I suppose it’s obvious to anyone visiting this site that it’s no longer an active blog, but I thought I would make it official — this site is closed. More or less. I can’t see myself writing anything new in it for the time being, so I’m going to make it clear to anyone who happens upon it that they shouldn’t expect different.

That said, I’m happy to leave the existing material up for anyone who does stumble across S&P. You’re welcome to leave comments, too — I’ll get notifications for them, so I’ll see them. You can email jenny at steeplesandpeople dot com, too, if you have something you want to say.

That’s all! Be well, everybody.

On Prayer

You ask me how to pray to someone who is not.
All I know is that prayer constructs a velvet bridge
And walking it we are aloft, as on a springboard,
Above landscapes the color of ripe gold
Transformed by a magic stopping of the sun.
That bridge leads to the shore of Reversal
Where everything is just the opposite and the word ‘is’
Unveils a meaning we hardly envisioned.
Notice: I say we; there, every one, separately,
Feels compassion for others entangled in the flesh
And knows that if there is no other shore
We will walk that aerial bridge all the same.

Czeslaw Milosz

Hey folks — I know, I know, I kinda dropped off the face of the internets. I even got an inquiring email or two asking after my welfare and I’m touched by that.

I don’t have much to say right at the moment, but I really wanted to post a segment that aired on The Current on CBC Radio this morning. It’s called “For God and Country,” and it’s a documentary about a soldier who was stationed at Abu Ghraib (after the scandal) as an interrogator. He was a non-denominational evangelical Christian, and after a period of time interrogating jihadis at Abu Ghraib he applied for and received conscientious objector status. He’s very articulate in telling his story as he talks about the moment he realized that all of his Christian role models - Paul, Bonhoeffer, etc. - were prisoners and that given that he would actually be more comfortable in the place of the orange-jumpsuit-wearing jihadi.

It’s not an “America sucks” kind of piece. It’s about the nature of warfare and how incompatible it is with Biblical Christianity.

Go here and click on “part three” at the bottom to listen.

Hi, all! You still reading? Is this thing on?

Well, I’ve dropped off the face of the religiosphere for a number of reasons, the foremost of which being that I’ve kind of taken a break from thinking about religion. Since I stopped going to church, it’s been significantly easier to do that. Right now my perspective on religion, and even spirituality as a whole, is so cynical that I expect participation in any discussion about it is non-productive for me and everyone else.

Another reason I haven’t been around much is because I’ve been feeling much better (you may recall, I have chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia) and therefore have been working more. The past few weeks I’ve been working full-time, with only one or two of those days spent working from home. That hasn’t been possible in a long, long time, my friends!

What has prompted me to poke my head out was the discovery that Steve Sjogren made a comment on my last entry, referring to a post I made last summer responding to a Pastors.com article he wrote about pastors and the concept of original thought.

Here’s an excerpt of his comment:

I have spoken as much as anyone you will ever meet in terms of actual times in front of an audience - between 10,000 and 12,000 times. All that to say - I have learned a lot - still am about the craft of communicating orally. I am more than honored that each weekend that many communicators lift my messages, hundreds of invented phrases - without being quoted.

What struck me about what he said there was the use of the word communicating/communicator.

My university degree is in communications. I’m not trying to set myself up as an expert here, just explaining that I took a lot of courses in the discipline of rhetoric. Now, there are many different definitions of rhetoric as a discipline, but I’ll give you one by a well-known rhetorician, Kenneth Burke:

The most characteristic concern of rhetoric [is] the manipulation of men’s beliefs for political ends….the basic function of rhetoric [is] the use of words by human agents to form attitudes or to induce actions in other human agents.

Just as the word ‘rhetoric’ has a negative connotation in Western culture, so does the word ‘persuasion,’ often. I don’t see rhetoric or persuasion as morally polarized in and of themselves. One television ad will persuade a viewer to give to a charity; another television ad will persuade the viewer to buy nutritionally-devoid, more-than-slightly-toxic fast food. Some people will say that all communication is an attempt at persuasion on one level. You don’t have to buy into that to acknowledge the power that rhetoric, that communication, has in a multitude of situations in all facets of life — the private, the public, and everything in between.

