fruit cups keep popping out. More than once, in the first few runs, we were almost overwhelmed by fruit cups. If I say it was nearly a "Lucy and Ethel moment" and refer you to this YouTube video, I think you'll get the point.
Later came the greasy work of slicing up meatloaf for loading onto meals, along with mashed potatoes and spinach. I got the grunt work of pulling out the trays of meatloaf from the cooler, dividing them up into pieces around 3.5 ounces each (or as close as I could get, since some of these meatloaf trays came out looking like continents in some post-Pangea stage of continental drift), and putting those meatloaf servings into trays. Others down the line added gravy, mashed potatoes, and spinach, then the trays were covered by another machine and labeled for distribution. The supervisor called it "the worst job," though I'm not sure why. Later tasks included shrink-wrapping large racks of meals and other items for loading on trucks for delivery to other agencies.
This was the point at which the enormity of the Food Bank's task became clearer. Even if many other meals had been delivered already that day, there was still an awful lot of stuff left to go. Furthermore, looking at the labels on the various items awaiting delivery reminded me of some of the complications that accrue to the task of providing so many meals. People have food allergies or intolerances. Some are vegetarians -- no meatloaf there. Others have dietary restrictions due to other health issues. The Food Bank has to work around all of these, and be sure the wrong meals don't get sent off to the wrong agencies. It can be a pretty mind-boggling task, but they handle it, and handle it well from what I could see today.
It was a good solid three-hour volunteer shift, and seemed to be well-appreciated by the staff and other volunteers. I certainly left feeling it had been a worthwhile day of service work by all means, and considering the Food Bank as a place to continue to volunteer on my own.
Still, the clincher of the day was yet to come. After another meal back on campus (fried chicken...mmmmm), the day's wrap was a worship service led by Motor Racing Outreach, a ministry connected to NASCAR, which of course has a race in Richmond this weekend. We did get our brush with celebrity: Trevor Bayne, this year's Daytona 500 winner, was one of the speakers. It was "worship" in the contemporary mode; many of you who know me will guess my overall reaction. I won't burden you with my reactions otherwise (I don't feel like starting fights these days), except to acknowledge that I didn't know any of the music.
But part of the order was to hear some words from students who had gone out to the various agencies and volunteered to reflect on their experience. All three of these were well-said and good to hear.
Then one more person spoke, more impromptu. Syngman Rhee (not to be confused with the one-time Korean president) is kind of a big deal in PC(USA) and mainline Protestantism more generally. He's been a moderator of PC(USA) and worked with the denomination in many ways. He now teaches here at Union, and was also part of the contingent at the Food Bank today. His words eloquently recalled his own experience on the receiving end of such food distribution, as a refugee fleeing North Korea in the early 1950s. Church World Service, then an arm of the National Council of Churches, was on hand quickly to minister to those refugees with food, blankets (Korean winters aren't pleasant, apparently), and more.
One could volunteer at a place like the Central Virginia Food Bank and not end up seeing the beneficiaries of one's work face-to-face. That doesn't make the work any less important, of course; clearly there is a significant need in the Richmond area for the service the CVFB provides. Still, being reminded of just what might happen on the receiving end of such work provided a fittingly thoughtful and even celebratory end to the day. A lot of people volunteer in so many places. Some of them are found "on the front lines," directly working with those in need. Many are found "behind the lines," providing unseen support and making the work "on the front lines" possible. May God continue to bless the hands, feet, arms, backs and work of those behind the lines, hairnets, plastic aprons and all; rubber gloves greasy with meatloaf or speckled with mashed potatoes, juggling fruit cups, and making it possible for people to be fed who might not otherwise eat tonight.
This Food Bank (under the umbrella of a group called FeedMore) serves as a clearinghouse where food is collected, preprared, and packaged for distribution by other groups, from Meals on Wheels to Children's Cafe to any number of others. A busy day might involve three thousand or more food packages moving through. Our group may well have put together several hundred meals today; in the middle of working you really can't tell.
