The Unmentionable

I've stumbled across another interesting passage in my reading and thought I would toss it up here for some public reflection. People in every emploi in the Church have debated for centuries about the issue of homosexuality and our appropriate response to it, and I think this guy has something to say worth considering. I don't by any stretch of the imagination agree with everything that he says, but this small bit struck me. This is Willard S. Krabill in Chapter 7 of a book entitled 'Sexuality: God's Gift.'

We have not broken fellowship with those whom we disagree on business practices and ethics, on the payment of war taxes, on registration for the draft, on lavish versus simple lifestyles, on the use of alcohol, and on many other issues. Instead, on these issues we keep talking, praying and striving for the will of God.

Althought the issue of homosexuality tends to be diverse, must it be a matter over which we divide our communion? Personally, I hope not. I believe that, mindful of the inexhaustible grace of God, we need to work responsibly on diverse issues and seek God's will in both our lifestyles and our discernment proceses. This will enable us to maintain fellowship with our fellow believers.

What Might Have Been

Thomas Alva Edison once said, "Opportunity is missed by most because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work." This one's for the Jameses.

Friends are Friends Forever

The sculpture above is entitled Friendship by Miguel Guía. This week while reading a chapter on intimacy for one of my classes, I read this section I wanted to share with yall.

Most people don't realize that relationship success also creates systemic pressures that make balancing closeness and intimacy difficult. The more valued the relationship, the more there is to lose. We feel more anxiety in being intimate in the sense of being honestly and fully ourselves. Yet if we want passion, we need the spark and invigoration of intimacy. One of the central dilemmas of [relationships] is that the more important a relationship becomes, the more difficult it is to sustain passion. This is so because the tension between closeness and intimacy becomes increasingly profound. The paradox of closeness and intimacy is that the only way to really have either is to be willing at times to sacrifice closeness for the sake of intimacy. In other words, to be liked we have to be willing to risk not being liked, for the sake of being known accurately.

The above paragraph was written with romantic couples in mind, but I think the points presented are readily applicable to all types of relationships. Does this paragraph resonate with yall at all? The line that keeps coming back to me is '[we must be] willing at times to sacrifice closeness for the sake of intimacy.'

SAT Prep

Directions: Fill in the blank to complete the analogy. Answer any or all questions, and there is no penalty for guessing. Feel free respond anonymously.

1. Pornography : Men :: _______ : Women
2. Christ : Church :: Church : ______
3. Cookies : Cookiemonster :: ______ : You

Point :: Counterpoint

James Lyons is rightfully burnt out on the contemporary music scene. Hell, I gladly listen to ex-jocks blather on and on about the same handful of inane topics on sports talk rather than sit through most music on the radio. For me, the only fix is a magical one.

CTRL + ALT + DEL

My wife was a double major in college: English and Journalism. She is a fabulous writer, a better wife, and this weekend while perusing through one of her old text books I learned the distinction between the two commonly misappropriated words 'nauseous’ and ‘nauseated’. Things which are nauseous cause one to feel nauseated, but technically speaking one does not ‘feel nauseous’ according to the Holy Bible of proper English utility, The Elements of Style. These are the kind of things which interest me, and in this case haunt me.

This weekend I attended my godsister’s wedding in Seattle with my wife, mother, father, sister and brother in law. After arduous hours of travel by land and by air (and very nearly by sea a few times, thanks to the legendary Pacific Northwest weather systems) we toured Pike Place Market, nearly got embroiled in a lover’s spat involving one exceptionally large and irate black man, one small but hurtful black man and one perplexed black woman, enjoyed the local cuisine, and sat through a lovely ceremony eternally and existentially smelting my godsister and her then fiancé in the bonds of Christian marriage. After the festivities died down, we decided as a family to take in the one essential feature of downtown Seattle: The REI. After skittering up and down narrowly glistening streets towards our destination, we came to a public parking structure half a block from REI and decided to make use of its services. We waved at the attendant, parked in the section labeled ‘Visitor Parking for Local Retail’ and ran like cows to feed toward our destination. The time: 6:17pm. 90 minutes and $120.00 later, we left Bobo Mecca contentedly laden with our purchases and headed back down to our tan rented Mercury van, only to discover that our every ingress to the previously hospitable parking structure had been cinched down tighter than a bullfrog’s rectum¹. On a wall near the main gate of the parking structure in unobtrusive letters a small sign read: ‘Sat: 8:00am – 7:30pm.’ Hello, Nauseous. Hello, Nausea.

