Image with words

A beautiful day.
Though cloudy.
A bit windy.
Slightly chilly.
Though improving
tomorrow, only
to slide back
to the 50s.
I hope that we don't slide back to the 50s for too long. Can it already be Tuesday? Can tomorrow be Wednesday?
I feel bad about the bland church, and I've been considering ways to make its blandness work for it (and how helpful it would be if in CIFs churches would be honest and say "we're a rich white church and our best days are behind us. We enjoy paying lip service to concepts of growth and fidelity to the gospel, but really we just like to hear a sermon that doesn't challenge us so we can go home and watch TV." Or "we're thoroughly dull and afraid of our own bodies. The sound of our voice in a crowded room, when unaided by alcohol, spooks us." etc): one way would be accepting worship time as a time for drama in a low key Beckettian sort of way. Or farce in a high toned Beckettian sort of way.
It's difficult saying goodbye to Lent. Lent with its red carpets and parades. Lent with its lentils, each pea a little Lent, so that eventually you've gone from a bowl full to a mouth full to a stomach full of Lent. Lent barreling down the bowels to the Jakes. Odd isn't it? For Christmas retailers go on a 4 month odyssey of banging the drum; the assertion is made that consumer goods are a great substitution for love and forgiveness. For Christmas we've got Santa. Then for Easter we've got the Easter Bunny and people break out their best attire. The Easter parade, The Easter bonnet (with all the thrills upon it). But what does Lent have? Valentine's and Mardi Gras are carefully scheduled before it and thus take most of its glory. Lent is left to wander about in rags as it were, starved, a slow fast, with people moaning about giving something up (though the taste of this seems to be lost now a days). Show some enthusiasm. I hope that in these waning days of Lent that we all can savor the denial of it.

I missed carnival and went straight into lent

I was looking forward to carnival this year - after reading Rabelais and Bakhtin, I was all worked up. Then this influenza hit me. The word Influenza is a medieval diagnosis - an influence in the air, that affected a person when their humors were out of balance, brought about this condition. It's an influence just like the Moon's influence on tides or the Sun's on gold or Venus on copper. The ancients had a notion that everything exerted an influence on everything else - that the cosmos was in a quest for balance - but a balance of motion - since the only thing that doesn't move is God: everything revolved around the primium mobile, and the motion that moved the cosmos was love.
So I missed carnival and now I'm immersed in lent. I missed the imposition of ashes. I missed the deposition of sashes. I'm left without a sense of deciding to give up anything. One year I gave up despair - and that worked pretty well. With influenza has come a significant loss of appetite, so I've already given up significant consumption. In the protestant tradition, you'd think we would have reversed carnival and lent - and that now we'd be eating all kinds of cow and pig and chicken: just to stick it to the Roman church. Aside from Luther though, the reformation was begun by some real spoil sports. Calvin probably could have done with a decade of lent - all of life should be lent.
But I could be wrong. Calvin could have been for free love and feasting: probably not.
I miss being a gadfly. Back in Decatur I carried my Kierkegaard with me and settled down at various desks: the bar at Twains, the reference desk at the library - where I was welcome to put in my hours. Here in Durham, I've mostly been sick; and of a truth, a gadfly needs a certain audience and a certain ambiance of local culture, in order to perform his best.
Yesterday Jami played me a thisamericanlife podcast about puzzle solvers and listening to it I heard a clue as to why I garner certain reactions from some people. One of the puzzle contestants, a very smart guy, says that it dawned on him: he was informing people against their will. I thought, "there's my last cpe experience in a nutshell." I believe my last cpe did occur in a nutshell.
It's great to be free again.
But what does that mean for me in the future? Don't I have to sacrifice some of that freedom for stability?
I consider it only to be the freedom most people require: freedom to be and to be without being made to feel guilty about who I am; and freedom to work, to not be bothered with micro-managers, but to actually do my job without looking over my shoulder.
So I am free.
Carnival and lent have that goal as well: to free the individual. The goal of every doctrine in Christianity is to free the individual; if it is used otherwise, it becomes a cramped and jejune thing.