Humor Me

Humor Me

Q: How many feminists does it take to screw in a light bulb?

A: That’s not funny.

Sadly, this is as close as I get to being humorous. I’ve always envied funny people, folks who can say something that makes people laugh. They seem to have a knack for it. I live with someone like this: he has been known to stand up in a meeting of ministers and read an otherwise dull report and somehow cause people to chuckle. Partly it’s his dry, western, could-give-a-damn accent, and partly it’s his timing and intonation, where he chooses to insert a pause before delivering what becomes the punch line—only it wasn’t meant to be a punch line, it was just the end of a boring sentence. Which makes it hilarious without trying.

 I, on the other hand, am a good audience. I laugh at pretty much anything. And as a minister I’ve developed a talent for laughing on the inside. Because people don’t like to be laughed at. Fortunately I inherited from my maternal ancestry a strong German temperament which allows me to suppress giggles, and I have a naturally down-turned mouth that expresses seriousness in the face of ludicrousness.

It’s little old ladies who make me laugh. Get a group of them together and it’s a stitch. Partly it’s because I expect their generation to be polite and well-mannered, and partly it’s because as they age they lose some of their social filters, or maybe when they get away from the menfolk they let down their defences. I remember taking a group of elderly churchwomen to tour retirement homes one day, and one place had a large glassed-in aviary with a variety of small birds flitting about inside it. Our tour guide was a young woman like myself, and as the group paused in front of the aviary, she asked if anyone had any questions—about the retirement home, she meant. One little old lady piped up, “How do they breed?”

It took a number of seconds for the question to sink in, during which time the guide looked at me and I could tell she wasn’t prepared to address ornithological reproduction. Finally she said, “Just like they do in the wild.” The enquirer peered up into the glass case and responded, “Don’t they suffocate?” I got as far as imagining two birds doing it and wondering where the concern for their airwaves came into it when I realized that she wanted to know “How do they breathe?”

Another time I was visiting a women’s monthly Circle meeting—definitely one of the circles of hell and as predictable and painful as a menstrual cycle. I only attend these upon invitation, but I do go each time I am invited. Such gatherings typically take place in someone’s living room, where the hostess serves tea or coffee in china cups set on matching plates. Platters of sandwiches—with the crusts removed and cut diagonally into fourths—would be passed around, followed by trays of home-made sweets. And in Minnesota there was always a dish of salted peanuts and a dish of hard mints.

After we’d all been served and re-served, the Circle President would call the meeting to order and most of the dozen or so ladies would give their attention to their leader. There would always be a few hard-of-hearing, however, who would carry on chatting until someone spoke directly into their ear, “We’re starting now,” and they’d shut up. The President would walk us through the agenda that felt to me like the valley of the shadow of death, only I had to act interested because I was, after all, the honored guest. The Secretary would read aloud the minutes of the previous meeting—which sounded like a scene from an existential drama where the audience members pretend to grasp the profound message therein but in fact don’t have a clue because there isn’t one. Then the Treasurer would report on—really—the number of pennies collected for this or that mission fund since last month’s meeting.

So once again I found myself surrounded by sweet little old nuts, when one of them reminded the group to turn in their stamps. By stamps she meant used postage stamps, this being in the days before snail-mail had been decimated by e-mail. This church matriarch was always telling members of the congregation to turn in stamps, and sure enough they would bring paper sacks or plastic baggies stuffed with American flags, eagles, Christmas religious scenes, and Santa Claus stamps, many of which still clung to the corners of envelopes. I estimate it took each individual a good hour or so to fill one bag with about-one-inch squares, and usually folks would bring several bags to church and pass them off to our nonagenarian stamp collector. Personally I tried to avoid this perpetual project like the plague, because it never quit. And while we all had a vague idea that it had something to do with foreign missions, it was a though Christ had died so that we might go out into the world to save stamps.

I recall that as soon as this little old lady had repeated her appeal for stamps, another little old lady turned to a third little old lady and whispered in a way that little old ladies are wont to do—that is, loudly—“What happens to the stamps?”