We managed to track down a very convivial and very helpful security guard girl who went to extraordinary lengths to help us extricate our vehicle from the acquisitive parking garage, and after nearly 50 minutes of chicanery and a good measure of Tom-foolery we were back on the road towards Portland. I never thought that the movie Dodgeball would be apropos to anything in my life, but reading that stupid sign I found myself wanting to quote Christine Taylor’s character: “Yeah, I just threw up in my mouth a little bit . . .”

¹That is: Water tight.

The Miracle of Music

If (when?) I form a face-melting rock band of mythic proportions, this will be our first album cover. The only appreciable difference will be the light rays forming the shape of a Gibson Firebird.

I've been trying to blog for the last three days, but every time I sit down at the computer I feel my brain congeal to concrete and my fingers consolidate to inarticulate flippers. Tonight as I was sitting down to bang my concrete head against the proverbial wall, I actually came up with an uncomfortably personal topic to write about. Thankfully, 'Video Killed the Radio Star' came up on my iTunes shuffle and inspired me to write about the magical ability music has to modify (most frequently mollify) my mood.

Audience participation portion:

1. What bails you out best when you're feeling beat down?
2. What does the song 'Video Killed the Radio Star' remind you of? (and yes, there is a right answer to this question)
3. Suggestions for the afore mentioned face-melting rock band's name.
   

Pride Goes Before the Fall

I'm not proud of it, but I love sugar wafers. Even though I bellyache about processed food, MSG, transfats and addictive chemical additives to our food more than most (as my wife will be glad to attest) I just can't get enough of the eerily preserved pink, brown and yellow wafers filled with some sort of sweet tasting goo invented to trap rats in WWII. Ah, well, we all have our vices, right?

This past week has been effing murder. Tuesday saw two very important and very difficult tests both covering a glut of information on disparate topics come and go, followed by my faculty review for practicum today. I just ate a package of 'strawberry' sugar wafers; it seems to have taken the edge off.

See Below

I'm not quite sure what's been going on inside my head for the last week or so, but I'm think I might have transmittable spongiform encephalitis. Damn the cattle industry and their cost-cutting ways. In all reality I’m probably just more stressed than I’m willing to admit, but I have been dropping the ball on a variety of life tasks for the last few days ranging from badly butchering the cornbread recipe tonight to somehow mistaking a class’ start time. Classic. While my life has been swirling, however, there have been three things that burn brightly through my mental fog. Apropos as it may be, one of them actually happened to me (I think) and the other two manifested out of the morass that is YouTube.

1. While tutoring earlier this week, I looked up to see one of my students hastily retrieving his left index finger from his right nostril. I cocked my eyebrow at him, and he looked slightly abashed for a moment. He then scrunched up his face in an entirely unabashed fit of laughter and confided in me, “I pick my nose almost every day!” Nuff said.
   

2. I somehow stumbled across a Phil Collins video that had me dumbstruck for nearly 15 minutes. I honestly can’t even remember how I found it, but after blindly clicking through a completely random series of ‘linked’ videos, I saw the MTV video for ‘Against All Odds.’ Great song. Inexplicable video. I can’t say much more without totally ruining everything, but I will say bare-chested Jeff Bridges + Count Collin-acula = solid gold music video.

3. As my test for psychopathology approaches, I surf more and more blogs. I found a link to a guy beat-boxing several different songs on a flute on Cory’s. On a FLUTE! If you want to know what it feels like to actually do what this guy is doing in the video, keep sucking in air and blowing it out as fast and as hard as you possibly can for about 3 min. But before you start, go ahead and call the Ambulance because you'll probably fracture your skull when you pass out and smack your noggin at the 53 sec mark. Props, dude.

PS: My dad played flute as well as starting flanker for Hughson High in 1965. We live in a different world now.

