During the time that “that man” was coming, one family that had been sending their children to Sunday School at the church stopped sending them. That’s one of the “reasons” given for needing to make that man go away. “Families won’t send their kids to a church where there are gay people, because they might turn the children gay.”

One of those kids is now the same age as our kid (8- and 9-year olds). He’s a total little shit. This morning, after worship, they were running around downstairs. The other kid does some hip gyrations and bends over with his lips puckered up and says, “What’s this?” My kid along with the others shouts, “It’s a gay guy kissing another guy.”

I pulled my kid aside and told him that what he was doing was totally inappropriate and to get ready to go. When we got home, I asked him who had taught him to make fun of gay people. “I don’t know,” my kid said. “Tim was saying all that.”

“Well Tim needs to get his head out of his ass,” I told my kid. “That’s just plain mean and you’re never, ever to say things like that. That’s not even a little bit funny, and if Tim starts talking like that again, you tell him it’s not and he’d better cut it out.” I think my kid got the message. I’m just hoping it sticks.

I’m not sure that I’m ready to take my kid back to Sunday School there. It may be time to start visiting different churches on Sundays – or doing Sunday School at home. My wife says she’ll have a talk with Tim next week about his gay-bashing. I’m glad she’s volunteered to do it. It certainly needs done, and she’ll do it in a more helpful way than I probably would. I wouldn’t be surprised if he stopped coming after that talk, though, which would open a whole other can of worms. Whether we go back is still in the air for me, though.

Of course, our kid is going to pick up these things sooner or later. I wouldn’t doubt that he’s probably seen it in school already. We’d have to be dealing with it one way or another. I’m just saying, he shouldn’t be learning it in church.

Photo credit: Kate Hiscock

After the funeral, they went out to the family plot at the cemetery to lay Bessie to rest, and after that they all went back to the family homestead to drink beer and talk about old times. It was at the “reception” that Katheryn and a couple other cousins approached my wife to ask if she might be willing to help them out.

It turns out there was a fourth sibling, a brother, Gene, who died maybe ten or twelve years ago. Gene and Faye never got along. In fact, they were really on the outs with each other. So when Gene died, Faye objected to burying Gene in the family plot. Since the cemetery plots are under Faye’s name, the cemetery association told them that if they wanted to bury Gene in that cemetery, they’d have to buy him his own plot.

Instead of buying another plot, though, Katheryn and few of the cousins took reception of Gene’s body from the hospital morgue determined to do right by Gene one way or another. The night after they got Gene’s body, they went out in the woods behind the old village church and buried him there by moonlight.

The old village church has long since ceased to be a church. It wasn’t even a church at the time they took Gene out in the woods behind it to bury him there. Some forty years ago the building had been sold off to another business that had moved into town. But it was the church they had all grown up in, so to them the woods behind it were still hallowed enough ground to receive their brother, at least temporarily. Gene has been in the woods behind the old village church ever since.

The return to the family cemetery plot to bury their sister, though, had stirred these memories. As they stood around the parlor drinking Bud Light, and with Faye on the other side of the house in the kitchen, they explained that Gene’s wife, Darlene, was going to be up from Florida later this month, and would my wife please go with them one night out behind the old village church to help them dig Gene up and to say some prayers as they re-buried him in the family plot. Nobody would have to know but them, and Faye wouldn’t ever know because she never goes to the cemetery. They even offered to provide the camouflage gear for her.

My wife, flabbergasted by the story, could only bring herself to say she’d think about it and they left it at that. What could she say? It’s not every day that one is invited to a secret nocturnal exhumation and reburial ceremony.

Since then, the opportunity to think about it has raised a few questions in our minds, details that hadn’t occurred to my wife to ask about in that first moment of shock.

• Was he in a casket? Or at least in a body bag? Or did they just bury him in one of those hospital smocks that opens in the back?
• Did they make any effort to embalm him?
• After all these years in an unmarked grave, are they sure they can find him? Sure, they can come within a few feet, but you’d only need to be off by a foot or two to be digging all night.
• It’s February in the north country. They buried Gene in the summer, but now the ground is going to be frozen. The professionals dig winter graves through frozen ground with a backhoe. But the camouflage isn’t going to cover a backhoe. How will they dig him up? And how will they get him re-buried at the cemetery without the groundskeepers noticing that there’s a fresh hole they didn’t dig?

Like any simple plan, the devil is in the details. The odds of something going amiss seem fairly high, and she really doesn’t want to end up with a prison ministry. So, as interesting as it would be to see a nocturnal exhumation, my wife’s decided to find a way of telling them she can’t make it that evening.

[Photo based on Shallow by George Foster]

Freeze the frame for a moment. You need some background.

