Wedding Bells and Shotgun Shells

Weddings are not my favorite things. In fact, I hate weddings. The whole deal, the cake, the dancing, the whole thing just bores me to tears. I haven’t always been this way though; there was a time I loved weddings. Let me explain, I was eight years old when I went to my first wedding. My grandmother has a picture of me during that wedding standing in front of a big banquet table wearing a giant pink cummerbund that will forever remind me just how awkward 90’s fashion was. In the picture, I’m smiling as hard as I can from ear to ear, so much so that to anyone who would enter my grandmother’s house it would be obvious that I was having the time of my life, that I just loved weddings.

However, what the uninformed visitor cannot to fully appreciate is that my smile, at that moment, was rooted in the awareness that the cameraman had just focused his camera on me because I was the only person at the wedding who was visibly having a good time. Directly behind the camera man was my frowning mother who seconds before hand leaned forward and whispered into my ear, “If I ever hear you utter even one of those words that just came out of you grandmother’s mouth, I’ll make sure your rear-end matches that cummerbund.”

You see, not long ago, before my family went and got all middle class and the Joneses and Perrys found the suburbs, our family gatherings used to be a lot more fun, so much so that the family that existed 17 years ago when that picture was taken no longer seems to exist anymore. My uncle’s wedding marks a kind of turning point in my family’s trajectory. Before then, the phrase, “enjoying the company of relatives,” meant trying to keep my 90-year-old great-grandmother from calling her soon-to-be in-laws, “a bunch of ghetto hoodlums, sons-a-bitches who’d never worked a day in their lives.” Back then, we’d all sit and pray her comments had gone unnoticed until somebody across the isle volleyed back with, “Shut the hell up you uppity old skank,” and shortly thereafter chaos ensued. For me, those days were the good old days, and everything that has come after them just doesn’t measure up. Since then, I’ve been to a lot of weddings, but nothing has lived up to that standard. I’m always longing for a time that can never be repeated.

In one month, I will be getting married. And though I don’t foresee many of the old Jones or Perry family antics taking place, (largely as a result of the fact that my great-grandmother is now dead), I kind of hate the fact that none of the drama of old will be there. Tiffany’s parents are great and I’m glad her mother will be spared the indignity of being called a “hussy whose trashy little daughter is stealing somebody’s baby,” but old habits die hard. Sure, it will be a great time. I am looking forward to hanging out with my friends, taking a week off, and lots of great food. But honestly, if we go the whole night and nobody throws a punch, it just won’t be the same.

If I get the girl, I can’t really complain. But if I could get the girl and a drunk, 90-year-old black woman to call the whole church a “bunch of assholes,” I’d actually be in heaven.

I have a new favorite song...

it won't last. But until it ends, enjoy it with me.
(free download)
http://iknowmusic.blogspot.com/2007/02/jamie-lidell-little-bit-more-i-was-at.html

thanks Target. I owe you one.

They Don't Make Handbooks for People Engaged to Joe Jones

and that's sad.

Tiffany and I are going through premarital counseling. This is for the most part a good thing. I like the people who are our counselors. I love Tiffany. The book we are reading, however, I don’t enjoy so much. The reason for this is two-fold. On one hand, I think it paints marriage in this sappy, optimistic light that I generally don’t enjoy. On the other hand, I am only on page 15 and it has already used passages from the Bible that I think are sketchy to define male/female relationships. Let’s tackle each of these issues one at a time.

So about marriage, and the whole sappiness thing - I want to spend my life with Tiffany. I am not one of those guys that are just trying this “thing” out. I don’t have an escape plan in mind. It works or I’m screwed, that’s it. However, I don’t have false beliefs that this thing is going to be easy. And as such, I hate it when people or books depict marriage as two orgasmic, pretty-looking people holding each other in the middle of a park in Italy. (see picture of book cover- it’s our actual book cover). It’s not that I don’t want to be this happy or that I don’t think Tiffany is awesome, but I hate people who show that much affection in public. It just looks contrived to me, something people do so other people will think they are in love. Christians, more than others, tend to construe relationships under false pretenses. We pretend life is perfect and go on with our middle-class suburban lives while our kids smoke weed and our sex lives are average. I’m more prone to believe that honesty, brutal, ugly honesty, provides more joy than fake lives ever will. If this is the case, than the really happy couples aren’t the ones that hug each other at parks or make out in French diners; they’re the ones that hold hands through movies even though no one is watching. I don’t want to be a show, I want to be married forever, and this book cover seems to be alluding to more of the former.

