Avoiding the plague

Sometime you get absorbed by your job. This is not necessarily bad: jobs are reality, too. But the pressures of working in an office often distract me from their reality: I solve a problem, I answer email, I got to a meeting, and the doing of things seems more important than their being. When I was in sales, alternating boredom and adrenalin-rush distracted me. When I worked for a sculptor, delusions of the importance of art distracted me. When I worked as a carpenter, fatigue or pain or cold distracted me. Maybe it’s not getting distracted, maybe it’s that there are more realities than one but we can usually only pay attention to one.

Today in the office I was absorbed by work. Even when I stopped a meeting so I could show the person I was meeting with the baby hummingbirds in their nest, I was still absorbed by work. Then I walked over to the other building to get water for tea, and the day crashed in on me. You live for moments like that, and you also avoid them like the plague because they are so disruptive.

More bad religious jokes

First joke. Heard this one from Philip, who made it sound far funnier than it will sound here:

There’s this militant atheist. He’s such an atheist that the word “god” never escapes his lips, except to prove the impossibility of such a concept. One day, he goes out for a walk in the woods. He’s admiring the beauty surrounding him, and thinking how amazing the natural world is. Suddenly he realizes that a bear is following him. He starts walking a little faster. The bear starts walking faster. The atheist starts to run. The bear starts to run. The atheist starts running really fast. The bear surges forward, leaps on the atheist, draws back one big paw to deliver the coup de grace — and without thinking about it, the atheist shouts, “Oh my god.”

Time freezes. All sound stops, the leaves are no longer waving in the breeze, the bear’s paw stops just short of the guy’s head. A big resonant voice comes out of nowhere. “So at last you call on me.”

The atheist is astounded. “Well, I guess I can’t disbelieve my senses,” he says. “All these years I’ve said there’s no god, and now I see there is. I guess it’s too much for me to ask you to make me a Christian at this point.”

“That would be too much to ask,” the voice says.

“Then could you make the bear a Christian?”

“Sure,” says the voice. Time starts again. The bear draws back his paw, looks at it speculatively. The bear rears back on its haunches, puts its paws together in prayer, and starts to speak. “Thank you, dear God, for this feast thou hast laid out before me.”

Second joke, worse than the first:

A man is lying in bed in a hospital, tubes coming out of him, machines beeping ominously. He’s dying. And as he dies, he’s talking to the hospital chaplain: “Could it be? Naw. But what if? I mean, who knows?” The hospital chaplain is sitting there saying nothing, just listening and nodding.

A doctor walking by hears the man, and she pulls the chaplain aside. “What’s going on?” says the doc.

“This man’s dying, and he’s getting some things off his chest before he dies,” says the chaplain.

“Oh,” says the doc. “Deathbed confession?”

“No, he’s a Unitarian Universalist. Deathbed confusion.”

Told you they were bad jokes.

Hummingbird babies

The Anna’s Hummingbird who is nesting next to our main worship space has hatched two babies:

The photo above is far from perfect — the light level is low necessitating a relatively long exposure, and the babies won’t keep still even when I ask them politely. Nevertheless, you should be able to see the bill of one pointing to the left, and the bill of the other one at the right of the nest pointing toward and above the camera; the bills are quite a bit shorter relative to the body than the bill of a mature hummingbird. The baby on the left has its wing spread out over the top of the nest, and you can see the fine white and black pattern of the developing primary feathers.

Two food memories

Carol and I walked by the fondue restaurant on our way to the supermarket. “I can’t believe people are still into fondue,” said Carol. “I remember when my parents were into fondue.”

“My family was into fondue at one point, too,” I said. “I remember one time — stop me if I’ve told you this a thousand times — when the cheese mixture wasn’t right, or the fondue pot wasn’t hot enough or something, and the cheese got all stringy. Remember my parents’ old house? Well, we stretched this one string of cheese from the dining room all the way to the far kitchen wall.”