A week ago, Thursday, Brian had called at nine p.m. to say Mrs. Nichols (another unrelated church member) had fallen and had been taken to the hospital. She was ready to come home, and could my wife please go pick her up. Now, Brian, who has his own car, could have gone to pick up Mrs. Nichols. And, as my wife knew very well, Mrs. Nichols has several other people who have offered to pick her up under such circumstances. There never was any question of Mrs. Nichols needing a ride home. Also, as it happened, my wife was home alone with the kid on a school night and couldn’t leave the house pick up Mrs. Nichols. So she told Brian that Mrs. Nichols probably already had a ride, but since he was so concerned, he might just drive over himself.

Sure enough, Mrs. Nichols had already called one of her friends and had been safely delivered home. Brian made a formal complaint, and on Sunday the Personnel Committee called a special meeting to review the case of my wife’s dereliction of pastoral duty.

As it turns out, Brian had already been out that evening when he’d heard that Mrs. Nichols had been taken to the hospital.

He had driven his car over to Mrs. Nichols’s house and had broken in. One of the neighbors had seen something suspicious and had called the police. The state troopers have a barracks three doors down from Mrs. Nichols’s house, so it didn’t take them very long to get there and find Brian red-handed going through Mrs. Nichols’s stuff. They were about to arrest him when he told them he was a member of the volunteer Rescue Squad. He told them that he was there on official rescue squad business to get Mrs. Nichols’s list of medications which had been left behind when they’d taken her to the hospital earlier. The troopers let him off with a summons to appear in court to tell his story to the judge.

The news that Brian was on the rescue squad made us just a little worried, for several reasons. Brian can’t read, has an IQ only a few points above a begonia, and he has a conviction for molesting his cousin (a minor) on the record. We were amazed that someone like Brian could get on the rescue squad without having passed some kind of competency test and a routine background check. We asked his aunt, who confirmed that “Oh, yes, Brian’s been on the rescue squad since last summer.” We resolved that no matter how serious the medical emergency we were going to drive to the emergency room ourselves rather than call 9-1-1.

It was his aunt’s confirmation of the rescue squad story that connects Brian’s call about Mrs. Nichols and his call needing to go to the emergency room on Tuesday. Wednesday morning, his aunt came by to say that it’s probably all the pressure from working on the rescue squad that had him so upset that he needed to go to the ER.

Return again to Tuesday night. My wife is home alone with the kid in bed, after having been put on church trial for dereliction of duty. Brian is on the phone wanting my wife to take him to the ER, and his mother doesn’t want him to go.

“Let me talk to your mother,” she says.

The mother says, “He doesn’t need to go. He’s just having a panic attack.” She puts Brian back on the line, so she can tell him she won’t take him.

My wife says, “Brian, if you really need to go to the hospital, you don’t want me taking you. I’ll never get you there before you’ll die of your heart attack if that’s what you’re having. Call 9-1-1.”

Later that night, we get a call from Brian’s aunt. He’s called 9-1-1 and his mother is furious. He hasn’t had a heart attack. But he got a good doctor at the ER who diagnosed him with some kind of panic disorder and prescribed him some medicine to calm him down. So, while my wife is on trial again this Sunday for upsetting Brian’s mother, at least Brian has the medicine he needs.

One last wrinkle. We found out on Friday from the Rescue Squad Chief, who we run into at the deli down the street (small town), that Brian isn’t on the Rescue Squad. He’s been telling people this since last summer, though, and the Rescue Squad is getting ready to press charges against Brian for impersonating emergency personnel. Quite likely, after Brian’s hearing for breaking and entering at Mrs. Nichols’s house and lying to the state police, my wife will be getting a call for a prison visit.

At least we can call 9-1-1 again.

[Photo credit: Dan Catt.]

So last month this guy in the church forwards a dirty joke to everyone on his email list, which includes my wife, the Pastor. (I’m not on his email list.) It wasn’t an explicit email. But it came with a picture of a young blond sitting on an old man’s lap, and left a pretty clear implication about what he was doing to take advantage of her.  It was clearly something he had sent to everybody on his list (or at least a lot of people on his list), so it wasn’t a personal case. Rather, a case a dirty old man with bad taste, no sense of women’s equality, and very bad judgment.

She sends a simple email back saying:

Dear D:
I promise not to email you any dirty jokes and you please don’t send me any either.

Pretty straight forward. She also notified her Personnel Committee chairperson that she’d done this (because she’s experienced enought to know that something’s bound to come back about it).

He emailed an apology. The next few weeks he didn’t come to church, but since he’s in the choir, he was missed, and the choir sent him a “please come back” card. So, for the last couple weeks, he’s been back. He won’t talk to my wife, and he won’t talk to me either, and he’s been going around telling the joke to every woman in the congregation to see if they would react any differently, trying to build a case that, since it wasn’t explicit, my wife was over-reacting to the email.