The third little old lady must have asked herself the same thing because she had a ready reply: “They probably burn them.”

And with that, we bowed our heads for the closing prayer.

Slug Hunting

Slug Hunting

We know it’s here. It leaves a slimy trail on our living room rug. But we've yet to catch it in action.

Our hunt for the elusive slug began a few weeks ago, when the weather here in Scotland turned unseasonably warm. By warm I mean it got up into the 70’s, and the sun came out from its usual cloud cover. It’s typically cool, overcast, and rainy here in the summertime, but this year we've gotten pretty close to what I remember from the Southern United States as being downright hot and humid. Only the main floor of our century-old stone manse stays cavernously cold all year long, and so the slug must appreciate our natural indoor air-conditioning as much as we do.

I grew up in the South with toads on the sidewalk, snakes in the yard, and ants in the kitchen. We also suffered cockroaches that would scatter as fast as lightening when you flicked the lights on. Occasionally we had mice in the house and opossums in the garage, and in Minneapolis there were raccoons that inhabited the sewers—I know because my dogs would sense them down in the storm drains and bark at them, and I could barely make out their beady little eyes shining fearlessly up at me.

When it comes to non-humans abiding in our Glasgow hame, my partner and I are—fortunately—not squeamish about the same critters. John hates spiders so I handle them, and my height allows me to reach the ones on the ceiling. I on the other hand can’t stand mice, and John doesn't mind setting traps or, more importantly, emptying them.

But this slug is getting the better of both of us. A couple times, when we've each woken up in the middle of the night, we've armed ourselves with flashlights and stealthily gone downstairs to the scene of the slime. Like a pair of private detectives we get down on all fours and train our searchlights over the rugged terrain expecting to find our culprit with its tentacles held up begging us, “Don’t salt!”

Nothing. Not a slug in sight. Only the tail-tale sign of its having come, crisscrossed the floor numerous times, and mysteriously vanished.

Now there’s a reason why a slug is called a slug and not a snake or a springer or a swift: it’s not a fast mover. It’s sluggish, hence its name. So why can’t we spot it in slow-motion? Even if it heard us coming down the steps, how could it make a speedy get-away?

Maybe the slug is a shape-shifter, a magical creature that can transform itself into another creature, say, a spider, scurrying under the floorboards. Or it might turn into a swallow and head for the window, which would explain the opaque imprints on our panes—perhaps they’re on the inside and not the outside. Or the slug could morph into streaks of silver, darting every which way.

One thing's for sure, this heat and the slug will be gone quick enough.

Land of the Fearful and Home of the Bravado

Land of the Fearful and Home of the Bravado

I am not proud to be an American.

Let me say it again, so that any U.S.A.—or U.K., for that matter—government entity can be sure there are no typos in what I mean: I am not proud to be an American.

Following the tragic shooting of Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida, on February 26, 2012, and the tragic acquittal issued by a jury of Americans to the shooter George Zimmerman in Sanford on July 13, 2013, I am ashamed to belong to a country where the scales of justice are calibrated to support one person’s fear over another person’s freedom to walk down the street.

Add skin color (the fearful person is white, the dead person was black), racial background (the fearful person is a multi-ethnic American, the dead person was an African-American), age (the fearful person is an adult, the dead person was a teenage minor), occupation (the fearful person was training for a career in criminal justice and was coordinator of the neighborhood watch program, and the dead person was a high school student), and circumstances (the fearful person was in their vehicle and had a gun, the dead person was on foot and did not have a weapon), and the question is not “What’s our country coming to?!”

The question is “What’s our country been and how do we want to live differently?!”

European explorers were not good guests where they went—uninvited—to erect systems of exploitation of both natural resources and native people. They used religion and politics to justify economic abuse of foreign environments and their inhabitants. And after claiming for themselves these new worlds—stealing them from the folks who lived there—Europeans have not been good hosts. We keep on bullying. Our national security interests—fear by another name—continue to outweigh other peoples’ freedom to live their lives.

