Category: Mutually Supportive Ranting

I really should thank you.

Your designs this season — and lately — are so unbelievably ugly that I haven’t been tempted to spend my money on them.

I’m making happily do with what’s in my closet and use retail shopping only for entertainment — for a laugh now and then while I’m on my way through the mall to do a necessary errand, say.

Your metallics and cheap shiny stuff and dropped waists and horrible necklines and unspeakably atrocious sleeves are amusing. Most of the garments I see now I hated way back in 1983 when you first showed them. Epaulettes were ugly then and they’re still ugly. Cheap, clingy disco fabric is consistently not something I want to go near. Polyester still makes me sweat. Your ugly color combinations depressed me in my college years and still lead me to want to cry today.

I hear that tangerine lipstick is IN for the fall.

I think you’ve all gone nuts. How much of a suckah do you think we big girls are?

Love, PeaceBang

Oh boy, howdy.

Please, please don’t take yourselves so seriously, okay?

Chickens, let’s always remember that our seminary experience is so deep and intense and ALL ABOUT US and our fascination with our fascinating call to the mysterious God’s fascinating ministry.

And once you graduate, no one cares.
Trust me.
Yes, it’s a calling and it’s deep and you need to stay deep and spiritually connected and all that. That’s true.

But sweet Jesus, if you stay as fascinated with yourself as seminary and the formation period require you to be, you will be a wicked pain in the ass to ordinary mortals such as the ones who privilege you by calling you pastor and, you know… provide you with a paycheck.

If you don’t get over yourself, you can’t serve real people. And also, people like me won’t trust you as far as we can throw you, and will stay away from you in the collegial setting. I’m sorry, yes, it happens. I’ve known a tiny handful of truly holy people and a WHOLE lotta sanctimonious also-rans who were so invested in presenting a Sincerely Holy Religious Leader persona that I wouldn’t ask them to organize a one-car funeral with me. Who needs it? These people never say in three words what can be said in 10,000. Their blathering e-mails alone will drive you to drink. Hello, Earth is your planet! Butt-scratching people are your colleagues and parishioners! Get over thyself.

And speaking of the collegial setting? Maybe this generation of clergy can break the disgusting habit of getting together and laughing in hearty, hollow ways about the stupidity and stubbornness of their pesky laypeople. God knows there are a lot of clergy-killers out there, I’ve met some of them. But there are also lovely congregations being served by arrogant jackasses who strut around under the mistaken impression that the lay folk are there to obey his or her every command and fulfill his or her vision. I have been tempted so many times to throw a cup of bad coffee into the face of the colleague who sits in a circle at clergy gatherings and drones on about his/her frustrating parishioners, when I myself know that minister to be a bore in the pulpit and elsewhere, and to articulate his/her faith is such a hesitant, incoherent provisional or negative way as to inspire no one except the most generous of listeners. BAH. I’m calling it out. I truly loathe this kind of hail-fellow-well-met nastiness among us. It sucks, it tears the psychic bond between pastor and parish and the fabric of the Church and it has to stop. Conflict and difficulty in the ministry are painful and hard. To be evaluated, judged and either accepted and loved or rejected for what amounts to our very personhood by congregations is scary and profoundly upsetting. We are always vulnerable. To engage in puerile, defensive insults of our congregations within the “safety” of the clergy gathering is not an appropriate response to that vulnerability. Have I said enough on this? I hope so.

An elderly married couple are sitting in church during a service. During the prayer, the woman passes a note to her husband. It says, “Oh my! I have terrible gas! I just let loose an enormous but silent fart! What should I do?” The husband passes her back a note. It reads, “Dear, the first thing you should do is turn up the volume on your hearing aid.”

What’s not funny about that joke?
A. “Married couple” shouldn’t assume a man and a woman. It could have been two women or two men!
B. Gas is not funny.
C. The word “fart” is crass and you won’t find it coming out of my mouth in public.
D. All of the above.

What’s great about that joke?
A. We loved it at the Worship Committee meeting! Thanks, Marcia!
B. The hearing aid thing is a riot! Great punch line!
C. Gross subject matter but I got a wicked chuckle out of it.
D. All of the above.

Once we get out of seminary, it’s time to stop, stop, stop with the intensely self-aware, me-centric approach to ministry. It’s a JOB, hon. You’re done with your formation. Now it’s time to turn your attention to the community and help them with theirs. Sad as it sounds, no one wants to read your paper on feminist theology, your theology of parish ministry, your 20-page tome on The Call As You Received It, or your verbatims from CPE. They won’t tell you how ridiculous your BIG SONOROUS MINISTER VOICE sounds when you’re standing up there intoning the Lord’s Prayer with rrrrround vowels like Lina Lamont during her lesson with the vocal coach in “Singing In the Rain.” They’ll just shrug and poke each other and say, “It’s just an affectation of hers. I think they teach that silly voice at seminary nowadays. ” Our people are forebearing people, boys and girls. Remember that. When they ask you at a wedding reception about how you became a minister, they don’t want you to hold them hostage for the next thirty minutes until they have to sneak away for wedding cake; they’re interested in a few minutes tops, and then YOU ask about THEM. Love humanity and spare them your whole story, okay?

Believe me, I know this is hard. I have bored enough people to glistening, yawn-suppressing eyes to have figured it out by now: once you get out of seminary, find a group of close, trusted colleagues to yammer to about how God is working in your life, your prayer practice, your amazingness, your holiness, and keep it minimal with lay people, who should always be the focus of your attention and receive the most air-time. Meet regularly with those colleagues. Get a spiritual director. Develop a prayer practice. And then shut up about it, seriously.

And if you can’t appreciate a good fart joke, well, Lord have mercy on ya, child. I’ve done what I can.

* = Religiously Correct (which always includes lots of jargon and PML [Precious Ministerial Language] and always a healthy, hearty dose of Political Correctness for maximum irritation effect.