Ministers and Movie Stars

Yesterday at the salon I saw an article about Leonardo DiCaprio being mistaken for a thief in a jewelry store because he was bundled up in a sweatshirt and hat, trying not to be recognized.  Apparently it worked, until the police showed up.

Sometimes I roll my eyes at famous people going all crazy to avoid notice.  Those millions of dollars you make: they come because you are recognizable.  Being unrecognizable is ostensibly not a good thing if you're an actor or a musician.

Yesterday, however, I did not roll my eyes.  Instead, I nodded in sympathy at this poor guy who was just trying to buy a gift for his mom and had to dress like a potential robber to avoid being chased down by fans and paparazzi.

I don't have fans, and no one is trying to take my picture.  However, I'm not entirely unfamiliar with the phenomenon of being recognized when you don't want to be.  For example, last week I got off of a plane after a few days of intense meetings.  I was starving, so I went to my home base bar to grab something to eat.  It was 10pm on a Saturday night.  I looked like absolute hell, hunched over my food after hours of travel.  So, of course this seemed like a good time for someone to talk to me about church business.

From her perspective, it makes complete sense: she needs to talk to me, I'm there, what else is there to it? Meanwhile, I am scrambling to find my work brain and not say something completely idiotic.

Fun clergy fact: The likelihood that you will run into a parishioner is directly proportional to how exhausted, frustrated, sloppily dressed, occupied with things other than church, or otherwise unclergylike you are at a given moment.  Ministers cannot just run to the grocery store or stop into the pharmacy or go out to dinner like normal people.  Perhaps we need to pile on hats and hooded sweatshirts and go incognito.  Then again, it didn't work so well for Leo.

The War of the Blogs

I occasionally write for a blog that my denomination hosts.  Usually I limit myself to writing during our annual assembly unless something big is happening, but every once in a while I get a yen to write about something denomination-specific.  This happened just last week, after I had attending the meetings of our executive committee and commissions.  I'm the moderator of the Commission for Women, which means that I spent three days talking about all the injustices women face in our in-progress denomination, which affirms women's ordination in general but provides an "out" for those who aren't down with the equality thing.

I've been living with the consequences of that "out" since I joined this denomination in 1999 and was rapidly disabused of my initial delusion that this would be a happy, accepting place for women (I was fleeing from a reactionary fundagelical experience at the time).  As a member of the Commission for Women, it's been part of my task to hear the worst of the stories of what women have experienced.  Hearing all that crap so consistently can sometimes make one maybe the slightest bit bitter.  So, I did what I do: I blogged about it.

And then the firestorm began.

There are now around seventy comments on that post.  Many of them are from anonymous authors.  In fact, I think only one of my detractors identified himself.  All the usual accusations are there.  I'm angry, I hate men, I'm not to be trusted anyway as I'm a supporter of the evil gays, blah blah blah.  There are lots of threats that they will leave the denomination if they're not allowed to be nasty to women candidates and ministers, which is apparently supposed to bother me.  I'm not sure why the exodus of a bunch of people who harass me and threaten my ordination would bring me a tremendous sense of loss, but whatever.

I'm more or less used to this sort of thing, although it's been a bit more concentrated this week than most.  But I'm starting to think it's just the warm-up.  My church just voted to allow same-sex marriages, and our regional assembly will be discussing it tonight.  A minister who was disciplined a few years ago for performing a marriage has just been reinstated, so tensions will already be high.  On Saturday, I found lists of biblical quotations about sexual immorality posted on the church doors, which I'm guessing may be some sort of commentary (again, anonymous) about our recent decisions.  I suspect we are in for a rocky ride in the months to come.  Because what we need is people verbally beating each other up again for a while, that being such an effective way for the church to function.  I can't help but think that the powers of evil are chuckling with glee while we distract ourselves by ripping each other apart while the injustices of the world run rampant all around us.  

Rev. Fatty Fat Fattikins and the Vicious Parishioner

My church is currently running a stewardship campaign, which we are actually treating more like a relationship campaign.  Members are calling other members and talking about church.  What's going wrong, what's going right, what could be better, how might you get more involved, etc.  Sounds like a good idea, right?

A woman came into the office this week to tell the senior minister that she didn't want to do this calling thing anymore.  The feedback she had heard on her first call was nothing like she was expecting, and she didn't want to deal with that sort of conversation anymore.  What was this troubling feedback, you ask - this complaint so crucial to the life of the church?