My cynicism here revolves around the idea that a gifted orator can convince an audience of many things. I won’t go so far as to say ‘anything,’ (though we can always point to Hitler as the default example of this) but certainly a lot. My question is, when you are moved, stirred, convicted by a pastor’s sermon — that is, an orator at work — are you being called by a higher power? Is the Spirit moving? Or is it purely the talent of the speaker, the order of the words, the sequence of the argument?

I feel this same trepidation toward music and worship. Human beings respond to music. I’ve said before on this blog that I’ve felt the same transcendent feelings at indie pop shows that I’ve felt in church services. I believe music has a special effect on the human psyche, human emotions, that must be separated from the supernatural.

The power of music and the power of communication/rhetoric are two branches of the same tree, in my view. Experiences that are a result of their effective use are never to be trivialized or ignored, but it’s essential to take a good look at what’s creating that sense of conviction in your heart (or, should I say, your ‘gut’), what’s making your spirits soar over the piano chords and vocal harmonies.

Counter-arguments I anticipate:
“God created rhetoric and music, and that’s why they work on people.”

Not a particularly effective argument against a person who does not presuppose the existence of God and/or the particular expression of God that would interact with humanity in such a way

“It’s not an either/or proposition. It’s not a matter of genuine spiritual experience vs. rhetorical/emotional manipulation.”

Perhaps. But my current frame of mind demands I examine the religious experience as it compares to the secular, especially since so much of the religion I was raised in was focussed on ‘feeling.’ That kind of faith becomes problematic when, it turns out, you don’t ‘feel’ it. This has to do with my own personal issues. I’m not condemning the use of oratory and music in worship, because that would be silly. Though it all makes me wonder if maybe the Quakers had it right. Sit in a bare room with your fellow believers and wait for something to happen. No sermons, no worship ballads to obscure the truth.

NB: The title of this post translates to “The forest of rhetoric,” and is also the name of an excellent reference site on this very topic.

Wow, I’m a bit of a tool. Way back on December 12, Bill tagged me for a meme and he even told me about it but I didn’t read his comment until just now so I didn’t know.

SORRY!

OK, here goes.

Five Things You Probably Didn’t Know About Me

1. I’m fat, and I self-identify as fat. I’m also fat positive, which means I don’t think it’s wrong or bad or even unhealthy to be fat. If you call me a fat bitch, I won’t take it as an insult ’cause neither of those words is an insult in my vocabulary.

2. I’m allergic to wheat, eggs, and dairy. Not in an anaphylactic way (like my brother is to nuts) but just in the way that they make me feel crappy so I avoid them. ‘Course sometimes I cheat, usually when chocolate or whipped cream is involved. My two best friends are vegan and they cheat under those same circumstances (one of them also cheats for brie).

3. When I was a preteen I spent endless hours playing out in the drainage ditch behind our house. Though it was a human-made feature, it became a habitat to all manner of wildlife including ducks, red-winged blackbirds, snails and frogs. One spring my mom even had to suffer me having an aquarium with tadpoles in it on her desk! I would make little habitats for the frogs in an old baby bathtub.

4. Speaking of my childhood, because the subdivision we live in wasn’t fully developed when I was young, there were a lot of empty lots in the neighbourhood. My brother and I used to play ‘Pioneers.’ That involved packing up our toy wagon with blankets, dolls and other playthings and carting them out into the empty lots, and picking the tall grasses and pretending to cook them.

5. I often fantasize about surprising random people at bus stops by offering them a free ride to wherever they’re going. Sometimes when I’m waiting at a bus stop I wish that someone I know would drive up and give me a ride — this has happened to me, but as you can imagine it’s a very rare occurrence. It’s almost always nicer and easier to get a ride than to take the bus. So when I see people waiting at bus stops when I’m driving a car, especially when it’s cold or otherwise inclement, I have this desire to stop and ask them if I can take them wherever they’re going. I would never do this, though, mostly because I don’t think most people would take me up on the offer. The would think I was a freak.

Ooops, almost forgot to tag. I herethuswith tag:

Brother Mark of Shifting Shifted Shifty
Steve of Stupid Church People
Lindsey of The Wolf that Lives in Lindsey
Pearlbear of Metacentricities
Kevin of Wasp Jerky

Over the past week there’s been a quiz going around LiveJournal (and I assume the other sites as well) all about the Bible. The quiz kind of annoyed me, not so much because it was too easy but because the answers were easy to deduce via a process of elimination. Being a nerd like I am, I made my own Bible quiz and called it SWORD DRILL!!! even though everyone knows this is not actually a Sword Drill in the way we understand it. Still. SWORD DRILL!!! is a great name (yes, the exclamation points are necessary) and possibly would be a great name for a band, though the phallic implications are probably too great for me to actually appreciate the term in that context.

