Bored: Bob Dylan Labour Day slideshow

One of those bored/boring days

   

I never do this, I mean make gifs out of still photos, mainly because this is the slowest speed I can display them in. But I've found a whole lot of interesting cloud formation pics - I told you it was a bored, boring day, a relentlessly dark Vancouver-rainish day when I don't want to get out of my fleece nightie and knee socks EVER (and might not, though I am not sick).

I have seen blobs of rainbow in Hawaii, while driving down the road from Hana, and I actually thought I was seeing things because I didn't think rainbows "came" that way. These were strange globes of colour that seemed to be snagged between bright cumulus clouds. A little rain was falling from somewhere. Some of the rainbow blobs appeared to be sitting on the ground, or perhaps on the side of the mountain. It was weird. Now I know a whole lot of things are possible, though I refuse to go into meteorological explanations as to what's happening when you see a funny-looking cloud.

I should do a bunch of these, why not? It's raining too hard to go out.

Covers

Just kind of a blah day, Christmas coming at me like a freight train (though the actual day is usually quite wonderful - so why?). Frustrated at the breakup of a 20-year friendship which had become irretrievably sour, unwilling to be a dumping ground for misplaced buckets of bile. The assumption being I was always ready and willing to receive, infinitely patient, accepting and understanding.

Life is just sour sometimes, it sucks or is boring, and the nice parts fly by so fast you don't even know how good they are. None of this is new. None of this is dramatic or suicidal or even really depressive, just fed up and uninspired.

I make Facebook covers of Harold Lloyd, obsessively, usually late at night (and when did I start staying up so late? For years and years I went to bed at 10:00 and got up at 6:00), and lately they are becoming more florid. Just for fun. I like the candy-colored tinted photos that were often used for promotion, and they lend themselves to florid backgrounds.

But in the final analysis, it's boring and I still feel chronically left out. It's no use, after all these years, to learn to skip Double Dutch or any other way. So I am left standing on the sidelines, or behind something. Bored.

Why I stopped going to church

God! I have wanted to write a post about this for a long time, but every time I approached the subject, something stopped me.


Some sort of massive rock of grief.


Some sort of conviction that "someone" from my former church community would see it, become angry, feel sorry for me, try to silence me, or otherwise write me off.


For you see, after fifteen years of involvement that was often draining and frustrating, I had to leave. The immediate cause was leadership and the wrongheaded direction I felt we were travelling in; this had been going on for years and years and could not be pinned on a single individual. But as the Man used to say: if a blind person tries to lead another blind person, they're both going to stumble into a ditch.

Where do I begin? I want to start with the sense of scarcity that has become epidemic among "liberal" (i.e. not fundamentalist) churches in the past couple of decades. These churches, many of them meeting in dowdy old buildings that are outrageously expensive to maintain, are bleeding members at an alarming rate, and not replacing them. The reasons for this are either very complex, or very simple.


For a lot of people,  religion, the churchy kind of religion many of us were brought up in, now seems as dusty and antiquated as wheezy old pipe organs and hard, varnishy pews.  Most churches appear to be more interested in maintaining a pleasant space and keeping their own little private programs going than in even attempting to address the howling need among their fellow suffering humans.


So the trickle of exodus has gradually became a flood. As people peel off, not always consciously but because somehow they just don't get there on Sunday morning any more, the church's debt (which always seems to be overwhelming: isn't there a church anywhere that makes their mortgage payments?) just snowballs because there aren't enough members left to throw enough dollars into the collection plate.

What happens then is a feverish drive to make up the deficit, usually through inward-turning events like garage and bake sales mostly frequented by members. That's what passed for "outreach" in my former church. Most of the emphasis was placed on desperately trying to stay afloat. If you didn't do your part, guilt was laid on with a trowel. A few years back, you'd get a home visit from someone on the finance committee to talk over your contribution: in other words, how much you were giving, and how much you were helping the church via committees and other churchy agencies. If you weren't giving "enough" in the eyes of the church, the pressure was ever so gently applied until one day you discovered you couldn't breathe.


This attitude of scarcity just breeds more scarcity, not to mention a "help, help, we're drowning" mentality that is probably not the best thing for attracting new members. Asking people to get on-board the Titanic isn't very effective. The minute someone new comes in the door, the hands are out, and the lasso is thrown: come, teach Sunday school,  join this or that committee, join the choir! Get involved (but in our way, not yours: fit yourself into a pre-existing slot.)  And whatever you do, for God's sake, don't leave.