PPS: If you watched Phil, check out IMDB for more background on the video.

Shout Out

Yo yo you, holla atcha boy. Imma give a shoutout tuh ma boy JRCO for strait hooking my blog up wid a sweet new look. Wurd.

All My Exes

Through some unlikely twist of fate, I have had six ex-girlfriends in my 25 years at large on the general public. Some of those relationships split because of intense stupidity on my part, some broke off because of fairly erratic behaviour on their part and some simply drifted apart as lives are wont to do when you're still in 5th grade. As much as I'd like to say that my relationships with these girls all ended on good notes, my sophomoric and inexperienced approach to the dating realm left me with really only half of them wrapped up in a mature fashion. I have never regretted dating anyone, however, and still genuinely respect and enjoy all of them as people. That being said, there is no more peculiar experience than bumping into an ex at an unexpected time. I ran into my ex from Jr. High with alarming frequency at unfathomable locales. I found her on the Presidio in Monterrey one Fourth of July casually lounging with her Firefighter boyfriend. Several years later, she happened to start working at the rock gym I climbed at after I graduated college. Just creepy stuff. The funny thing about running into exes, however, is the flood of memories that return. Relational interactions you imagined long dead rear their heads again in spectral imitation of a life long past, questions of etiquette stare you harshly in the face and all the bad memories dash back into the wainscoting.

Tonight I went back to the Church I grew up in for the first time in a very long time. Confronted with the dichotomy of returning from a leadership retreat for the church I currently attend and returning to a service at the Church which I credit with forming me into the man I am today, I'm left feeling like I just ran into my ex while shoe shopping with my current girlfriend¹, and it’s left me reeling a bit. The message delivered tonight was impeccable, the friends I still have in that Body were enjoyable and the building itself folded me back like I had never left. And yet, I have left. In the six years since I have attended that Body regularly I have graduated college, moved six times in two different states, gotten married, worked diligently through 3^1/2 semesters of graduate school and maintained a full beard for nearly 3 months. I’ve undoubtedly changed, but I can’t say that I have 'moved on,' because University Presbyterian Church will always be my home church and cannot be supplanted. I think that The Well has a lot of great things going for it, and am entirely confident in my worshiping there; I am very glad I had the chance to sit in University Chapel tonight and enjoy worship with the Body there.

Same Ol Feeling

I hate Tech. Again.

My Normal Life

I was a pretty boring guy all the way through college. I had a soap opera quality social life, but I never got arrested, crashed the ‘Girls Gone Wild’ filming or even had a car to smash into anything. I don’t like loud parties much, being drunk actually kinda freaks me out and the only time I was sitting in a circle having the Magic Dragon passed ‘round I turned it down more out of plausible deniability than moral fortitude. My wife has told me on several occasions that she always wanted to marry a nerd, so I guess that makes me one lucky guy, right? One September night my senior year of college, however, I drove to Austin, Texas with two friends in a bright red Jeep to sound my proverbial ‘YAWP.’ I had just finished a long hard summer of classes and putting my heart back together from a messy relationship the year before. It was a sticky summer of close friendship, head shaving, toe painting and soul searching that left me with a lot of emotional steam to release and I found my catharsis when I heard Chris Carrabba pipe,

‘And the picture frames are facing down
and the ringing from this empty sound
is deafening and keeping you from sleep.
And breathing is a foreign task
and thinking's just too much to ask
and you're measuring your minutes by a clock that's blinking eights.’

And so it was that I made the pilgrimage to see this sage for myself; to sit at his feet and behold in person the angst which flowed so palpably through his plaintive voice. To for one night lap up what MTV had been pitching. When Lee, Karen and I made it to 6^th Street in Austin, found some parking and made our way to Stubb’s BBQ, I had officially left College Station and found myself instead on the set of Wild On. The kaleidoscope of humanity, bouquet of olfactory sensations and cacophony of traffic mixed with shouts of revelry mixed with the deep resonance of driving bass grabbed me like a shore-breaking wave and easily subsumed my person into its energy.