There were occasional moments of threatened comedy. My first station involved packing and loading fruit cups for distribution. These had already been filled, but needed to be covered. The Food Bank has been able to acquire machines to stick those plastic filmy covers on things like fruit cups and meal trays, and I (along with Brian Blount, the president of Union Presbyterian Seminary) was on the receiving end, loading fruit cups onto trays to be taken to another station for packing. The trick is that once the machine gets going, it's not easy to stop. Even if switched off it takes several more seconds to stop, in which fruit cups keep popping out. More than once, in the first few runs, we were almost overwhelmed by fruit cups. If I say it was nearly a "Lucy and Ethel moment" and refer you to this YouTube video, I think you'll get the point.
Later came the greasy work of slicing up meatloaf for loading onto meals, along with mashed potatoes and spinach. I got the grunt work of pulling out the trays of meatloaf from the cooler, dividing them up into pieces around 3.5 ounces each (or as close as I could get, since some of these meatloaf trays came out looking like continents in some post-Pangea stage of continental drift), and putting those meatloaf servings into trays. Others down the line added gravy, mashed potatoes, and spinach, then the trays were covered by another machine and labeled for distribution. The supervisor called it "the worst job," though I'm not sure why. Later tasks included shrink-wrapping large racks of meals and other items for loading on trucks for delivery to other agencies.
This was the point at which the enormity of the Food Bank's task became clearer. Even if many other meals had been delivered already that day, there was still an awful lot of stuff left to go. Furthermore, looking at the labels on the various items awaiting delivery reminded me of some of the complications that accrue to the task of providing so many meals. People have food allergies or intolerances. Some are vegetarians -- no meatloaf there. Others have dietary restrictions due to other health issues. The Food Bank has to work around all of these, and be sure the wrong meals don't get sent off to the wrong agencies. It can be a pretty mind-boggling task, but they handle it, and handle it well from what I could see today.
It was a good solid three-hour volunteer shift, and seemed to be well-appreciated by the staff and other volunteers. I certainly left feeling it had been a worthwhile day of service work by all means, and considering the Food Bank as a place to continue to volunteer on my own.
Still, the clincher of the day was yet to come. After another meal back on campus (fried chicken...mmmmm), the day's wrap was a worship service led by Motor Racing Outreach, a ministry connected to NASCAR, which of course has a race in Richmond this weekend. We did get our brush with celebrity: Trevor Bayne, this year's Daytona 500 winner, was one of the speakers. It was "worship" in the contemporary mode; many of you who know me will guess my overall reaction. I won't burden you with my reactions otherwise (I don't feel like starting fights these days), except to acknowledge that I didn't know any of the music.
But part of the order was to hear some words from students who had gone out to the various agencies and volunteered to reflect on their experience. All three of these were well-said and good to hear.
Then one more person spoke, more impromptu. Syngman Rhee (not to be confused with the one-time Korean president) is kind of a big deal in PC(USA) and mainline Protestantism more generally. He's been a moderator of PC(USA) and worked with the denomination in many ways. He now teaches here at Union, and was also part of the contingent at the Food Bank today. His words eloquently recalled his own experience on the receiving end of such food distribution, as a refugee fleeing North Korea in the early 1950s. Church World Service, then an arm of the National Council of Churches, was on hand quickly to minister to those refugees with food, blankets (Korean winters aren't pleasant, apparently), and more.
One could volunteer at a place like the Central Virginia Food Bank and not end up seeing the beneficiaries of one's work face-to-face. That doesn't make the work any less important, of course; clearly there is a significant need in the Richmond area for the service the CVFB provides. Still, being reminded of just what might happen on the receiving end of such work provided a fittingly thoughtful and even celebratory end to the day. A lot of people volunteer in so many places. Some of them are found "on the front lines," directly working with those in need. Many are found "behind the lines," providing unseen support and making the work "on the front lines" possible. May God continue to bless the hands, feet, arms, backs and work of those behind the lines, hairnets, plastic aprons and all; rubber gloves greasy with meatloaf or speckled with mashed potatoes, juggling fruit cups, and making it possible for people to be fed who might not otherwise eat tonight.