Anyway, to the readership of this blog I expect this quiz will be quite easy. But as for the infidels on the other sites… we shall see. We shall see. Oh, sure, Mr. Never-Been-To-Church can get 93% on the other quiz, but THIS ONE? WE SHALL SEE.

The above is my score. I got 100% because I wrote the quiz. Please do feel free to do the quiz and post your results here in the comments or on your own blog or on your Match.com profile or whatever.

I can’t believe I didn’t post this! It wasn’t until my brother mentioned his desire to post about it that I remembered. So I’m beating him to the punch.

I went to church on Christmas Eve morning (it always seems like such a good idea. Then once the service starts I find myself in deep regret) with the aforementioned brother. When we went out to the parking lot after, we (OK, Mark) discovered this exact tableau on the asphalt:

In case you can’t read the fine print, the text on the kazoo reads “Jesus Loves Me.” And yes, that is a yellow condom.

So I work at a university, right, and my office is near the (incredibly tiny) Muslim Students’ Association room. (The room is tiny, not the MSA.) I was in the washroom and I walked in on a woman, who was wearing hijab, with her stockinged foot propped up awkwardly against the sink. She kind of startled, and I picked a stall and went into it and by the time I was finished she had hurried out.

I felt like saying, look, it’s OK. I know you have to wash your face, hands and feet before you pray. Don’t worry about it.

Speaking of hijab, the last time the topic was on the news, they were discussing whether burqas should be outlawed in Canada. They played some listener calls and there was a student from my university who called in saying, “I don’t have a problem with burqas, there are people who wear them here at the university.” No, you idiot. There are no burqa-wearing women at our university. They wear hijab, that is, modest clothing that covers their arms, legs, and hair. Headscarves and long sleeves are NOT the same thing as a head-to-toe garment that renders a woman’s face invisible and field of vision extremely limited. JUST SAYING.

Speaking of Muslims, today is the premiere of a new sitcom here in Canada called Little Mosque on the Prairie. It’ll be on in half an hour, I guess I’ll watch.

In other news, First Church of Suburbia’s associate pastor resigned on Sunday. This allows me the momentary joy of clinging to the notion that perhaps they might hire a woman to replace him!

Today my friend Jane left for Switzerland, where she’ll be for a week before she continues on to Uganda, where she’ll work for a year setting up mobile clinics in the northern part of that country (the part right next to the Sudan). For real. She’s a nurse, and having known her for 19 years, I’m completely confident this is the thing for her to do. I’ve always thought of her as being independent and fearless, and that’s what you have to be to do something this incredible.

The NGO she’s working for is a well-established one that’s very invested in keeping their employees happy and healthy (and, well, alive), so I have high hopes she’ll be able to stick out her contract.

While I personally don’t relish the idea of needing a military escort to get to work, in a lot of ways I envy her — how amazing to have the skills and ability to do something that will actually make a difference (as trite as that sounds).

Well, here it is, a new year. Wacky! I enjoyed myself at the annual house party I attended, though not as much as previous years ’cause we got a massive snowfall the day before that kept some people away from the party. Parties are really all about the people. Even if your party has fresh vegan wontons, accordions, vintage vinyl and ancient Egypt scenes made of gingerbread, as this one did.

I had to go back to work on the second, which is far too early if you ask me. You need more than one day to recover from NYE, even if you’re not nursing a hangover but rather just the effects of a late night and too much sugar.

In other news, Brother Mark is getting ready for his final semester of college. He’s TA-ing a course on the Emerging Church, too, and will be delivering several lectures. To that end, he has requested loans from my personal library, namely Steve’s favourite, Cages of Pain and any books on feminist theology I might have. Toward that end, I gave him just one, the superlative Under the Tree of Life: The Religion of a Feminist Christian by Gail Ramshaw, about which I have waxed rhapsodic many a time on this blog (run a search).

I hope you all have had a good start to your new year!