I am not proud to be an heir of this history, but I cannot deny that it is my history. I come from various northern European clans who wanted a better life for themselves even if it meant making other peoples’ lives hell. My great-grandmother Biddle was a piano teacher, in Florida, and I have one of her newspaper ads offering lessons “For Whites Only.” Her son, my grandfather, over the course of his 99 years never quite made the shift from using the n-word to using the term “negro” that Civil Rights leaders used in the mid-1900’s. I only heard Granddaddy Biddle refer to black people as “nigras.”

His son, my father, broke out of that mindset somehow. My dad grew up in the Jim Crow South, in small towns in the Carolinas where my grandfather served as a Presbyterian minister and my grandmother served as a traditional minister’s wife. Needless to say, back then the schools were racially segregated and miscegenation was against the law.

But then a strange thing happened. Some Southern white people and some Southern black people—all Presbyterians—somehow got the idea of letting white teenagers and black teenagers—Presbyterian youth—spend time together in a church camp setting. One of the leaders at these interracial youth events was the Rev. Benjamin Mays, a Baptist minister who was President of Morehouse College and a mentor to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., from King’s student years at Morehouse.

For the life of me I can’t imagine what possessed that group of organizers to go against their deeply-held religion—the white Presbyterians would certainly have been indoctrinated about the Bible supporting white supremacy—and to cross widely-held social and political divisions that were believed to have been divinely mandated since the beginning of time. What were they thinking, to risk putting black and white teenage girls and boys in a room together?! If they stopped being afraid of each other, they might start to love one another, and where would that lead? If they got to know each other as children of God, as sisters and brothers in Christ, that could give way to thinking of one another as fellow citizens—all equally due their civil rights.

At least one of those white youths chose to live differently than his ancestors. According to my mother, my dad’s parents always regretted sending him to those interracial events as they believed “that’s where he got off on race.” I am proud to be his daughter. But until every black youth is free to walk down the street—any street in the U.S.A.—without fear of getting shot, we have to tell the truth, the whole truth, about our country’s history, and we have to live differently.

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Read “A Prayer for My Son and Black Boys Everywhere” by Jane Steiner, posted Monday, July 15, 2013 (myextendedtable.blogspot.com).

Co-existing with fears

Co-existing with fears

I grew up unafraid of bears. Three of them lived in my bedroom closet: a mommy bear, a daddy bear, and a baby bear. Every time I went to bed I’d say good-night to them.

In kindergarten I learned the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. That is, I learned to tell my version of it. On Parents’ Day, I got to use the flannel board and felt characters to illustrate how, after Goldilocks runs off in fear, the momma bear set about making a new batch of porridge, the daddy bear replaced the chairs, and the baby bear made up the beds. The moral of my story was that it isn't finished until everything is where it’s supposed to be, like the bears in my closet.

On family camping trips and when I worked in Yellowstone National Park and Denali National Park, I learned that real bears were to be respected from a safe distance. We put our food in bear-proof containers and stored them outside our tent, we didn’t sleep in the clothes we had cooked in, and we tied bells to our packs while hiking so that bears could hear us coming and leave us alone.

I have only seen grizzly bears in their natural habitat from far, far away, which is a good thing, and to my knowledge they’ve only heard me from afar. They are near-sighted, we employees were told during our orientation, and so if you surprise a grizzly it will want to get a closer look, and then if you try to run away it will run after you, and if you do live to tell the tale it is guaranteed to have an unhappy ending. The park rangers warned us not to hike with food on us or if we were menstruating as grizzly bears have a strong sense of smell and are attracted to the scent of blood or anything edible. The moral here was let live and live.

The same goes for fears. As children we grow up with fears, and somehow we learn to cope. These child-appropriate coping mechanisms aren’t always suitable for adulthood, however.

Here are tips for co-existing with fears, based on advice about co-existing with bears issued by the State of Maryland Wildlife and Heritage Division of the Maryland Department of National Resources:

1. Do not feed fears—feeding fears may place you or your family, friends, and neighbors in danger as they lose their instinctive role and become unpredictable.