Monday, August 29, 2011
Power-less
Here I am again, further exploring the nuances of the McAlister's Deli menu. (The chicken tortilla soup is spicier than I remember.) Day three without electricity, and estimates of when it will be restored range from Wednesday to Friday. We aren't in danger of becoming anything like those poor folks in Pahokee and Belle Glade and other parts of south Florida that went several months without power after Hurricane Wilma back in 2005, much less anything like Katrina wrought six years ago today. Still, one does learn how much one relies upon electricity when it's gone.
I'm still baffled as to why we lost the juice as soon as we did. It went out about 11:30 a.m. on Saturday. At that point Irene was nothing more than a dreary Saturday; real wind (tropical storm force, no more, and minimal at that) didn't kick in for several hours. I know from a friend in Williamsburg that their power stayed on much longer, and similarly from a friend who was in Raleigh that day. Is there something special about Richmond that can't tolerate even mildly bad weather? Too many trees, perhaps?
Kvetching aside, this has been a fairly targeted loss. We still have running water, and no evident threat of it being fouled in any way. This is good, but of course that water is getting steadily colder as the reservoir in the hot water heater is depleted. Yesterday's shower still had hot water enough to get the hair washed; today's was more like not-cold water. Tomorrow, I fear for my scalp. Jokes and double entendres aside, I really don't like cold showers.
Aside from one tree down in the back yard, no damage. The house wasn't hit. This is a blessing of course. A house on another block in this neighborhood was not so lucky. We could be much worse off, and I'm extremely grateful that we are all fine, pets included (although poor Miss Piggy doesn't enjoy the heat at her age). Even if I don't quite understand why Richmond was so damaged by what here was a storm of minimal tropical storm force (and yes, I'm sure that's my bias from having lived in Florida for so long), I'm glad to be relatively unscathed.
And yet being without electricity is a noticeable loss. That I'm writing up this entry at McAlister's Deli points to the inconvenience. Dishes pile up, awaiting either the restoration of the dishwasher or someone getting desperate enough to wash by hand. Fortunately we got the laundry done before the storm, but that will pile up too. Of course, since most businesses in the area seem to have power back, we can always hit a laundromat if we get desperate. (Now that's a subject for speculation; businesses were up and running very quickly--and not on generators--and not just "essential" businesses--while houses languish.) And of course, most inconvenient and least consequential of all; we are bereft of our favorite electronic distractions.
I should excuse my wife from the above comment. Living in Virginia and working for an office in Florida requires electronic connections and electric power. Her ability to work is severely impinged by this circumstance, and it grates on her to be cut off from so much of her work. I, on the other hand, am between semesters at the moment, so I really can't claim any more than inconvenience. I can haul myself off to the seminary library and do what I need to do, which right now is write program notes for the Palm Beach Symphony. Since I need a few library resources to do that, it's all just as well to be forced out of the house. (And yes, I can divert myself with my favored distractions every couple of hours or so--email, Facebook, my sim baseball team, etc.)
Still, when at the house, it's hard not to notice I can't just flip on the MacBook and start surfing around or playing solitaire without draining the battery. Our Netflix subscription is languishing, and I haven't quite finished off all the Christopher Eccleston Doctor Who episodes yet. Nor can I access MLB.tv and follow the Rays from long distance.
But even in the loss of trivial things there is some grace, if one pays attention. Driven back to books (when the light allows), I am blessed, particularly because my hands were fortunate to pick a collection of sermons by Frederick Buechner off the shelves first. Even if those sermons remind me how woefully inadequate I will always be in writing sermons, at least I've been driven back to a reminder of just how right words can be when applied to the Word skillfully and under grace. I've also made a start at Buechner's Bebb quartet; we'll see how that goes.
Otherwise, I'm simply forced to go slow. There is a grace in that too, though not always easy to recognize as grace. There is also the grace of shared trouble; I've spoken to more people I don't know since Irene than we had in our weeks here before Irene, if only to commiserate over the lack of electricity. Still, that's something. If I got to know them I'd no doubt find something to loathe, or at least get ticked off by--their politics, quite possibly, or their religious beliefs or who knows what--but we now share the aggravation of being power-less, and for the most part the burden becomes a little easier to bear.