Last Sunday the Personnel Committee had a meeting after worship. It was supposed to be a 15 minute “check in” meeting. But D’s girlfriend (who is not inappropriately young) is on the Personnel Committee, and the whole thing came up. The meeting went over an hour on, “What to do about D?” Mostly, I’m told, it turned out to be a support group session for D’s girlfriend, who has had to endure his telling this joke to all her friends and acquaintences.

This time around, it happened to be D. In this particular church, though, it could have been any number of guys. This church has quite a few old men who have no sense at all of women’s equality, and who love to tell inappropriate jokes. A well-meaning friends once suggested to my wife that “at least you can get a church in the United States. In Africa, the churches are a couple generations behind and they’d never allow for a woman pastor.” But, guess what. It’s not just African churches that are “a couple generations behind.” And it’s not just women’s equality issues that they’re behind in.

With any luck, this might be an opportunity for this congregation to work through some of its issues with women. With any luck, by the time the dust settles, we may be able to move this congregation forward a generation or two. I’m guessing something will come up that will break open the racial issue sooner or later.

“Yeah, whatever.” Because there is absolutely nothing you can do to satisfy them anyway.

I’m ringing chimes with the “bell choir” now. Because they’re desperate. And most of them realize that they’re desperate. Except the director. I gave it a try shortly after our arrival, and when I missed a rehearsal (not having been told that there was a last-minute rehearsal Sunday morning), the director told me that if I didn’t make rehearsal I couldn’t be in the bell choir. So I did what I thought was the honorable thing and didn’t go any more – since there was (and is) no way I can commit to being at every rehearsal without fail.

But the rest of the bell choir has been imploring me to return. And in November I did. For them. They’re nice people. And in my six weeks back, the director has tried to kick me out twice already. Except the others wouldn’t let her. This morning I arrived at last-minute rehearsal five minutes late. (We were on time getting into the building, but a couple people downstairs wanted to talk and it took me a while to get upstairs.) Guess what. I was nearly kicked out the third time.

Then after services, we took it on the chin from the same woman for the way our kid had a hard time lighting the altar candles. (He’s short and couldn’t get the wick on the long lighter apparatus to contact the candle wick.) We should let the other kid (there’s only one other kid) do it. Except the other kid wasn’t there in time this morning to do it.

She wanted to argue about all this on the way out the door with the rest of the congregation all lined up behind her to shake hands. And we (when will we learn) should have had the sense to just say, “Yeah, whatever.”

As it was, another church lady (a nice one), after waiting three minutes for the director to lay out her case of criticisms, told her, “Shut up and get moving, there are people behind you.”

Score one for common sense. Whatever.

P- is an affable fellow who always wants to talk to me whenever we’re within 100 feet of each other. The first week we were here, he says, “Bottom line, the Bible is all about forgiveness. That’s it’s core message. Forgiveness.” The second or third week, he says about Anders Behring Breivik, the perpetrator of the massacre in Oslo this summer, “It’s not enough to just execute those terrorists, we need to really make them feel pain before we execute them. They should be tortured before we execute them as a deterrent to other terrorists.” The Bible is all about forgiveness. We should torture them before they are executed. Go figure.

Given the paradoxical nature of P-’s opinions, I’ve got no idea whether P-’s position is for or against evolution or creationism. I do have every reason to believe he really wants to discuss it next time I run into him. And as it happens, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the resurgence of fundamentalism and the obsession with creationism.

So, I’m actually going to try to read it. If nothing else, just to know first hand what this kind of seminal popular literature from someone who claims to be an expert dissenter from within the scientific community has to say. In one sitting the other evening, I managed to read the preface and the first 13 pages before getting tired of it and putting it down. It’s written in a way that is so friendly and conversational that if you’re not careful, audacity of his assertions and sometimes bald-faced misrepresentations (yes, in the preface and first 13 pages alone) tend to sneak right by. Which makes it a fairly difficult read, if you’re really paying attention. But I can see how it would be engaging as entertainment. I just hope that when I’m done with it I don’t end up looking like the guy on the right on the cover.

We never made any secret that we had been looking at the Catholic school. In fact, we were openly asking for people to tell us everything they knew about both schools. The fact is, anyone who was willing to talk about it said good, often glowing things about the Catholic school. And while nobody ever said anything disparaging about the public school, nobody really raved about it either.

We would have been happy to hear Anonymous’s opinion two weeks ago, before we had to register at one place or another, rather than now, after the decision has already been made, had he or she had the guts to talk to us. It makes me doubt the line about his or her “good conscience.” The rest of the letter has too much of the tone of sour grapes to take the accusations seriously. And, without a name or any other context attached to it, we have no basis for evaluating his or her claims. It does absolutely nothing to help us make an informed decision.

