Alain Resnais, RIP

The most memorably bad date of my collegiate life went like this:

A friend's girlfriend had arranged a blind date for me.  Given that this girlfriend was herself a difficult character -- pageant queen gone to terrifying seed -- a wiser man would have politely demurred.  But hey, I was looking for love.

We met at the student center, and it was clear in an instant that we were ill-matched.  I studied English, she studied Chem.  She had no evident interest in art or politics, I couldn't for the life of me remember what chelation and reagents were.  Apart from the aforementioned friend's girlfriend, we seemed not to have a single acquaintance in common -- and this on a very small campus.

But that was okay, because I had an ace in the hole:  the campus film club.  Every week, in one of the lecture halls, they screened a movie classic.  That was where I became acquainted with Fassbinder, Antonioni, and all the other highbrow moviemakers that college kids love.  But this particular night, they had scheduled one of those perfect date movies -- a screwball comedy from the 1930s or 40s.

I forget what it was, exactly.  My Man Godfrey?  Holiday?  Bringing Up Baby?  Anyway, it was a guaranteed good time, 100 minutes of laughter followed by a glamorous big-screen kiss.  Hard to resist.

So off we went to Blodgett Hall, where we sat in the uncomfortable seats normally reserved for Anthropology 101.  We make awkward small talk, and waited for the lights to dim.

Then disaster struck.

"I'm sorry," said the president of the club, walking in front of the screen and holding a round steel film canister.  "The company that we rent these things from seems to have screwed up.  Instead of [Godfrey/Holiday/Baby], they seem to have sent us a French at film called Hiroshima, Mon Amour."

Ah, yes.  Hiroshima, Mon Amour.  For those who have never had the pleasure, it is Alain Resnais' 1959non-linear meditation on memory and war, which launched the Nouvelle Vague.  A French actress and a Japanese architect are ending their affair, and ... talking about it. He remembers being in Hisrohima when the bomb fell, she remembers being shaved bald as punishment for a fling with a German soldier.  There are pictures of people dying and disfigured by the effects of atomic warfare.

"So," I said cautiously when the lights came up afterward.  "You want to, maybe, get a beer?"

"I don't drink" she said.  This might have been true, or might not.  For all I know, she might have taken the pledge that very moment.  It was probably just as well.

Anyway, I did not get lucky that night, and have always blamed Alain Resnais.  He was a good director -- I like L'Annee Derniere a Marienbad as much as you can like that sort of thing -- and haven't let this particular disaster interfere with a lifetime of snobby Francophilia.  But the guy did cost me a night of amorous fun, which is a serious offense.  Yes, it was thirty-odd years ago -- but I have neither forgotten nor forgiven

Anyway, Resnais is dead at 91.  The rest of the world mourns; I hereby declare victory.

Hawkeye? Yes, Hawkeye!

For some time, now, we have been hearing friendly murmurs about Marvel's ongoing Hawkeye series.  People said it was good -- very good, even great.

Frankly, this seemed unlikely.

Hawkeye is, and we are putting this charitably, the lamest of the classic Avengers roster.  He suffers from what you could call "the Batman syndrome," meaning that on a team filled with Norse gods, super soldiers, witches and robots, Hawkeye is ... just a guy.  He doesn't even have Batman's bazillion dollars, fast car and psychologically intense backstory.  All he has is a longbow and a quiver full of trick arrows, mostly borrowed from Green Arrow.

Because Hawkeye was created by Stan Lee, he does have one useful possession: a seething cauldron of anxiety, ready to overwhelm him at any moment.  This includes a difficult relationship with his father-figure, a one-time criminal called the Swordsman, which probably explains his early hostility toward Captain America.  He's also had some bad luck in love.  First he fell for the Black Widow, who led him into a life of crime, and then for the Scarlet Witch, who preferred to date an intangible android.

Oh, it's not that bad.  Compared to the psychological profiles of Bruce Wayne, Matt Murdock or even Tony Stark, Clint Barton is a model of mental health.  He could get by with a low dose of Lexapro, while those guys probably would shrug off electroshock.  Still, his angst gives writers something to work with.

And as it turns out, Matt Fraction is the sort of writer who can make the most of what you give him.

We'd seen this in Fraction's work on Iron Man a couple of years ago.  He wrote a Tony Stark who was brilliant and flawed -- the Stan Lee inheritance, with the Robert Downey bad attitude  -- but also somber, self-aware, and a little sad.  ("You can bring me back to life," Fraction's Stark told his friends in a recorded message.  "But before you do, I want you to ask yourselves whether that's something you really want."  They seemed conflicted.) It was a brilliant run, one of our very favorite recent comics arcs.

But we figured maybe it was a one-off.  Maybe Fraction just has an eye for Tony Stark.  Maybe he's just good at science fiction heroes, the way Frank Miller is good at ninjas.  That's what we were thinking.

Nope.  Fraction's Hawkeye is a funny, sweet, human guy, vulnerable both physically and emotionally.  He depends on his partner Kate Bishop, who may be a better archer and is certainly smarter.  He lives in a slum apartment building and tries to watch out for his neighbors, which somehow entails getting shot at, thrown through windows and generally beaten up. He is, in other words a classic noir hero, kinder than Spade and humbler than Spenser.  A classic noir hero who happens to use a bow and arrow and, occasionally, hang out with gods, robots and super-soldiers.

We're just digging into this series, but we can already recommend it highly.  The writing is clever and touching, the art (by David Aja and a variety of other talented people) shows a deliberate simplicity, a la Alex Toth, that rebukes the current fad for over-production exemplified by Jim Lee's many imitators.

If you like comics, buy Hawkeye.

For the Study Wall

Here's the key phrase from that remark of Augustine's that we quoted the other day:

[C]ontristor linguam meam cordi meo non potuisse sufficere

I am sad that my tongue is not equal to my heart.  We may have that written out by a calligrapher, framed and mounted near our desk.  Nothing so beautifully sums up what we take to be the ordinary dilemma of the conscientious preacher.