I wonder when my feeling of spiritual awe died. It happened gradually, and at first it took the form of feeling extremely alone. I was not able to voice any of my grief to anyone, or I would be ostracized, patronized or pitied, as in, "well, you know, she can't help it, dear." If I felt transported by a service, it was almost by accident, as everyone was scurrying around making the service happen, busy-busy-busy, and even busier afterwards at coffee time when the talk ran along the most trivial lines.

 









I didn't stay fifteen years for nothing, however, and I am sure there was a time when it all meant something to me, but I'll tell you this - I was never able to truly be myself. I had to be a carefully-edited version of myself, and weigh carefully everything I was going to say before I said it. This was so I wouldn't upset the applecart and be ever so slowly, ever so subtly, ever so ruthlessly edged out.


If I got carried away and cried during a service, I couldn't help it because I was evidently "suffering from depression" (poor soul!). The thing to do was remain in the middle of the middle, a kind of blandness marked by hoary old hymns from the 19th century and sermons that were generally very conventional and uninspired.  Don't upset the applecart, remember. Don't lose control.

Several years ago we had a meltdown over leadership, a very bad one (and forgive me if you've read this here before: apparently I still need to write about it),  but NOT ONE PERSON acknowledged at any time that we had created the experience ourselves by choosing that person out of all the other available candidates. He did not fall from the sky, but you would not know it from the victim mentality that prevailed in our church over the next several years, the sense we'd been "wronged" (by, in the words of the Council Chair, "a nasty, evil little man").


If you blow on a church and it falls over, doesn't that mean the structure is just a little rotten? Like is attracted to like, and (as the psychologists say) we tend to recreate the experiences that are most familiar to us. Such as dysfunction, poor communication and the oppression and abuse of the weakest members. But if anyone had suggested that these things were going on BEFORE our meltdown, the congregation would have been aghast.

And, needless to say, the messenger would have been shot.

The problem was "solved" when the nasty, evil little man was ousted by the larger church. Then came the long period of "healing", in which we replayed the awful scenarios over and over and over again, after which we told ourselves it was all over and stuck big glossy smiles on our faces.


For me, it was all gone, just all of it, whatever I had absorbed of the gospel message, of holiness, of compassion at the deepest level. I began to see things I could and would not see before. While a few other churches in our district were making a brave attempt at programs for the homeless (and by the way, they first had to overcome the common perception that no homeless people existed in our community), our church steered needy people to a social agency whose office was so far away you'd have to bus for half an hour to get there, probably to be treated patronizingly. I think we provided them with a bus ticket.


So much for "I was hungry, and you fed me; naked, and you clothed me. . . " But what does church have to do with any of that?

And how's this for muddying the waters? While that "nasty, evil little man" was in charge, he was horrified that we turned away people in need and insisted we keep some non-perishable food in the church to be given to people who were hungry. Everyone thought he was crazy: that's just not the way we do things!

I still long for a sense of community and spiritual belonging, but I see that when I had it, or thought I had it, the personal cost was astronomical. Financially, I gave more than I could really afford (because I couldn't live with the guilt if I didn't), and saw my contribution thrown into a giant abyss where it promptly disappeared, leading to cries for "more, more, more". Every annual meeting was the same. How I hated and dreaded them: it was a dirge of "not enough, not enough," and desperate ploys to make up a hopeless deficit. We seemed to sink a little bit lower every year.


But a hopeless deficit does not fall from the sky either. WE create it out of an entrenched mentality of chronic scarcity. If people stop coming, that situation doesn't land on us from the moon. They stop coming because they're bored, feel that the service is irrelevant, and need the time to catch up on sleep after an exhausting week of working long hours and looking after the kids.

Most conventional churches had their heyday during the Betty Crocker era, when men worked and women stayed home with the children and everyone dressed up in their finest on Sunday morning. It doesn't exactly work that way any more: not if your husband is a violent alcoholic or has just walked out on you, or you've just been laid off from your factory job and have nowhere to turn. It also doesn't work if all you can get is a Sunday morning shift. (I can't count the number of times I picked up subtle disapproval of people who worked on Sundays.) But most churches I know of "don't have the resources" for a service at any other time of the week.

This tells me everything about their priorities, not to mention their inflexibility and (perhaps unconscious) need to keep things the way they are.
For after all, "we've always done it this way" (and we've done just fine, thank you very much).