Anonymous letters in churches are all too common. And they speak more loudly about a church’s dysfunction than about the issues they pretend to address. They’re a sign of cowardice and fear, and their real intention is to sew fear and uncertainty, and as you can see in our example above, to criticize and defame people from the safety of a self-righteous cloak. They are stealth attacks, every bit as dishonorable as the tactics of rogues and assassins. They are the devil’s tools. Never give them any credit. Don’t even keep them on file “for the record in case it ever comes up.” Deep six them.

Apparently, clergy are a pretty unhealthy bunch, as a group. The plan is expensive, because taking care of all the inactive, overweight, overstressed people that make up this group costs a lot. The premiums tend to be higher.

So, in an effort to get more clergy to be healthier, the denomination has arranged for everyone to have a fitness coach with which we must do a session by phone at least once every three months, and all clergy and their spouses have been issued pedometers so they can keep track of how active we are (or aren’t). Yesterday our pedometers arrived in the mail. They’re really high-tech gadgets, complete with internal 3D accelerometers. We have to plug them into our computers each night now to upload our daily performances. There’s no indication of them having GPS tracking – yet.

So, having dutifully clipped on my pedometer this morning, I’m beginning to wonder how many people sit at their desk and shake the pedometer. I picture two scenarios:

1. the person who shakes the pedometer in order to inflate their activity measurements, and
2. the person who shakes the pedometer because people in their congregation are driving them bat-shit.

I’ve plugged my pedometer in, and registered it, and now the program wants me to enter a number of other vital statistics for which I need to go out and buy several pieces of equipment.

• I need to enter my weight, so I need to buy a bathroom scale
• I need to enter my blood pressure, so I need to buy a home blood pressure cuff
• I need to enter my body fat percentage, so I have to buy an infrared body fat calculator

Now I’m ready to shake my “free” pedometer because it’s costing me $50 at Rite-Aid.

But continuing on, the program wants me to agree not to smoke while I’m participating. Fine. I don’t smoke anyway.

Next, I need to become a “challenge leader” by making up a challenge and asking another plan participant to participate. The only other plan participant I know, of course, is my wife. So as of today, we’re not only spouses, we’re rivals. And I begin to wonder how many marriages this health plan has ruined turning otherwise happy couples into pedometer competition junkies. I guess we may never know.

However, I feel that my new calling is to start a pedometer competition recovery group. We’ll be meeting every Wednesday evening after choir practice. All are welcome.

1. Be sure to attract young families with children, but make the children sit quietly in the pew.
2. Make worship exciting and new every week without ever changing the order of the service.
3. Make starting a vibrant youth group your number one priority without missing the twice-a-week senior luncheons, the knitting circle, or the free Lawrence Welk music in the park.
4. Be sure to visit all the shut-ins every week, but be in the office when we stop by.
5. Be sure there are no type-os in the bulletin, but don’t upset the secretary; she has enough to deal with as it is.
6. We want relevant worship, but don’t choose any hymns we don’t already know and like.
7. Be caring and engaged in the lives of your parishioners, but don’t meddle.
8. Have a backbone and make the organization run like clockwork without stepping on anyone’s toes or ruffling anyone’s feathers.
9. Always consult the proper committee when making decisions for which you alone will be held responsible.

I’m guessing there are a few others I’m missing. Does anyone care to add to this list?

“Hey, we noticed as we were driving by the parsonage the other day, that you don’t have any patio furniture on your front porch. Do you have any patio furniture on your back porch?”

“As a matter of fact, we do have some chairs on our back porch,” the Pastor said.

“Well, let me tell you my reason for asking,” the voice on the other end went on. “We’re getting rid of our deck furniture to make room for new, and we thought if you didn’t have any patio furniture that we’d just bring ours by the parsonage for you.”

“Um, OK.”

Consider:

1. The reason people “get rid of their patio furniture to make room for new” is almost always that the old furniture has seen a few seasons and is in pretty rough shape.
2. Used deck furniture is bulky and heavy and costs a lot to unload at the dump.
3. People want to ingratiate themselves to the new pastor without it really costing anything.

And now you have the perfect storm for the parsonage to become a dumping ground for all manner of stuff you would otherwise have to pay someone to take away: you get to feel good about having “done something for your church.” And you can even write off the value of “deck furniture” on your taxes as a donation to charity.

Sure enough our new patio furniture set arrived on Tuesday. Our brand new deck chairs were shuffled aside so that the beat-up weather-worn table and chairs could take center deck. I’ve since taken them around to the front porch in hopes that it will prevent a similar idea from occurring to the next people who are getting new deck furniture this summer.