There are other phrases that we'd like to see mounted on our office wall.  One, surprisingly, comes from Oliver Cromwell:

I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.

Mind you, we despite the source of that remark.  It is from Cromwell's 3 August 1650 letter to the General Assembly of the Kirk of Scotland, seeking to dissuade them from their adherence to Charles II.  We don't love Charles, but our hatred for Cromwell is nearly boundless.  Still, that is neither here nor there; preachers, and pastors generally, are well advised to always consider the possibility that they are mistaken.

Susan Howatch gets at the same idea, in one of her bodice-rippers, with a phrase less burdened by history.  Something along the lines of "every priest in the Church of england should have these words tattooed on his forehead ...," although that can't be right since one can't read what is on one's own head.  Sadly, we can't recall it correctly or find the source.  (Any readers able to help?)

We who sometimes feel that preaching is a lot of work are naturally admonished by George Herbert's famous remark:

The Countrey Parson preacheth constantly, the pulpit is his joy and his throne

And perhaps more of us ought to be admonished by his closing comment in the same chapter:

The Parson exceeds not an hour in preaching, because all ages have thought that a competency, and he that profits not in that time, will lesse afterwards, the same affection which made him not profit before, making him then weary, and so he grows from not relishing, to loathing.

Although a bit confusing to some people, we think some pastors and many congregations might benefit from the admonition of our hish school physics teacher:

More lab, less oratory.

"Lab," here, needs to be read (correctly) as shorthand for "labor."

Anyway, those are some of the non-Biblical phrases it strikes us that a parson might do well to keep posted in a visible spot.  Do you have any suggestions?

And Heeeeere It Comes!

Is everybody enjoying Holy Week?

No, we aren't using some exotic kalendar, as perhaps of the Third-Order Antiochian Rite of St. Urho's Monastery.  It's just that, for us as for many people who lead worship, the sense of urgency connected to Holy Week begins very far in advance.  It comes speeding toward us like a freight train, visible from far off where it looks small and harmless, but seeming to gain speed just before it hits with annihilating force.

Like getting out of the way of a train, you need to be ready for Holy Week well in advance, or it will destroy you.

This year's schedule includes:

• Vigil of Palm Sunday (Contemporary Style)
• Palm Sunday 
• Stations of the Cross (adapted for Youth Group)
• Maundy Thursday (with First Communion)
• Good Friday noon prayers
• Good Friday tenebrae
• Vigil of Easter (Contemporary)
• Easter Matins (outdoors, at daybreak, in a contemporary idiom)
• Easter Mass x2

It's actually a fairly mild schedule as these things go.  There is no public worship on Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday, for example.  (We interpret this as God's invitation to spend those days hot-tubbing with adult film stars or something.)  Many people have more worship services to organize than we do, and in any case our personal plan is to make Mother A. do all the work.

There are two complications:

(1) that this is our first year in a new parish.  This means putting a great deal of effort into figuring out just what sort of services are precious to the various sub-communities we serve.  Lutherans, the past masters of passive aggression, increase the challenge by saying things like, "Well, Pastor, what do you prefer?"  This, being translated from the original tongues, actually means, "I sure hope you plan to do this the way we like.  But we're not going to tell you what that is."

(2) juggling idioms.  The weekly worship at Paradise in the Piedmont Lutheran Church is divided between "traditional" and "contemporary" services.  Each idiom has its devotees, some of whom can be rather strident in their expression of preference. The challenge during the holy days is to show tokens of  liturgical respect to both sides, so as to prevent hurt feelings down the road.

The idiom-juggling is rendered comical by two facts:

(1) the fact that our "traditional" service is not particularly traditional at all. No choir robes, and a choir that only sings "anthems" rather than liturgical music.  Virtually no music composed before, say, 1650, and not much before 1850.  Heinously ugly paraments, especially during Lent.  Some nitwit taught them to say the Collect en masse.  No lavabo; no aumbry, tabernacle or even ciborium; certainly no crucifix anywhere near the free-standing altar.  And let's not even get started on the actual distribution of Communion, which involves self-intinction, small cups, grape juice, oversized ceramic chalices, and every other bad idea anybody has ever seen on vacation and come back to tell their long-suffering priest about with breathless enthusiasm.

Basically, the "traditions" expressed in this service -- as in so  many other Protestant worship gatherings each week -- are the traditions of the mid-20th century.  Whether these ahistorical practices are expressions of a dying form of Christianity or the instruments of its death is open for debate, but you can guess what we think.

(2) the fact that our "contemporary" service is really quite traditional.  It features a dedicated and well-rehearsed choir (they prefer to be called a "praise band," but we're not fooled), who are present every week; confession and forgiveness (unless Fr. A slips in an Introit); a weekly celebration of Holy Communion; use of the lectionary; standing for prayer; etc.  Throw in vestments and some incense, improve the distribution, and there really wouldn't be much to complain about.  It's certainly no less traditional than the other service, assuming one is able to take a long view of what constitutes tradition.

It may take the Anonymi a few years to sort all this out liturgically.  That's fine; we're in no hurry.  They're nice people, and it's a privilege to lead them in worship, even if they are a little confused about this "tradition" thing.  But you can imagine that we are approaching our first Holy Week -- one of the most tradition-steeped phases of the Christian year -- with a certain amount of pious trepidation.

How are things at your parish shaping up?

Need it Be Said?

Aprilis stulte dies, amici.

[UPDATE:  for those who missed it, here is our contribution to the Internet's favorite day of hijinks.  Readers who tuned in yesterday got to see an entirely different blog.  While it lacks the "gotcha" quality of Fr. Bosco's "ecumenical missal" spoof, we like to imagine that it compensated with belly laughs.]