I sometimes go on church web sites, if they have them, and see a confused mess, with most of the links not even working. One had no email address. One had been "under construction" for three or four years. It was common to see the most recent events listed under 2008 or 2009.


It screams "out of touch". It screams "irrelevant". It screams "we don't know how to change, in fact we don't want to, so let's just hold tight and see if they come back".

There is very little acknowledgement or even awareness of the profound social turmoil that has thrown the care of needy people back on the church's resources. For the most part, government funding is no longer there. But it appals me to see how many churches protest that they have to put themselves first, to keep their little operation going from all those desperately-begged-for donations before they think about those people "out there", those poor souls (whom they'd rather not have in the sanctuary because they're messy and unkempt and drop cigarette butts on the driveway).


There's nothing wrong with being a little old lady. I'm all for it, as that's the direction I am moving in with frightening speed. But increasingly, churches are dominated by very traditional older women from the Betty Crocker era as older men die out and fewer and fewer young people join. A few years ago I went to an ordination ceremony with a couple of dozen candidates, and all of them were women between the ages of 45 and 60.  No men, and no new blood either. Maybe a 60-year-old woman can be a spiritual firebrand, but why not a 25-year-old man? Where are they,  and why are none of them even faintly interested?

But lest I come across as age-ist, let me tell you a story.  One of our most dynamic members, a great-grandmother who gave tirelessly of her time and energy for years, was asked to leave. She and her husband were presented with a report, a long list of grievances neatly typed-up, which listed all their transgressions over the years. They strayed from the Sunday School curriculum, probably making it interesting for the kids for the first time ever. He (a retired minister) preached a sermon that was a little hard to follow, and it upset people. I don't know what else they did except restore the church library from nothing and build professional-level sets for every pageant we ever put on (and this on their own dime, because everyone else screamed that they had no money).

They were coloring outside the lines, obviously, and even though every progressive thinker we ever heard of was begging people to do just that before the church sank, they were asked to leave. The minister apparently didn't want to get his hands dirty with this task (though, to be sure, that report had to be his doing). He had one of his henchmen do it for him. These two were my favorite people in my church. They were told to toe the line or get out, and the choice was clear.


I'm sorry, but I can't be part of this. It's not going anywhere. It's just not. I am tired of being squeezed for money I can't afford to give. I'm tired of editing myself, of biting my tongue. Of being so careful all the time, never saying what I really think. 

I was never much of a joiner anyway, so all those years of participation were kind of surprising. I'm not going to go out and run after another disappointing experience of listening to those howls of scarcity. I wonder if anyone in these increasingly-empty places has ever heard the story about the loaves and fishes. In my former church, people would be running around screaming, "We're running out of loaves, and look at those fishes!  Quick, pass the collection plate again!"


What would Jesus say? I'd say it would make him sick.

(A post-script. Re-reading this, which is never a good idea, I realize it  resembles a post from quite a long time ago called Why I Left the United Church. I hope this piece gets into some other issues, things I may have left out. The fact that I still need to write about it is significant in itself. Roots that deep are not pulled up without pain.)

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

Backward child

Today I found two books I had given up for dead. You know how you just can't find a book? It must be somewhere. I felt as if I was going out of my mind.

This all started a few months ago, I think. I was in the bird room (my bird's bedroom, downstairs, also a catch-all for my husband's TEN YEARS' WORTH of receipts for such important purchases as foam insoles at Walmart and two loaves of bread from the Safeway). No, back up a little. I couldn't find my music books! Caitlin, now 7, got a guitar for Xmas and wanted me to help her and I could not find ANY of my 25 or so music books!!

I don't know, I didn't even think to look in the bird room, nor did I remember moving a whole bookcase down there with lots of "tall" books in it, books that just didn't fit anywhere else. Anyways.

The 2 books I found today, in the tall book case in the bird room, are called (firstly) Panati's Extraordinary Endings of Practically Everything and Everybody. Most of it is boring, the rest of it gruesome. It talks about how a man, after being beheaded, retains consciousness (presumably in his head) for several seconds after "severance". Once a researcher asked a poor beheaded guy to blink three times after they removed his melon. He blinked twice.

I won't tell you about Thomas Edison's early failed experiments (on humans) in electrocution, or the death of William the Conqueror whose body exploded like Mr. Creosote in Monty Python, because it is simply too disgusting (and when I visited England, a tour guide at the Tower of London told a horrible fable about a drunken executioner, Jack Ketch, who mis-chopped about fourteen times before successfully offing the poor guy's head).