Just outside the gate to the venue, I happened to run into my roommate from the year before, his eyes already glazed and lolling. Needless to say he was thrilled to see me. From there we barely dodged some projectile vomit from a young looking blonde and then somehow managed to keep her from plummeting to the ground after it until an EMT could be found to attend to her. From the midst of the throng of several hundred revelers, we let the music wash over us and felt our sweat mingle with that of our impossibly close neighbors and the water from the hose they intermittently sprayed the crowd with. After several hours of roiling participation in the rite, we made our way back the Jeep cotton-eared and reeking of God only knows what. I had never experienced anything quite like it before and never have since.

My cousin had jello shots at her wedding reception last night, and it kinda brought it all back for me.

Fresh Eyes

Binocular vision is a tricky thing. I've never had the experience of monocular vision, but from personal experience I can say with certainty that the former is far from perfect. Although purported to sport the functional benefits of depth perception and improved detection of distant objects, I seem to have a startling propensity to completely miss what is sitting two inches from my own nose. I could have sworn that's what binocular vision was supposed to fix. One of the many valuable features on slate.com is David Plotz's blog through the Bible. Starting in Genesis and currently extending through Ezekiel, his unique and intelligent take on Scripture has been refreshingly binocular to my customary fashion of addressing The Book. Plotz by no means provides a scholarly commentary for serious Biblical study, but the blog is rife with perspective and priceless for brain fodder.

Another example of completely missing what's in front of my nose: Today I bought a mountain bike with a huge dent in the down tube. It wasn't until I was prancing it around in front of my friend Scott that he said, "Hey, did you see this big old dent here in the down tube?" I wonder if that's what those Mennonites have harping on and on about . . . ? Tomorrow I go to Herb Bauer's to do battle with James the cycling manager.

The Killing Game

If you listen to the radio long enough, you can hear just about anything. Due to the nature of the medium and the existence of radio shows devoted to nothing but talking, odds are sooner or later you’ll hear something that stops you dead in your tracks. From HG Wells duping the nation to shaved hamster stories on Love Lines, and everything in between, the public airwaves have always been abuzz with scintillating tales and titillating stories.

This morning on my way to the gym I was listening to sports talk radio (1430 KCBL) and had the pleasure of hearing Jim Rome interviewing Lennox Lewis. Now normally I don’t like Jim Rome, but his interview with Mr. Lewis had three pleasant surprises. The first was that Lennox Lewis was remarkably articulate for a former world heavy weight champion. Bill Clinton he was not, but he was fairly pellucid and managed to stay coherent and engaging through the entire interview. I was impressed, and Lord knows he's doing better than I would be after 40-some-odd heavy weight fights. The second was that because Jim was talking to a huge death machine of a man, much of his customary smarminess had magically evaporated. It was like listening to a 6^th grade girl interview Tom Brady; Rome was all giggles and breathlessness and profuse, “Thank-you, Mr. Lennox”es. Priceless. Better than either of these two combined, however, was Lewis introducing Chess Boxing, the sport which has finally combined the game of Chess with the sport of Boxing. I won’t try to take away from it by explaining the whole process, but check out the wiki site and the WCBO site. Pure genius and about damn time.

Spunges Among Us!

One of the unexpected fringe benefits of getting married has been the legitimate utilization of the mesh sponge. (Side bar: I always heard of these things referred to as luffas. This seems to be a misnomer, since the luffa gourd is the source of authentic luffa sponges.) I was never raised in a frou-frou environment, and for most of my life bathing consisted of some hot water, bar of Irish Spring soap and some elbow grease; at the most there may have been some 40 grit sandpaper or steel wool for those really stubborn oil and grease stains. In my single days, there was no conceivable situation that would precipitate me marching myself into any retail establishment and purchasing a mesh sponge. I was infinately more likely to shoplift it. A more likely purchase would have been (and this was my favourite store run as Town Driver for Calvin Crest) a package of adult diapers, tampons and six litres of rootbeer. Now I have body wash and a mesh sponge, and I’d be a liar if I said I didn’t like it.

Marriage has taught me to realize that sometimes being right can be utterly wrong, how to apologize and mean it, how to truly appreciate being alone and how to truly appreciate being together. And it has taught me to love the luffa.