Sermons, Integrity and Richard Nixon

If you google "sermon illustrations" and "love your enemies," you will pretty quickly come across this anecdote:

Hubert Humphrey was a former vice-president of the United States. When he died hundreds of people from across the world attended his funeral. All were welcome, but one – former President Richard Nixon, who had not long previously dragged himself and his country through the humiliation and shame of Watergate. As eyes turned away and conversations ran dry around him Nixon could feel the ostracism being ladled out to him.

Then Jimmy Carter, the serving US President, walked into the room. Carter was from a different political party to Nixon and well known for his honesty and integrity. As he moved to his seat President Carter noticed Richard Nixon standing all alone. Carter immediately changed course, walked over to Richard Nixon, held out his hand, and smiling genuinely and broadly embraced Nixon and said “Welcome home, Mr President! Welcome home!”

The incident was reported by Newsweek magazine, which wrote: “If there was a turning point in Nixon’s long ordeal in the wilderness, it was that moment and that gesture of love and compassion.”*

Great story, right?  Turns out it may be almost true.

We weren't sure at first.

We found the story repeated verbatim here, here and here.  The verbatim part makes us suspicious, since preachers are notorious for passing around the same old stories, with little concertn for pesky old factuality.The last source is Maxie Dunnam's Irresistible Invitation, published in 2010; further research finds that Dunnam has been telling this story at least since his 1998 This is Christianity.  So ... did Dunnam clip this little tidbit out of a newsmagazine, or find it somewhere else?  The question is made harder to answer by the fact that  Newsweek's archives are owned by The Daily Beast, but have not been digitized or made available to anybody except Beast employees.

There is an alternate version of the story that is easy to trace.  Remember that Humphrey and Nixon were political rivals, and the 1968 election was one of the closest and hardest fought in history.  After Watergate, Nixon's reputation was at an ebb so low it may be hard for young people to imagine.  He was hated, reviled, shunned by virtually the whole of the Establishment.  And then, in 1977, his old rival developed urinary cancer.

Then-Senator Dave Durenberger tells the rest of the story, in the Congressional Record (2 May 1994):

When my predecessor in this office -- the Honorable Hubert H. Humphrey -- was dying of cancer in Lake Waverly, MN, he called former President Nixon and asked him to attend his -- Humphrey's -- funeral. 

Humphrey knew that the funeral was not going to be long in coming -- and he arranged that Richard Nixon be received at that ceremony with the full honor due to a former President. Young people who watched the TV coverage of President Nixon's death and funeral -- coverage that I understand was generally positive in tone -- might find nothing remarkable in this. But back in 1977, the scars of the Watergate scandal were far from healed. Many of Senator Humphrey's liberal colleagues -- and even a substantial number of moderates and conservatives -- viewed Nixon as deserving a state of permanent disgrace.

Hubert Humphrey demonstrated true nobility of character by making his historic gesture to President Nixon. He realized that whether you share Nixon's views or no,you have to recognize his value to public life. Humphrey had known Nixon for decades -- and knew that ostracizing Nixon would hurt America's future more than it would help.

Today, let us continue in the tradition of my distinguished predecessor. Let us join Hubert Humphrey in recognizing that all public-spirited Americans, whatever their ideology, have a constructive role to play in building our country's future.

Ah.  Now that is a beautiful story, and -- when you subtract the political blather -- a better preaching illustration as well.

Larry King tells a shorter but compatible version in his 2009 memoir, My Remarkable Journey.  In King's version, which he says he heard from Humphrey, it was Nixon who called Humphrey, in the hospital, on Christmas Eve.  (With a rope?)

But in neither Durenberger's version nor King's is there any mention of Jimmy Carter.  For a while, we thought that the homiletic version was a fabrication.  But then we found a 1994 article in The New York Review of Books, which tells the story of how Nixon fought his way back from ignominy.  And lo and behold, it cites Newsweek's 19 May 1986 issue, on the cover of which a victorious Nixon appeared, under the proud headline "He's Back!"  The Newsweek story begins:

Suddenly he [Nixon] was in the room, and the conversation died. As Howard Baker tells it, Richard Nixon “looked like he was four feet tall, all shrunk up in himself and gray as a ghost.” It was January 1978, in Baker’s Senate office, where the notables were mustering for Hubert Humphrey’s memorial service in the Capitol Rotunda. “Nobody would get near him. Nobody would talk to him. The hush lasted until President Jimmy Carter walked over, shook Nixon’s hand and welcomed him.

If there was a turning point in Nixon’s long ordeal in the wilderness, that was it.

This version was shortened for use in a 1999 sermon by Arthur Ferry.  Ferry glosses a little, saying that Carter welcomed Nixon "back to Washington."  Ferry also adds the words "humanity and compassion," attributing them -- wrongly -- to Newsweek.  The supposed quotation, "Welcome home, Mr. President," occurs in neither Newsweek nor Ferry. 

The version published by Maxie Dunnam and often copied by other preachers is less faithful to Newsweek than the one in Ferry's sermon.  Dunnam turns "humanity" to "love," and adds the "Welcome home, Mr. President." We thought at first that Dunnam had copied from Ferry, but perhaps he has simply strayed further from a common source.  Still, if Newsweek is to be trusted, the Dunnam/Ferry version is largely accurate, apart from some dialogue and editorial moralizing.  The dialogue seems likely to be Dunnam's creation.

We prefer Durenberger's version, with its emphasis upon Humphrey's kindness rather than Carter's. In any case, the earliest telling -- Newsweek's -- comes almost a decade after the fact, and should be treated with some caution.

We shouldn't care about this.  As readers now know, we at the Egg have no more integrity than Nixon himself.  But still, we do think it is better for everyone, and especially for the credibility of the Gospel, when the stories in sermons are demonstrably true.

New Year -- New Blog!