“No, you never told me that story,” said Carol

How could I have not told her that story? We talked about it for years afterwards; I still have a vivid memory of that long string of cheese, close to twenty feet long. We got to the supermarket: Carol went off to find yogurt, I went to get paper towels. Another memory came to me unbidden, another one of those little stories that we retold over and over again:

Dad was pouring some coffee for my mother. Mom held her coffee cup over Jean’s bowl of cereal, and Dad started pouring. Why over Jean’s cereal bowl? I guess Mom thought that if a little coffee spilled, at least it wouldn’t drip on the table.

“That’s enough,” said Mom, and quickly pulled her coffee cup away.

Dad didn’t have time to react. He kept pouring. A stream of coffee went into Jean’s cereal bowl.

Jean, needless to say, was surprised, and rightfully indignant. I thought Dad looked sorry for what he had done, though I thought he was not at fault. Mom apologized to Jean, but treated the whole thing lightly. “We’ll get you another bowl of cereal,” she said. It took years before Jean and I got over it; we certainly never let our parents pour coffee, or anything else, over anything we were eating for years thereafter.

How To Feed Five Thousand People

Another in a work-in-progress, stories for liberal religious kids.

Once upon a time, Jesus and his disciples (that is, his closest followers) were trying to take a day off. Jesus had become very popular, and people just wouldn’t leave him alone. Jesus and the disciples wanted a little time away from the crowds that followed them everywhere, so they rented a boat and went to a lonely place, far from any village.

But people figured out where they were going, and by the time Jesus and his friends landed the boat, there were five thousand people waiting there for them. So Jesus started to teach them, and he talked to them for hours.

It started getting late, and the disciples of Jesus pulled him aside and said, “We need to send these people to one of the nearby villages to get some food.”

“No,” said Jesus. “The villages around here are too small to feed five thousand people. You will have to get them something to eat.”

“What do you mean?” his disciples said. “We don’t have enough money to go buy enough bread for all these people, and even if we did, how would we bring it all back here?”

“No, no,” said Jesus. “I don’t want you to go buy bread. Look, how many loaves of bread have we got right here?” Continue reading →

Spring watch

The front page of the sports section of the San Mateo County Times features a big picture from the Giants’ exhibition opener in the cactus league, and there’s almost a full page of baseball coverage inside. Spring — real honest-to-goodness spring, not this year-round flower-laden pseudo-springtime we have to put up with in the Bay area — can’t be far behind.

Personal to Ms. M: Don’t worry, I won’t be wearing black and orange just because I’m living on the Peninsula; I’m still an AL guy.

Getting distracted

“It’s four o’clock,” I said, “the train will be here soon.” Carol started to get out of the car, and then said, “Oh look!” and pointed at the rainbow. It was low in the sky, and quite vivid.

She ran off to catch her train. I started driving back to the office, and managed to miss my turn because I was looking at the rainbow, which had faded and had lost the top of its arch.

I drove around in one of those suburban tracts where you can never go in the direction you think you want to go. I was a little bit embarrassed that I had gotten lost because I was looking at a rainbow; rainbows are so wonderful that they’re trite; little kids like rainbows; I’m sure the other adults who driving around didn’t bother looking at the rainbow, although they might have had a little kid in a car seat who pointed at it.

Eventually I got back on the right road again. I came back to the office, and didn’t think about the rainbow until just now.

Sean says it’s a revolution

A few minutes ago, I was talking with Sean of the blog Ministrare — he’s here at the Palo Alto church while Amy, our senior minister, is on sabbatical — and he showed me a video that he likes. He put the video up on his blog, and I’ll embed it here, so you can watch it, too:

 

 

Over on his blog, Sean says that he believes we religious liberals are not ready for the social media revolution. I think Sean is mostly right.

But I can find some bright spots, places where we do use social media well. Here in Palo Alto, we’ve been piloting a podcast for Sunday school teachers, and the teachers tell us they love this venture into online learning. And although I write my blog on my own time, I find that some people in the congregation do read it, and what I have written here has sparked some very interesting conversations in the face-to-face congregation. When we do use social media, what we do online strengthens and reinforces what happens in our face-to-face congregation.

So I’m ready to embrace the social media revolution. I think it will make congregational life that much better. What do you think?