A Reprise

I spent some more time thinking over my previous post about sexuality, and realized that I had made a terrible mistake. Public forum isn't the best place to discuss something as intimate, personal and often wounded as personal sexuality. I appologize, and I'm actually glad that nobody posted much because in retrospect it probably wouldn't have been appropriate.

Whether you post or not, though, I still really believe that it is important to continue examining our sexuality and what it means. In that vein, I ask another question on sexuality: How did the man Jesus Christ, Son of God, express His sexuality? If we really do espouse the doctrine of a fully human Christ (as well as fully divine), it would seem to me that Christ's life would have included sexuality. Did He chase girls on the playground? Suffer through the awkward stages of puberty? Did Joseph ever sit Him down and have 'the talk?' I haven't formulated many of my own thoughts on the subject yet, but I'm interested in what yall think about this . . .

It Bears Repeating

Gregg Easterbrook once again managed to insert some sage observations into his weekly sports column.

Americans Now Hear the Word "Pleasure" 100 Times for Every Actual Experience of Pleasure: TMQ is being driven crazy by the modern affectation of saying "my pleasure" in formal settings that have nothing to do with pleasure. When you call a Hyatt hotel and ask to be transferred to a guest room or the front desk, the Hyatt operator says, "My pleasure." Lots of corporate-run chains are instructing workers to say "my pleasure" in situations far removed from what the word means. It's even catching on with intellectuals; recently David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker, signed off from an NPR interview by invoking this phrase. (NPR: "Thanks, David." Remnick: "My pleasure.") "My pleasure" is a ridiculously overloaded surrogate for "sure" or "happy to do it" or "you're welcome." More, its adaptation as a hollow chestnut of mundane interaction seems part of the overall cheapening of the meaning of words. Pleasure is one of the greatest and highest experiences of life; in our short stay on this Earth, we know far too little. And pleasure is almost always intimate in nature. Using the word "pleasure" in contexts that have nothing to do with intimacy or delight seems a cruel little joke in a world of too much work and too little enjoyment.

My momments of pleasure have been randomly interspersed throughout my life, but when they come they are unmistakable. A glance across the breakfast table at my wife, a ski across an undisturbed meadow, or driving through the desert have all had a way of bringing me up short by the emotional unswelling of pleasure they evoke. They hit me like a back massage all at once, and my senses open up to take in the most subtle of details; time crawls by while I watch in ammusement. When was the last time you experienced true pleasure in an activity or interaction?

The Fig Leaf

The spring semester has started, and brought with it the promise of rejuvenation and excitement. At the end of last semester, I was bushed. Bedraggled. Beat up, beat down, tapped out. After a relaxing and thoroughly enjoyable trans-continental holiday, I'm facing this semester with a sense of optimism and (dare I say?) excitement. I have a lot to look forward to coming into this semester. I get to begin working with actual people, interview for internship positions and . . . I get a whole class on human sexuality.

While I knew that this class is essential in training to become a psychologist, I was apprehensive coming into it. Would it be awkward? Shameful? Informative? Growth-inspiring? Would I be able to talk about it with people outside of the class, or do I leave that one off the list when people ask me what I'm taking this semester? So far the class has been remarkably un-awkward and refreshing. We are able to talk about people's sexuality in a way that isn't predicated on selling or exploiting anything. We have explored the dualistic philosophical roots much of the Victorian sexual mores have been based on. We have attempted to let Biblical texts inform the readings we have in some remarkably secular texts. It's also helped me to start actually thinking about sexuality instead of blindly reacting to it or away from it.

The class has only gone through two sessions to date, but one of the most interesting questions yet broached is: What does sexuality look like for celibate people? (either permanently or temporarily celibate). Coming to mind are passages like Eph. 5 and the entire book of Song of Solomon, but what do yall think? How do celibate people still incorporate and metabolize a visceral part of who we have all been created to be as human beings?

Infamy

65 years ago tomorrow, a very momentous occasion in our Nation's history came to pass. May we never forget the horror or war, nor forsake the pursuit of more effective and humane means to our ends.