2. Don’t tempt fears by leaving or providing fuel within easy reach. Store all fuels and wastes properly.

3. Do not approach any fear in the wild. Maintain a safe distance between yourself and any wild fears to avoid threat or instigating a confrontation.

4. Be alert in areas where fears may be active, especially areas frequented by fears.

Facts about Fears:

Fears normally retreat before you even realize that they are there.

Fears are intelligent, have good long-term memory, and are capable of recalling the location of plentiful fuel sources even years later.

Moral of this story: they all lived happily ever after, with fears in proper perspective.

I run in the morning

I run in the morning

I run in the morning

face to face with the sun

rising out of bed

sometimes bleary-eyed and in a fog

hung-over from a long trip across the ocean

or bright-eyed and bushy-tailed

rip-roarin’ to go

full blazes

I turn

and the sun clocks me and my silent partner

(who’s a little slow in the winter

but manages to catch up in the summer)

as we seize the moment

and sprint between dawn and what the day holds

noticing the latter chase the former

or at least tag along behind it

I turn away

and the sun pores over my back

like a steadfast lover drinking in my every move

while time takes a nap

and my breath dissolves centuries of asceticism

preaching dust to dust

as my spirit ruach becomes flesh

and my flesh becomes fluid

I turn again

and the sun completes its orbit around me

a planet of salt water and vapor

and makes me for one exhilarating instant

this final stretch

this last leg

the center of its universe

I lap it up

Preaching Exercise

Preaching Exercise

The first thing the professor made us do was get up from our desks and touch our toes. Every preaching class, week after week. For some of us students this was physically impossible at the beginning of the semester, but over time we managed to reach down and feel the pain and hold it briefly before rising slowly and reaching up to the ceiling. Then she’d have us do the whole movement again and again.

A strange exercise for a preaching class, I thought at the time. It was my only class in seminary—and come to think of it, my only class ever, except for Physical Education and Marching Band—that involved getting off our bottoms and using our bodies. We preaching students came to appreciate it as a fifteen-minute recess in an otherwise academic training for ministry. Our line of work involved reading books, writing papers, and sitting around and talking about reading books and writing papers. And preaching was the epitome of reading (the scriptures and commentaries on the scriptures), then writing (a sermon manuscript), and then talking about it (reading aloud the scriptures and sermon manuscript to the congregation).

No wonder sermons put people to sleep.

In the first church I served after becoming a “Minister of the Word”—as it states on my certificate of ordination lest there be any doubt as to the importance of knowledge in this profession—I spent a large portion of my time each week preparing and writing a sermon. I would skim the lectionary selections from the Old Testament, the Psalms, the Gospels, and the Epistles; choose one or two of these passages to focus on and read them in depth and take a few notes; read what some other biblical scholars and theologians had to say about them and add to my notes; think about the passages and my notes and draft a sermon in long hand; and then sit down with the passages and my draft and my head full of thoughts—and a deadline looming—and type out a sermon, editing and revising as I typed.

Notice the key physical activity in all of this—apart from opening and closing books, pens, and typewriters—is sitting. I would sit on my backside and not use my body. Not even a few toe-touches.

Then I got fired. Or rather, the session, the ruling body of the congregation, voted on whether to renew my annual contract that I had held for only one year, and they decided, by a margin of one, not to renew my contract. As the moderator of the session and thus a member of this session, I could have voted. Assuming I voted for the motion to renew my contract, the vote would have been tied and the motion passed. But, wisely, I had excused myself from the discussion and decision and let the chips fall where they did. My tears afterward expressed relief as much as failure.

The moment of this vote until the end of my contract year left me with about a half dozen Sundays in which to preach. I distinctly recall deciding that I was not going to take the time to write any more sermons for this congregation. I read and researched the scripture passages as usual, but I didn’t take notes or write a draft or type a manuscript. No more sitting down on the job.