So we'll see how long this lasts. Probably not another post until the power is back. In the meantime, time to go home and read some Buechner.
I'm still baffled as to why we lost the juice as soon as we did. It went out about 11:30 a.m. on Saturday. At that point Irene was nothing more than a dreary Saturday; real wind (tropical storm force, no more, and minimal at that) didn't kick in for several hours. I know from a friend in Williamsburg that their power stayed on much longer, and similarly from a friend who was in Raleigh that day. Is there something special about Richmond that can't tolerate even mildly bad weather? Too many trees, perhaps?
Kvetching aside, this has been a fairly targeted loss. We still have running water, and no evident threat of it being fouled in any way. This is good, but of course that water is getting steadily colder as the reservoir in the hot water heater is depleted. Yesterday's shower still had hot water enough to get the hair washed; today's was more like not-cold water. Tomorrow, I fear for my scalp. Jokes and double entendres aside, I really don't like cold showers.
Aside from one tree down in the back yard, no damage. The house wasn't hit. This is a blessing of course. A house on another block in this neighborhood was not so lucky. We could be much worse off, and I'm extremely grateful that we are all fine, pets included (although poor Miss Piggy doesn't enjoy the heat at her age). Even if I don't quite understand why Richmond was so damaged by what here was a storm of minimal tropical storm force (and yes, I'm sure that's my bias from having lived in Florida for so long), I'm glad to be relatively unscathed.
And yet being without electricity is a noticeable loss. That I'm writing up this entry at McAlister's Deli points to the inconvenience. Dishes pile up, awaiting either the restoration of the dishwasher or someone getting desperate enough to wash by hand. Fortunately we got the laundry done before the storm, but that will pile up too. Of course, since most businesses in the area seem to have power back, we can always hit a laundromat if we get desperate. (Now that's a subject for speculation; businesses were up and running very quickly--and not on generators--and not just "essential" businesses--while houses languish.) And of course, most inconvenient and least consequential of all; we are bereft of our favorite electronic distractions.
I should excuse my wife from the above comment. Living in Virginia and working for an office in Florida requires electronic connections and electric power. Her ability to work is severely impinged by this circumstance, and it grates on her to be cut off from so much of her work. I, on the other hand, am between semesters at the moment, so I really can't claim any more than inconvenience. I can haul myself off to the seminary library and do what I need to do, which right now is write program notes for the Palm Beach Symphony. Since I need a few library resources to do that, it's all just as well to be forced out of the house. (And yes, I can divert myself with my favored distractions every couple of hours or so--email, Facebook, my sim baseball team, etc.)
Still, when at the house, it's hard not to notice I can't just flip on the MacBook and start surfing around or playing solitaire without draining the battery. Our Netflix subscription is languishing, and I haven't quite finished off all the Christopher Eccleston Doctor Who episodes yet. Nor can I access MLB.tv and follow the Rays from long distance.
But even in the loss of trivial things there is some grace, if one pays attention. Driven back to books (when the light allows), I am blessed, particularly because my hands were fortunate to pick a collection of sermons by Frederick Buechner off the shelves first. Even if those sermons remind me how woefully inadequate I will always be in writing sermons, at least I've been driven back to a reminder of just how right words can be when applied to the Word skillfully and under grace. I've also made a start at Buechner's Bebb quartet; we'll see how that goes.
Otherwise, I'm simply forced to go slow. There is a grace in that too, though not always easy to recognize as grace. There is also the grace of shared trouble; I've spoken to more people I don't know since Irene than we had in our weeks here before Irene, if only to commiserate over the lack of electricity. Still, that's something. If I got to know them I'd no doubt find something to loathe, or at least get ticked off by--their politics, quite possibly, or their religious beliefs or who knows what--but we now share the aggravation of being power-less, and for the most part the burden becomes a little easier to bear.
So we'll see how long this lasts. Probably not another post until the power is back. In the meantime, time to go home and read some Buechner.
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