A few years back, we got to talking with our chum Father James of the Tonsure.  Although we were both reasonably smart guys with a taste for traditional theology, it turned out that neither of us had ever read St. Augustine's City of God.  It's just so long and ... hard.

Seriously.  You guys know how much we love St. Augustine.  We like the Confessions, we adore the sermons, we are keenly interested in his arguments against the Pelagians and (to a lesser degree) Manichaeans, his use of the Psalms to derive a description of sin as being incurvatus -- bent over toward the earth, and unable to face upward toward heaven.  We love that he is, like John Donne, one of those writers in whom sex, religion and politics are all mixed up together.

We're Lutheran, for pity's sake -- Augustine is in our blood.  But the City of God is one of those books, like the Summa or Proust or the entire shelf of Cerebus the Aardvark, that sits there, mountainous in its size and abysmal in its depth, terrifying the faint of heart and foiling the casual skimmer.  So, to our shame and sorrow, we've read about it without ever reading it.

Back in the day, we talked with Fr. James about reading it together, over the course of a year or so, sharing notes to keep each other going.  It was a promising idea, but then Father Anonymous and his family relocated to Transylvania for a few years of vampire-hunting in the Carpathians, and nothing ever came of the virtual sojourn to ancient Africa.  His continuing professional education devolved into language tutoring (and, of course, the compilation of that neat little Latin/English breviary you can purchase by clicking on the right sidebar).  His pleasure reading, during those years, consisted largely of the The Economist and some Romanian newspapers.

Now, at last, things have settled down a bit.  The Egg's publishing headquarters is located in bucolic Fauquier County, a place no New Yorker can name without lapsing into vulgarity.  The parish is busy but stable, and the obscure machinations of the Hungarian nobility are an ocean away.  We do need to make time for developing the Adventures of Purple and Nine, a cartoon which will change the world, but that will get easier come the Epiphany.

So now is our chance to climb the mountain, metaphorically speaking.  This year we, God willing and the creek don't rise, we will finally read De Civitate Dei Contra Paganos, all XXII libri.

And more than that, we plan to blog the blessed thing.

Not here, though.  The Egg remains our suppressed voice, the escape valve to vent those things the congregants don't need or want to hear -- ideas about sex, politics and (pathetically) religion.  It will stay cranky, obscurantist, and first-person plural.  But Augustine deserves better treatment.  So for him, we need to adopt a tone that is gentler and more direct -- and it won't hurt to have a website dedicated solely to this particular voice and project.

To which end, we offer Most Glorious City.  It's another Blogger site, deliberately simple-looking.  Over time, we'll expand its offerings to include many, many more links to online Augustiniana.  But its only real purpose is to serve as a notebook for our reflections on the City of God.

We hope some of you will be moved to read along.  Pick up a copy (it's probably on your shelf already) and join us.  We're planning to move very, very slowly.  It may take us a year to read the whole thing.  It may take us longer.  But it should be fun.

Hauskaa Joulua!

Ah, the Feast of the Nativity.  Or as we in the trade call it, "Crunch Time."

Fr. A. has been working double duty for weeks, with no end in sight (funeral coming, then Sunday, then blessing some chalk on Epiphany).  We have been living on cookies and cold coffee for longer than we can recall.  We could really use a little Ordinary Time right now.

Still, something curious happened last night.  The cynical preacher's view of the Vigil of Christmas is that people come to hear the familiar story recapitulated, a touching fable or two, and then to light a few candles and sing "Silent Night."  Anything much different risks rebellion in the pews.

 Moved by heaven knows what imp of the perverse, we decided to take our sermon in a different direction.  It's all a blur now, but we recall sharing the semantic range of the Greek verb "symballo," digressing on the fact that "host" is the word of an army -- militia coelestibus -- and blathering on about the arrangement of Israelite forces at the Battle of Midian.  Oh, and some long-winded anecdote about providing emergency pastoral care at the DMV.

The faithful actually seemed to enjoy this -- quite a bit, apparently -- although Heaven only knows why.  A Christmas miracle!

Our Secret Life

Here's our confession:  there is more to Father Anonymous than sex, religion and politics.  Not a lot more, frankly, but a little.

Like cartoons.

And the desire to make the world a better place, using cartoons.

One way to do this, as a friend pointed out years ago, is to make cartoons that inspire kids to do things they didn't think they could do.  For instance, letting little boys know that they can grow up to be peaceful and nurturing men -- not something you pick up easily from the mass media.

Or letting little girls know that they can grow up to excel at science and technology, and that they can use these tools to keep on making the world a better place.  That is the idea behind Gangly Sister.  We aren't ready to spill all the beans about this yet, but you can get some ideas from following the link.  Which you should.  Then like us on Facebook.  And support our Kickstarter.

Because, come on, don't you want the world to be better?

Good News!

The Egg's Dept. of Collegial Congratulations has just been informed that Pastor Joelle has been named Director of Evangelical Outreach for the ELCA's Northeastern Iowa Synod.

We commend her bishop and Synod Council for their excellent judgment, and condemn them for giving her even more excuses to avoid blogging.

Ad multos annos!

Why You Wear Your Collar

Father A. was standing on line outside the DMV today, waiting to re-title his truck.  The sun was hot, the line was long, and the hour marked on the door had come and gone.  The crowd was restless.

Eventually, two women came out, looking visibly shaken.  One of them, dressed in manager's clothing, announced that a DMV worker had been killed in a car accident, and that the staff was too shaken to do business.  The office would not be opening that day.

She spoke in a low, quiet voice and it took the message some time to penetrate the outdoor crowd.  We ourselves had to repeat it several times to the deaf old man behind us.  Some of the people headed back to their cars; others stood in silence, absorbing the news.

And one woman started shouting.