Secondly, I’m a middler divinity student and so there is still a lot I have to learn about the Bible, but one of the key passages that freaks me out is the Ephesians passage about husbands loving their wives and wives “revering” their husbands. The work this passage is attempting to do, seems to me, to revolve around co-operation and teamwork in a marriage, something I support. However, this passage in context is not necessarily the best choice for an analysis of how co-operation is optimized. Only a few verses later Paul (the author of this book of the Bible) will tell slaves to submit to their masters in a manner that makes me question whether or not what Paul is saying can be trusted at all. I don’t think it’s wrong to use this passage; rather, I question the fact that the writers were unwilling to choose others. What does this say about their theology? Are they the kind of people that aren’t worried about problem passages? Did they knowingly place this text here because it was that good in their minds? Are they reading into Paul’s words healthy perspectives of mutual submission or unhealthy patriarchal models of Evangelical Christianity? Who knows…

In any case I still want to marry Tiffany, the people we meet with are fun, and I’m too skeptical anyway.

"Waiting on the World to Change"

Ever since I saw The Matrix, I’ve had a small place in my heart for Cypher. That name probably won’t mean much to most of you, but he is the guy who betrays Morphious in the first Matrix film. In the movie, his betrayal is rooted in a desire to return to the Matrix rather than live in the real world that he hates. The reason Cypher receives my empathy is not only that I have a God-complex (too many of my friends have God-complexes and still think Cypher was an ass). This is the case, because when I look at this character I see someone who is similarly wrestling with the complex issue of what it means to live in a community.

In The Matrix, what could be called the real world sucks. Everyday Cypher wakes up, eats a bowl of nasty gruel, and thinks to himself - Who would want to live like this? Not only that, but everyone around him appears to be better able to deal with the crappy-ness of the world. So he comes to the point where a normal person would commit suicide; But instead, he realizes he has another option – returning to the Matrix. However, returning to the Matrix comes at a high price. He must betray his community, a community that he has already established a clear hatred towards. Cypher finds himself in a moral dilemma. He must determine if he is obligated to obey a moral standard that says not to betray his community though he is also aware that if he does betray this community he will never have to face any ramifications for that action. It is a tough decision. It gets worse. There is another option he must face that is not dealt with in the movie – staying in the “real world.”The question is even harder than it may first appear. Can an average man forsake a more enjoyable life so that everyone else may be happy?

On a daily basis my friends, family, fellow divinity students and I participate in a world where we know that more could be done to help people less fortunate than us; and still, we do nothing. I’m not attacking the fact that we don’t work at homeless shelters; I mean that we don’t even try to think of living in ways that would eliminate the need for homeless shelters. We don’t live as a part of a global community, or even as a larger Durham, North Carolina community. We live for ourselves as if we were the most important people on earth. We are not just, as the John Mayer song goes, “waiting for the world to change.” But instead, we are living like the rest of the world and hoping someone else will change it while we wait. I wonder if living this way, as if we were not a part of a community that affects other people, if that is not just creating our own fake world. If so, then the difference between our own denials of the people around us who are affected by our decisions and Cypher’s climbing back into the Matrix is smaller than most would think. Every time I pretend that that homeless guy isn’t on the street, I create a fake world in which to live. Every time I pretend that my clothes weren’t made in a sweatshop by 10 year olds, I create my own Matrix to live in. Every time I pretend my nieces don’t need or want me to hang out and be a positive male figure, I betray the people who need me the most.

Looks like I’m hanging out with my nieces next weekend.

Call me Isaiah Washington if you like...

But this is funny.