I'm too fat.

Yes, the secret is out.  My tremendous breadth no longer fits in the pulpit.  I'm far too ginormous to climb into the driver's seat of the church van and take work groups to flooded areas.  In fact, I can no longer find clerical robes made in my size.  And after I broke my office chair, they had to buy me one of those circus balls that elephants balance on.  

Seriously?

So there is the plain old sheer meanness of this comment, of course.  Fortunately, my self esteem is fairly high and was only slightly shaken by this useful piece of information.  It was a little worse than it might normally have been because I had spent the week with my family and was a bit emotionally raw.  My first inclination was to get defensive, but there is no one to get defensive to.  I don't know who this person is, and the bearer of bad news certainly doesn't deserve the diatribe that is in my head about genetics, health, enjoyment of life, and the unrealistic societal expectations placed on women.  So, occasionally I think about this episode and allow myself a moment of irritation at people's often thoughtless and sometimes vicious behavior.  

I swear, I will never understand the degree to which some people believe that they own the appearance (and by extension the body) of their minister.  I'm fairly certain this happens more to female clergy than it does to male.  I am constantly fending off comments about my hair, skin, clothes, shoes, nail polish color, tattoos...if you can see it, people feel free to express an opinion about it.  Sometimes it's caring and well-intentioned, sometimes not so much.  But it's nearly always annoying.

More importantly, there is the fact that I now know there is someone in the congregation who is not thinking about whether we are loving people, or pointing people toward God, or working toward peace and justice.  I know that when I talk about these things, she's worrying about whether my fat ass will break the preacher's bench, or worse yet, that I won't look good enough to represent the congregation.  And that, my friends, really chaps my hide.  Excuse me, my fat hide.    

Irene Boot Camp (otherwise known as, Reflections on the Shallower Side of Flood Relief)

Doing relief work is fabulous for your inner beauty.  On your outer beauty, I should warn you, it can wreak havoc.  My skin is breaking out around my mouth and nose in a line that precisely marks the place where an N95 mask sits on my face for a few hours a day.  My hair always seems to contain some remnant of drywall dust - which looks suspiciously like dandruff to those who don't spend their days prying nails out of ceilings while sheetrock particles rain down on their faces.  I've developed some serious biceps, just in time for Cosmo to inform me that too-muscley women aren't hot (give me a break.  Whoever keeps subscribing me to that magazine, it's not funny.  Kindly stop).  Things like eyebrow grooming have fallen by the wayside, as I've been burning the candle at both ends just to get my work done this month while leading volunteer groups almost every day.  The good news is that my pedicure has held up a record-breaking three weeks; I suppose being constantly encased in steel-toed work boots helped.

On the other hand, I feel pretty fabulous.  I'm using my body every day, and not just to raise and lower myself from my office chair.  There is a physical confidence that comes back to my when I'm regularly active, and it's showing up big time as a result of swinging a sledge hammer and hauling buckets of mud.  Which I guess sort of makes up for the fact that Irene Boot Camp hasn't done a thing to reduce my size.  Apparently being in my mid-thirties means that 6-8 hours of physical labor a day still isn't enough to kick my metabolism into action or reduce the annoying fat that has deposited itself around my stomach and hips.  For the most part I'm really enjoying my thirties, but they could take that part back.  And the heartburn, to which I say, where the hell did you come from?

These are the things that I notice when I come home from days of doing the heaviest, most disgusting work of my life, when I don't want to think anymore about the house that sat for three weeks full of mud before anyone touched it, or the trailer park that was battered against the nearby grove of trees, or the woman who started crying when we pulled into her driveway because she had been gutting the house alone for the last three days.  And I understand a little bit of why so many people around my already seem to have forgotten all about this whole situation, because it's really easy to just think about how irritating my skin is instead.      

Anger

So, I have a friend who is currently angry at me, although she hasn't actually said that and probably won't.  She didn't say anything about it until I asked if everything was okay, and even then, she said she was fine and then later sent me a text message to tell me that everything was not fine.  Apparently we're going to talk about it...sometime.  It's already been four days since the offending incident (the nature of which is not entirely clear to me).  The text message is a big improvement over the silent treatment I was getting before, but still.