"This is a government office," she shouted at the manager.  "You have no right to close it!  Did you get permission?"  You have no right!"  The manager, a much smaller woman -- and one who looked absolutely frail at that moment -- answered quietly, in controlled tones.  She was obviously used to irate customers; after all, she works for the DMV.  Yes, she had spoken to the people upstairs; yes, she had permission.  But the angry woman, hovering over the manager's head, wasn't done yelling.  She was loud and aggressive.

A little reluctantly, Father A. slipped in his collar tab and came forward.  To the second DMV woman, the one wearing a safety vest, he quietly said, "I'm a member of the clergy.  Can I help out?"  A minute or two later, he was shown into the kitchenette, where the rest of the morning crew sat -- four or five women, most of them sobbing loudly, one or two frozen with grief.  The woman who had been killed was very young, very popular, and had only just achieved her full-time status with the department.  Her friends were in shock.

Father A. did what you do in those circumstances.  It took a while.  But here's the thing:  he never introduced himself to anyone except the manager (and even that was only after ten or fifteen minutes). To the rest, he was just the priest who showed up in the moment of crisis, to pray with them and help them focus their grief.  They didn't know his name, and that was just fine because -- for that little while -- they didn't need a person, an I-thou relationship.  They needed a symbol, a sign of God's presence and concern.

Sure, this might all have unfolded the same way without a black shirt and a strip of cheap plastic at the neck.  But more explanations would have been needed, more introductions -- more time spent on Fr. A instead of the important things.  And it is quite possible that, if he had been in civvies, he'd never have had the chance to help.

As Jesus said only yesterday, "Be dressed for action and keep your lamps lit."

The Money Pit

Awesome picture stolen from hbombkaraoke.com

It may need a little work, but at least it's not haunted.  And we can afford it, too, as long as we don't retire before 80.

Yes, friends, it's true:  Father A. and his family just bought a house.  The realtor called it an "older home," although we certainly wouldn't -- it's about our own vintage, so we're inclined to say it is middle-aged.  It is graying and could stand to lose a few pounds, but is still fit for duty.

This is the first house we have ever bought -- in fact, until last Wednesday, the most valuable thing we owned was a sofa.  (Literally:  it's worth more than our car.  Nice sofa, old car.)

Buying your first home is a big step for anybody -- it combines the wild exhilaration of achieving the American Dream with the vertiginous horror of unpayable debt and perpetual fear of changing real estate values.  In some ways, it may be a bigger step for the clergy, since (especially in the East) so many of us can get by without it.  Call it a rectory, manse or parsonage, older churches often have a home for their pastor.  For the last 23 years, we ourselves have lived in seminary dorms and and other church-owned housing.  Before that, we rented a series of typical New York apartments, each one fully the equal of your coat closet, if you happen to park your coat in an iffy neighborhood.  By comparison, the parsonages were often comically spacious, and -- with one memorable exception -- pleasant, well-maintained houses.

The truth is that we like parsonages.  Our Mom grew up in one, and we wouldn't mind if our kid grew up in one as well.  In high-rent areas (like the one from which we just moved, and as it happens the one in which we now live) a parsonage can be a real blessing to a congregation, enabling it to call and retain a pastor whom it could not otherwise pay enough to live in the neighborhood.  Not to mention that they make it easier for everybody if the pastor needs to move on quickly.

For the pastors themselves, the parsonage is a sketchier proposition.  It builds no equity, which means that after thirty or forty years of parsonage living, you can easily wind up with no place to live and no money to buy a place.  We have seen this happen, and it isn't pretty.  Both pastors and congregations are encouraged to create housing-equity accounts to prevent this, but ... well, sometimes that just doesn't happen.  This is probably why churches don't build them as often anymore.

We are excited about our new pad, and in the months to come, you'll probably hear more about it than you care to.  We don't know if it's a good investment or a bad one, whether it's a home we can fill with love and warmth or a pit that will suck our money, our time and ultimately our will to live.  We don't know whether a giant tree will blow down on the roof in the next storm, either (and there are some whoppers on the property).  But we move in on Wednesday, and your prayers will be gratefully appreciated.

Our Macho God

During our three whole weeks as residents of the Bible Belt, we at the Egg have had a great deal of fun.  The new parish is a joy, and there are fewer Confederate-flag gewgaws on sale at the 7-11 than we had first feared.  (Although ....)

Almost as good, our first synod assembly in these parts was an unalloyed pleasure.  Although the underlying tasks are the same as in New York, they are addressed quite differently.  We'll go into more detail some other time -- the contrast is telling -- but suffice it to say that, at one point, we were standing in a college gym with a group of enthusiastic teenagers, mouthing out the lyrics to "Awesome God."

Ah, yes -- "Awesome God."  We were introduced to this little ditty by a few seminary classmates, trying to relive their days with Navigators or Intervarsity or Campus Crusade.  For those who have not had the pleasure, it might be described as the "Kum Ba Yah" of Muscular Christianity, the rhythmic praises of testosterone-heavy Deity:

When He rolls up His sleeves
He ain't just putting on the ritz
(Our God is an awesome God)
There's thunder in His footsteps
And lightning in His fists

There's nothing profoundly wrong with "Awesome God."  Most of  the imagery is from Genesis. The Creation, the expulsion from Eden, and the destruction of Sodom are dutifully balanced with the acknowledgment that "mercy and grace [were] poured out on the Cross."  

Such reservations as we have are less about text than tone.  Yes, God sends out some lightning in the Bible, mostly in Job and the Psalms, and there are plenty of references to the Almighty's upraised arm.  But  that first stanza makes it sound as though the Trinity ought to include Zeus and Thor.  And don't tell me that, when this number is sung at youth camps, the closeted gay kid doesn't feel singled out by that Sodom business -- creating one more damn pastoral care problem that may never be solved this side of Paradise.

And here's the funny part: apparently, we're not the only ones who feel this way.  When the synod's youth director played the song, he did two curious things.  