I started jogging. I was living in a city whose blocks were one tenth of a mile long, and I ran around a short block, three tenths of a mile each lap, ten laps for a total of three miles. Not bad for someone who hadn’t exercised regularly since high school.

Running or jogging—or slogging, as it often feels—allowed me to do something positive in the wake of having something negative done to me. It got my heart pumping, my lungs panting, my body sweating. I discovered muscles I never knew I had. I was very angry and sad and depressed after losing my first job as a pastor, and my runs released more tears, more thoughts about what went wrong, and more things I wish I’d said in my defense as well as a few remarks I wish I’d made to offend.

Running also turned me into a preacher: running gave me the time and space and energy to run through all the sermons in me that were not meant for public consumption, and left me a few words that were, I had to say, truly inspired.

Running left me a few words truly inspired that I had to say.

Running improved my breathing, which empowered my voice, which changed my tune both about the exercise of preaching—and my preaching professor was right, it is a physical exercise—and my job as a “Minister of the Word.” It’s physical labor, day in and day out, week after week.

I still read and research and write and talk about reading and researching and writing. But I don’t sit down to prepare a sermon. I go out and run.

Found Gifts

Found Gifts

Like many traditions, this one did not start out as a tradition. It started out as a kick in the butt for a certain stepchild who will remain nameless but who knows perfectly well who they are.

It was my first Christmas after being a stepmother for a full year. Like many roles, this one did not come with instructions. It did, however, come with expectations. I had sure expectations about what it meant to live in what was now my and my new husband’s house: Where things were supposed to be kept and returned promptly after use, when chores were to be done, how they were to be done, and why they were to be done in the first place. And who was to do chores, that is, everyone who lived under our roof.

Doubtless each of my stepchildren had expectations about what life was supposed to be like “under the new regime,” as my husband, their father, so diplomatically put it. To his credit he did not try to “arrange” the relationships between me and my stepchildren, nor did he attempt to “fix” things when they seemed to be at an impasse. He would listen to me rant, and I knew he listened to his kids because he would tell me—when I was in a frame of mind calm enough to hear—their side of the story, such as, “Why is her stuff her stuff, but our stuff is her stuff too?”

As it happened, I was moving into my stepchildren’s lives just as each of them was in the process of leaving the nest. The eldest was newly married and setting up house. The youngest was finishing high school and set on going to college. That left the middle one who had their own apartment by now but was apparently settled on doing little of value with their time or talents. Menial jobs came and went, entire nights were wasted playing video games, and whole days were spent sleeping life away.

Thus when Christmas rolled around that year, instead of shelling out hard-earned money on new gifts, we gave my middle stepchild a special incentive to clean up their act: A vacum cleaner. Our old vacum cleaner. We emptied it and washed the attachments, wrapped it up in (used) gift paper, and stuffed a set of bags in their Christmas stocking. It wasn’t exactly coals-and-ashes but better—because it could suck up coals and ashes and dirt and dust and whatever else accumulated in a young person’s natural habitat. And to be fair, we also gave the other two kids recycled gifts: our microwave oven went to the college student, and Christmas tree ornaments were handed down to the newly-wed.

Hitting bottom broke the ice. What was intended as a one-time kick-in-the-rear developed into a family tradition of giving each other “found gifts”—that something extraordinary which may have been donated to a second-hand shop or consignment store (a fish carved out of a cattle horn), or given to a church jumble sale or school raffle (an old magazine published in the month of one’s birth), or left on the street (a beer glass in Reykjavik, Iceland), or even thrown away in the garbage (a suitcase full of costume jewelry). Way more preferable to expensive or last-minute gift-shopping, gift-finding has become an enjoyable year-round mission. It’s allowed me to let go of sure expectations, for which I earned the term of endearment “Step-monster,” and treasure the unique and interesting relationship I am blessed to have with each of my stepchildren. Found gifts also fulfill the adage, “It’s the thought that counts.”

Or rather, it’s the story that counts: “Lindsay, This is a special gift for you, one that I found in . . . .”