But I will say, during one of the worst bouts of the Black Plague, 10,000 people were dying per day. Unable to accommodate the bodies even in burning pits, they had to remove the roofs from massive guard towers, throw the bodies in, cover the whole thing with quicklime and nail the roof back on.

I think my day just got a whole lot brighter.

Enough of this Panati stuff: and who is he, anyway? Some ghoul? On to the other one, equally boring except in spots, called An Almanac of Words at Play by Willard R. Espy.

A lot of this is bad poetry and tricky little word-things, and the anagrams are atrocious, but I do like the palindromes, words or names or phrases that read the same forwards as backwards ("Otto"; "Anna"; "Norma is as selfless as I am, Ron"; "'Naomi, sex at noon taxes,' I moan").

I want to share with you, dear readers, before I nod off into another bout of foggy depression, what I've come to think of as the Ultimate Palindrome. For some reason it's called The Faded Bloomers' Rhapsody. I will have to transcribe it, damn it, and it's long!

Flee to me, remote elf - Sal a dewan desired;
Now is a Late-Petal Era.
We fade: lucid Iris, red Rose of Sharon;
Goldenrod a silly ram ate.
Wan olives teem (ah, Satan lives!);
A star eyes pale Roses.

Revel, big elf on a mayonnaise man -
A tinsel baton-dragging nice elf too.
Lisp, oh sibyl, dragging Nola along;
Niggardly bishops I loot.
Fleecing niggard notables Nita names,
I annoy a Man of Legible Verse.

So relapse, ye rats,
As evil Natasha meets Evil
On a wet, amaryllis-adorned log.
Norah's foes' orders (I ridiculed a few) are late, Pet.
Alas, I wonder! Is Edna wed?
Alas - flee to me, remote elf.

This is simply gorgeous, and you just gotta start at the end and go backwards. It will at least distract you for a while.

The somnambulist

One of my fave-fave ads. Took me 2 years to find it.

Jesus, that's funny!

This is the way my mind works, when it works at all.

I started watching a six-hour documentary about Monty Python. SIX hours. I couldn't believe I was sitting through it all, and at several points was going to ditch it for Dateline or Hoarders or something esoteric like that.

These guys just look so bloody old now, and one of them is dead. John Cleese is unrecognizable, as if he belongs in a home. Eric Idle looks like George Harrison if George Harrison had lived to be 100, Michael Palin and Terry Jones still look alike, ha ha ha. They gabbed and they gabbed like tiresome old men, which they are. There were a few welcome clips, but mostly it was people blathering on and on and on about what their favorite "bit" was. Half of them I didn't even know, but I guess their opinion mattered, or they were cool or something.

They all liked stuff like the parrot sketch, Lumberjack Song, fish slapping dance and Upper Class Twit of the Year. The ones everybody likes. Why was this show even made? Why wasn't it edited down to a nice pithy hour and a half?

I liked the one about the fatal joke, but it wasn't just a sketch, it was a whole episode that brought in World War II (the group was obsessed with World War II) and Hitler with funny subtitles:

Hitler: I cut my dog's nose off.

Crowd: How does he smell?

Hitler: Terrible!

Mostly the six-hour endurance test made me realize how much time had passed, and how uneven the several Python movies were. There were some really disgusting passages I'd forgotten about, such as the Holy Grail scene where Sir Whatsisname got his arms and legs chopped off and was hopping around gushing blood. Blecccch. The Meaning of Life was the worst, though, with someone's liver being carved out, and then that scene with the fat man exploding, just about the worst thing I've ever seen.

But I did like Life of Brian. I thought Life of Brian was profound, and at times bordered on the reverent. I don't think they were dissing Jesus so much as dissing all the pompous assholes who pretend to know what he was about (if he existed at all: might he have been just the distillation of all our most aching desires?).

That got me going on a post I did on a former blog, the blog where I was chased out of town. It was all about drawings and paintings depicting the Laughing Jesus. There are dozens of them, seemingly, all along the same lines, as if the artists traced them.

Then I started wondering about St. Margaret and the Dragon. When I looked up St. Margaret, there were about 14 of them, so I got discouraged and quit.

Eric Idle still goes around milking Python with a show called Spamalot, though the rest of them don't seem to mind (maybe he bought them out). He must be a fucking millionaire by now, so this must be an attempt to recapture his glory days.

I think Graham Chapman had the right idea.