First, he decided to cut all of the stanzas, and sing only the refrain -- so that, without smashing any Sodomites with his electrically charged fists, our awesome God merely "rules from Heaven above / with wisdom, power and love."  Even liberals won't object to that, right?  Second, he announced that we would replace the missing stanzas with some from an entirely different song.  (A cento, they call that in hymnody).

Perhaps the most curious part of this maneuver, though, was the way he described it. When introducing Christian "contemporary" music, he was somewhat scrupulous about naming authors.  In this case, he began by saying,  "We're going to sing 'Awesome God,' by the late, great Rich Mullins."  Fair enough.  Then he added, "We'll mix in lyrics from the old camp song 'They'll Know We are Christians.' "

Old camp song?  Well, this is fair enough, in its way.  We ourselves did, in actual fact, sing that song at camp a few times, although not nearly as often as "Titanic" or "Hey, Meester Columbus."  But it's not as though "They Will Know" is some authorless bit of campfire kitsch.  

On the contrary, it was written by Father Peter Scholtes, a Roman Catholic priest, to be sung by the choir of African-American boys he was taking on tour. Decent guy, although to be honest we find Mullins' faith journey -- which culminated in RCIA -- more inspiring.  Scholtes later laicized, married, and became a successful author and management consultant.  Although he gets lumped in with the Folk Mass crowd, and not wrongly so, "They'll Know" is a pretty great song.  It's dated, but still certainly less kitschy than "Awesome God."

So why does Rich Mullin get name-checked at a synod assembly, and Peter Scholtes get forgotten?  Not out of malice, we are sure sure.  But because (we suspect) in the two decades between them -- one song was written in 1968, the other in 1988 -- an industry grew up around churchy songs that could be accompanied by an acoustic guitar.  What in Scholtes' day was the work of amateurs in church basements had become, by Mullins' and especially in the years since, a business for professionals.  It's not an enormous part of the music industry's portfolio, but it's a part.  So we imagine that, in our youth director's mind, a guy working in the 1980s gets a kind of respect that a guy doing similar work in the 1960s doesn't.  Which is weird.

Either way, we have to chuckle at calling songs like this "contemporary."  No kid in our youth group was born before 1995, and some of them are more recent than Bush v. Gore.  To them, this stuff is neither more nor less contemporary than the work of, say, Johann Crueger.

Speaking of which, here's how contemporary Crueger can actually sound:

Carry Me Back

Break out the corn pone and Joel Chandler Harris.  Father Anonymous is moving down south.

He and Mother A. have been offered a call, together, at a wonderful congregation located somewhere between the Chesapeake Bay and the Blue Ridge.  It's an agricultural community, specializing in horses and wine.  Under the synod's guidelines, your humble blogger and his wife had thirty days to accept; it did not take them thirty seconds.

The champagne corks have been popping around the Rental Rectory tonight, at least metaphorically.  (In non-metaphorical fact, Mother A. went to a conference meeting while Father A. fed the kid a corn dog.  But there was a glass of seltzer involved:  both celebratory and digestive.)  After a gut-wrenching nine months of unemployment, and a depression-inducing seven call processes of one sort or another, this news is balm in Gilead.

We invite you to join us in offering fervent prayers of thanksgiving.

Now for the hard part:  imagining ourselves Down South.

Our Dutch ancestors settled Nieuw Amsterdam.  We have long proposed that the Mason-Dixon Line runs through Staten Island, and that people who use the Outerbridge Crossing talk a little funny.  (We jest, of course:  everybody in Noo Yawk tawks a liddle funny.  You got a problem widdat?)  But, in all seriousness, we have lived our entire life (except for brief interludes) within a ninety-minute drive of Central Park, depending on traffic.  We have served our entire ministry in one synod.  Much of our free time, in recent years, has been spent researching and meditating on the history of Lutheranism in New York, a subject about which we know more than many other people, and one which will do us not a whit of good in the foreseeable future.

It is entirely possible that the remainder of our ministry will be carried out in Virginia.  It is unlikely that we will ever live in New York City again, and possible that we will never even live in New York State.  This exile will take some getting used to.

Not so much for Mother A. though.  She was born in New Orleans, raised in Mississippi and Texas.  She actually likes grits.  And before our Dutch ancestors ever set foot on Manhattan, her Anglo-Sephardic ancestors were settling Jamestown.  So she's practically a native.

Not to mention the fact that we fell in love in Virginia, watching a full moon rise over the mountains (and then heading back to the cabin for a Star Trek: Next Generation marathon.)

It is the beginning of an exciting new chapter in Father A.'s life.  He's already looking forward to his first Stuckey's Pecan Log.

Our New Look --Yea or Nay? [UPDATE]

A few days ago, on a whim we changed the Egg's display to use Blogger's "Dynamic View."  It's a cool feature that lets readers change the way they see the blog.  We asked for feedback

Two readers wrote back, purty durn unhappy.  Apparently the colors were bad and the interface itself was a little buggy.  So we're trying something new, and -- once again -- asking for feedback.  So let us know what you think about this slightly Gothic look.  We're not married to it, by any means (and no, before you ask, we couldn't seem to keep the background and change the goofy pink trim).

But fair warning:  during the two days we were using Dynamic View, our hit count doubled, far exceeding any previous record.  This may simply have been a result of our resolution to feature more SEXX and more naked ladies, or it may have something to do with the interface.  We'll see how it goes.

Anyway, let us know what you think.

1501: The More Sex Post

In August of 2005, Father Anonymous started blogging here at the Egg.  Yesterday, he punched the "publish" button on a mildly-interesting story about Pope Francis, and realized with some shock that it was a landmark of sorts:  our 1500th blog post.

This makes us reflective.  We started the Egg to get some things off our chest -- as a place to say, and be heard saying, some of the things we aren't naturally inclined to say in church.  As the subhead says, Sex, Religion and Politics.  At least two of these really are things about which the typical preacher is well-advised to shut up.