This week Michael Buday of Orange County California petitioned a federal judge for the right to take his, soon to be, wife Diana Bijons’ last name. Diana Bijon’s made the suggestion to her fiancé at the behest of her mother, who was worried that because she had no sons there would be no one to carryon the family name. Buday, a twenty-nine year-old, advertising executive is not new to the unusual petition filing. He has also secretly filed several other petitions the week as well. Two of which were sent to the California Medical Board of Regents requesting permission to have his lips surgically removed from Ms. Bijon’s Butt and another volunteering for a very controversial new procedure that would involve having testical seeds implanted in his scrotum in hopes that he will one day grow a pair.

I'm not making this up. Read it for yourself at:
http://news.aol.com/topnews/articles/_a/man-sues-to-more-easily-take-wifes-name/20070112111009990001

I Love Malcolm X

I love Malcolm X for many reasons, more than I have time to write. But I found two quotes from the book Soul on Ice that well articulate my feelings.

"It was not the Black Muslim movement itself that was so irresistibly appealing to believers. It was the awakening into self-consciousness of twenty million Negroes that was so compelling. Malcolm X articulated their aspirations better than any other man of our time. When he spoke under the banner of Elijah Muhammad he was irresistible. When he spoke under his own banner he was still irresistible. If he had become a Quaker, a Catholic, or a Seventh-Day Adventist, and if he had continued to give voice to the mute ambitions in the black man's soul, his message would still have been triumphant: because what was great was not Malcolm X but the truth he uttered."

Quoting Ossie Davis:
"If you knew him you would know why we must honor him: Malcolm was our manhood, our living, black manhood! This was his meaning to his people. And, in honoring him, we honor the best in ourselves...However much we may have differed with him - or with each other about him and his value as a man, let his going from us serve only to bring us together, now. Consigning these mortal remains to earth, the common mother of all, secure in the knowledge that what we place in the ground is no more now a man - but a seed - which, after the winter of our discontent will come forth again to meet us. And we will know him then for what he was and is - a Prince - our own black shining Prince! - Who didn't hesitate to die, because he loved us so."

Amen.

F*@k You and this Church

On a Monday morning, during one of my first few weeks at Carr Church, I drove into the church’s parking lot and noticed a man sleeping there in one of the Church vans. Having had relatively little experience with the Carr fellowship at the time and being unsure how the pastor would handle the situation, I went into the office and asked the pastor what I should do. She instructed me that if anything were to happen to him while on the church’s ground we would be legally liable and so with her blessing and prayers, my first ministerial moment of the day would be to clear him off the church grounds.
It was not until I reached the parking lot for the second time that I realized how gravely unprepared for the situation I was. As I made my way across the gravel lot, my mind raced with all the worst possible scenarios of this situation. With very little effort, this could easily devolve into a very dangerous situation. To my benefit, I had witnessed and been a part of a number of violent confrontations as a child. Still, it had been a long time since I needed or wanted to defend myself physically. What is more, I was an assistant pastor now. It could not be beneficial for the church if tomorrow’s headline read: Local Pastor Beats-Up Homeless Man. I was wracking my brain to figure out how exactly one knocks on a glass windshield in such a way as to clearly communicate, “It’s time to wake up … I’m sorry you can’t sleep here,” and, “Please don’t break that beer bottle on the curb and stab me to death,” when I reached the van.
It tuned out my plans did not matter, because the gentleman was already awake and climbing out of the van when I arrived. Attempting to appear firm yet graceful, I told him that he could not sleep in here and that he would have to move along. He responded by stumbling farther out of the van and unsuccessfully attempting to balance himself. Encouraged by his compliance, I began to list to him the programs the Carr church offered for the homeless when he projectile vomited onto another car in the parking lot and his own shoes. It was at this point I realized he had not listened or even heard what I had said, but was solely concerned with finding a place other than his bedroom to soil.
Again, this time more forcefully, I told him that he would be unable to sleep here; he would have to leave. Adding this time that he was trespassing and it was not safe to sleep here, I knew instantly that I had gotten his attention, because his gaze wandered up to mine.
“You gonna throw me out of this here church. You think Jesus would throw me out of his church. F*@k You and this Church,” he slurred. And then with no other fanfare he stumbled away and out of the parking lot, stopping only to relieve himself on the side of the church building.