Sometimes I am forced to confront the fact that other people do not deal with anger the way that I do.

This is how I get angry:
1. Incident occurs.
2. I say, "I'm angry," or yell, or have some other immediate expression of emotion.
3. Person in question reacts however they're going to react.
4. Depending on their reaction, I either forgive and forget, or file the incident into the "reduce expectations of this person" category of acquaintance.  Either way, I move on.

Let there be no mistaking this: I get angry.  Sometimes VERY angry.  I just don't have the capacity to hold on to anger.  It's not my nature to stew over things.  Also, right now, I have other things to worry about.  Like, you know, thousands of people without functional homes.

I'm trying to be understanding and give her time to put her thoughts in order, but seriously.  I just do not have the energy or patience to deal with this indefinitely.

Hurricane Irene and the Tools of Ministry

The area where I live was recently hit with this hurricane, and everything has pretty much been turned upside down around here.  My own home and church weren't affected, but the neighborhood around the church was badly flooded.  Several communities around us were devastated, and I have friends who are trying to hold their churches together, help the people in their towns, and deal with the loss of their own houses.  I can't imagine how they're doing it.  I'm exhausted, and all I'm doing is organizing volunteer groups and donations.  I've spent most of the last couple of weeks mucking out basements and gutting houses.  It's a whole different kind of work than I usually do.  I can't say I'd like to do it all the time, but there is something deeply satisfying about swinging a sledge hammer and tearing down a wall.

When I graduated from seminary, I asked for a copy of the Septuagint as a gift.  Don't get me wrong, I like my Septuagint, but other tools have proven a wee bit more useful over the years.  I didn't expect ministry to lead me to own my own sledge hammer, crow bar, and steel-toed boots.  My classes never mentioned how proficient I would become in backing up a 15-passenger van, making gumbo or goat curry for 100, or drywalling.  I'm glad I took the classes I did; I enjoyed them, and they fit the path I thought I was on at the time.  I believe in seminary education and the foundation it provides.  But wow, it sometimes seems pretty distant from the work that I do from day to day.

I also feel like I should have had a class in "How to Not Get Angry When People Don't Volunteer," but that's another subject for another day.

Pick Up a Shovel, Yo

Several downs within an hour drive of where I live have been completely devastated by Hurricane Irene.  It took me a few days to get my act together and start doing something to help out with this, mostly because I was waiting for other people who said they were doing something about it to get their act together, but finally I decided to just go ahead and start organizing because it needed to be done and, well, let's face it - I'm a lot better at organizing than I am at the actual labor part of all of this.

Anyway, I was down at one of the sites yesterday, cleaning mud off of body bags at a funeral home (yes, really - and no, there were no people in the bags) and shoveling piles of refuse (which we used to call "walls" and "ceiling") out of the basement of a church.  Most of the buildings there have been completely gutted, the piles of soggy insulation, drywall, and carpet lining the streets.  There is a roof in the church parking lot.  Just the roof; it floated off of someone's house.  The amount of damage is unbelievable.

So, here is the thing that is annoying me today.  This is all happening very close to where I live.  Some of it is happening two blocks from my church.  I preached this sermon on Sunday about getting through crisis, and how we all need to pitch in if we want these people and communities to make it.  People loved this sermon.  Yes, yes, you're so right, we should totally help people, etc.  Then I asked for volunteers to go to the affected areas and spend a few hours wielding a hose, sponge, or shovel.  I said I would take people down every day this week, so we could accommodate different schedules.  How many volunteers do you think I got?  Yeah...not as many as people who told me what a great sermon it was.  What it comes down to is this: they're glad our church is doing something to help, but "our church" really means "someone else," namely me and the few other people who have stepped forward.

I....just don't get it.  I don't understand how you can know that people down the street and in the areas surrounding you have lost EVERYTHING, and not feel the need to help.  I do understand that some people don't have the physical capability to haul wheelbarrows of wet building materials, but there are a lot of different things that need to be done.  I guess I was hoping that all of these people saying, "We should do something to help" would equal a large turnout of people actually doing something to help.  Apparently not.

That said, if you are in the area, we'll have work groups (of indeterminate size) going out on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday this week.  Drop me a comment or, if you know me, get in touch by email or phone, and I'll set you up.  If you can't do it this week but still want to help, let me know.  We are talking months worth of work here, so it's not going to run out before you're available.