As to politics, its pulpit-related pitfalls are well known.  A surprising number of preachers seem to feel it is their duty to share their political opinions with the faithful.  This is tricky for many reasons.  For one thing, it is hard to separate your own reflections from official church teaching.  For another, we live and minister in a nation so deeply and passionately divided by political partisanship that civil discussion of hot topics is rare and difficult.  Churches, sadly, often have to make a choice:  use partisanship as a tool for binding themselves together, or avoid political discourse altogether, lest it tear them apart.  Neither of these is really satisfactory, but them's the times we live in.

As to religion, well, there are several things to consider.  The great majority of laypeople neither know nor care about theology; when exposed to the work of theologians, they are at best indifferent and at worst hostile.  It's hard to blame them, given how dreary most of it is.  They want Jesus, which is good -- and they want their own childhood Sunday School lessons enshrined as Sacred Writ, which is less good.  (And which is actually a disservice to most Sunday School curricula.  What we should say is that people want their own half-pagan misconceptions to be affirmed from the pulpit.)  Unless you are prepared to feed them Semi-Pelagianism, you should be prepared for them to crucify you.

Beyond that, there is the fact that we, like anybody else, have some personal fixations of dubious value to the typical parish.  We did not imagine, when we began blogging, how much of our time would eventually be devoted to Latin prayers, or complaining about the ELW Psalter, or sharing our jaundiced view of a small and long-defunct Lutheran church body.*  These are all things that arouse our passions, but we cannot imagine that most congregations would benefit from hearing much about them.  So they, along with our interest in the DC Comics reboot and the actual sources of popular sermon illustrations, are kept here like zoo animals, on display for the curious but unable to do any harm.

But talking about politics and religion are easy compared to talking about sex.  Or should we say SEXXX?  Because, in modern America, sex, and anxiety about sex, permeates nearly every aspect of our lives.  We live in an era of unprecedented frankness -- it is not just gay people who come out now,  demanding both acknowledgment and respect, but polyamorists, people who dress up like stuffed animals, and the whole nation of Japan.  (Seriously.  Those people are crazy.)  But this frankness has done nothing to lessen the underlying anxiety for which Americans are famous all over the world.  Our conversation about sex is not just constant but -- like that crack about Japan -- fiercely judgmental, in a way that reveals the underlying fear and desire typical of adolescence.

And bad as this is in society at large, it is worse in the Church.  There are many reasons, some genuinely rooted in Christian tradition, others having more to do with being modern and American.  The process by which eating from the tree of knowledge came to be seen as a metaphor for sexual awakening is long and twisted, but it really happened, long ago and far away.  Likewise the process by which our patroness, Mary Magdalene, went from victim of demonic possession to reformed prostitute.  And then, after centuries of basically condemning sodomy and tolerating sodomites -- ugly now, those were the usual terms -- Christian theology has spent the last forty years or so engaged in a fratricidal combat over the nature and use of human sexuality.  Although now worldwide, this stage of the combat has its roots in America, and in our peculiar and double-sided fascination with sex.  It would not have happened, or at least not this way, without Stonewall and Anita Bryant, Roe v. Wade and Eric Robert Rudolph.

At a practical level, this means that while it is almost impossible to avoid talking about sex, however obliquely, in the typical parish, it is also immensely dangerous.  It divides communities far more efficiently than mere politics.  This is no where more true than in the person of the pastor.  It is not merely the gay clergy which is well advised to appear as nearly celibate as possible. The least hint of sexual activity, gay or straight, can destroy the delicate balance of trust and confidence that a pastor needs to serve effectively.  This includes the licit, officially-sanctioned kind.  Parishes like pastors' babies, goes the old chestnut; but they don't like to be reminded of where those babies come from.  Don't have too many or too often, don't be suspected of enjoying it too much.

Consider the irony:  seminarians are taught to think about little besides sex, and then discover (through trial and error) that they can't really talk about it.  Like theology, but more extreme.

Perhaps we're overstating the case.  But perhaps not.

At any rate, we have noticed that, even though the Egg was created 1500 posts ago specifically to ventilate our brains on these dangerous subjects, we have ourselves largely avoided the topic of sex.  Out of our two-dozen hashtags, precisely one -- Mars Loves Venus -- identifies posts about sex, and we don't use it very often.  We have, in other words, succumbed to the pervasive anxiety we criticize.  Bluntly said, we have chickened out.  Time and again, we have chickened out.

Part of this is the fact that we aren't really anonymous anymore; our Mom reads this thing.  So do our godfather, a few colleagues, and even some of the faithful.  This is all very well, and with 24 followers we're grateful for every pageview we can get, but it does encourage a little self-censorship.  Lately, we have even though about starting a second blog, under some other name.  (How about "Dirty Laundry, by Father Really Anonymous"?)  It seems like a lot of work, though.

We haven't worked out a strategy yet.  We certainly can't promise that the next 1500 posts will be full of racier and riskier content.  But we are wondering if blogs can have centerfolds.

_____________________________________
* Nor did we expect to use the editorial we quite so obsessively.  Not sure how that one happened.

Dodged That Bullet. Sort Of.

Over the last few months, Father Anonymous has been -- like so many other Americans -- unemployed, in a fashion that is by turns frightening, humiliating and then frightening again.  He still is; this is not a "hey, good news" post.  Quite the contrary.

Mind you, the chubby little cleric has interviewed.  He has read hundreds of pages of parish profiles,  and met, both in person and via Skype, with quite a number of call committees.  Some of the meetings went well, a number very well -- he's met some wonderful people, all over the country.  Call committees are typically made up of faithful, hard-working and forward-looking church members.  This makes them a particular pleasure for pastors, who often share the same characteristics.  Those meetings can be a lot of fun.

Today, he started wondering about the very first congregation he spoke to during this Amblerian journey into fear.  What have they been up to?

It was a long-shot parish, a unique bunch of people in an unfamiliar area.  But the video call was very promising, and they invited him out to visit.  By the time he was able to make arrangements, they had invited somebody else, and the moment had passed.  This was odd, and a little painful, but such things happen when a congregation is eager to move forward.

So, wondering whom they had moved forward with, he looked them up on the internet.  It has been almost six months now, and he expected to see a nice big "Our New Pastor" tab on the parish website, along with a smiling picture and a biographical sketch.  Shockingly, it wasn't there.

Instead, he found a picture of the interim pastor, along with a very sad (and very recent) note discussing the closure of the parish preschool, and the shocking allegations being made against the teachers by ... well, you get the idea.  The details don't matter here.  It's a scandal, and people are in pain.

How do you react to such news?  Of course, there's an element of selfish relief -- "Glad I wasn't on the bridge when they hit that iceberg."  But beyond that, and far more deeply felt, is the element of sadness, compassion and -- let's face it -- self-importance: "If I were there now, maybe I could help."  Maybe not; they have a capable and experienced interim pastor. But still, you can't help wondering.  Even if you only know a few of the people, and very slightly, it is easy to imagine their pain, and you miss having the opportunity to soften it, or at least suffer along with them.

Oh, well.  With any luck, we'll find somebody else to suffer with, and soon.

True Story #2: Pax Vobiscum, Suckaz

For several weeks, during the height of New York's influenza epidemic, Father Anonymous proposed to the congregation where he was preaching that, rather than sharing Christ's peace by shaking hands, they offer each other a reverent bow, hands pressed prayerfully together on their chests.

This didn't work.  Nor did those vaccines we got at Rite-Aid.  Although the congregation seems healthy enough, our family all got miserably sick.  The child was the first to fall, then Daddy, then Mommy -- who is only now starting to feel up to snuff.

For the first victim, a pediatrician prescribed Tamilu.  Apparently, this stuff tastes like chalk, or sewage, or some other thing that reasonable people prefer not to ingest.  Twice each day, young Kindergartener Anonymous put up a royal fight, kicking and howling and doing everything else in his (still-limited) power to avoid medication.

At the height of such a fit, and before his parents had taken ill, the boy was struck by a demonic inspiration.

"No, no, no," he shouted.  "I won't take it, I won't! I'll stop you, I'll -- I'll -- I'LL GIVE YOU THE FLU!"

At which point, he reached out, grasped his mother's hand firmly, and said, "Peace be with you!"

True Story #1: Gone With the Wind

So there was Fr. A., in the supermarket parking lot, taking a cart and pushing it toward the store.  "Huh," he said, noticing a tag bolted to the cart.  "An electronic anti-theft device.  I wonder how that works?  Good idea, though."

As often happens, there was a newspaper flyer lying in the cart, advertising today's great price on beef or Snak-Paks or some damn thing.  Father A. customarily ignores flyers.  But when a savage gust of wind snatched the flyer, your humble blogger leapt into action.  He hates litter.

So off he went, chasing the flapping scrap of newsprint.  At first, out of reflex, he pushed the cart, too.  But then the wind reached into his pocket and snatched away his shopping list -- which had been drafted by the lovely Mother Anonymous, and as to the contents of which Fr. A. was utterly ignorant.  He could not afford to lose that list, so he dropped the cart and sprinted, literally diving off the edge of the pavement, catching the list in his hand, and rolling down a grassy embankment toward Sunrise Highway.

The flyer was lost forever, but the shopping list was saved.

Father Anonymous felt, let's admit it, pretty studly.  This was the most athletic thing he had done in weeks.  Sure, he was panting and bruised; sure, he had not retrieved the flyer; but he had saved the shopping list.  His wife would not be disappointed, his son would not go hungry, and his credentials as a hunter-gatherer would not be called into question.

He puffed his way back to the shopping cart and pushed.  At which moment he learned how shopping cart containment systems work.  It's really very interesting; a cover snaps down over one wheel, and prevents the cart cart from moving, just the way the DOT might do with an illegally parked car.  You can't move the thing.  You can't push it, and you can barely drag it.

This is great if the store is trying to avoid losing their carts to bag ladies.  It is less great if a minister, sprinting after his wind-blown shopping list, abandoned the thing in the middle of a traffic lane.  And the same sort of scruples that make him chase an unwanted newsprint flyer mean he can't just leave the cart for somebody else to deal with.

So Fr. A., sighing mightily at the inconvenience of modern life, grasped the wire cart by its front end and hauled it, slowly and awkwardly, across the asphalt to the little pavilion in the center where the shopping carts are stowed.  Then he took another cart and went shopping.

SEQUEL:

Thirty minutes later, as Fr. A. was loading the truck with newly-purchased groceries, another statistically improbable gust of wind snatched the shopping list from his pocket.  Did the poor dumb schmuck say, "Ah, well, I don't need it anymore, anyway"?  Oh, no.  He sprang into action, sprinted across the parking lot and onto the embankment.  This time he slipped on some huge spiked seedpods -- horse chestnut?  Who knows? -- and fell, rolling down to the margin of the highway.  Again.

The list, still in the grip of a mighty wind, flew straight to the windshield of a passing truck.  Astonishingly, nobody was killed.

True Story

When 5-year-old Kindergartener Anonymous came out of school today, he saw Fr. A. reading something on a Kindle.  The following exchange ensued:

"Hi, Daddy!  What are you reading on your reading machine?" 
"The Parson's Handbook, by Percy Dearmer."
"What's that?"
"It's a book about how to do the things that pastors do."
Long pause.
"Hmmm.  Maybe I should hear that ... when I'm 13."

The randomly-chosen high number is Kindergartener A.'s way of putting a thing off indefinitely.