Retired Pastor Ruminates: January 2011

Thursday, January 20, 2011

My Ten Guidelines for Oversharers

Our little family was on one of those cool Hebridean car ferries, traveling from Oban to Mull on our way to Iona, when I first ruminated on the American national trait to share way too much information with total strangers. My five-year old daughter (this was 1989) had just commented, “Duddy, there are lots of Americans on this boat!” I was reminding her that, although we had lived in Britain for several months, we were, in fact, ourselves Americans, when we were set upon by two very friendly Mid-Western American women who had overheard our conversation.

Within minutes we knew where they were from and the names of their children, their children’s spouses, and their grandchildren. And when they discovered I was a minister, they felt compelled to tell me all about their church, their pastor, and all their activities in the congregation.

Perhaps none of this would have struck me as particularly strange if I hadn’t been a foreigner in Britain, but the contrast was evident to me. Everybody in England had been quite pleasant to us during our stay, but with few exceptions maintained a certain reserve that I actually came to appreciate.

When we left Oxford that summer, I said my goodbyes to college dons and staff, and several remarked, “But you’ve only just arrived! We will miss you.” While I believe they were sincere, I was amused by their heartfelt goodbyes in that they had barely given me the time of day.

I liked it in Britain, but I must confess that I’m an American oversharer, and that I come from a family of oversharers. I was one even before my brain injury, which adjusted my social filters to, shall we say, a more porous setting.

I come by it honestly. My Dad, of blessed memory, was at times an oversharer. One Thanksgiving dinner he launched his own campaign of “shock and awe” (shock to the grownups and awe to us kids). My Uncle Dick was expertly carving the turkey with an electric carving knife (remember those?). My Dad felt the need to share that a former secretary of his had committed suicide using such an implement, but his telling was not nearly as discreet as mine here. I suspect that there were lots of leftovers from that meal.

The Internet was made for oversharers. Blogging or updating one’s status on Facebook offer hourly temptations. So in yet another of my high-minded public service offerings, here are my ten guidelines to avoid oversharing:

Never post on the Internet when you are intoxicated. Trust me on this. You may wake up to see that cute little red flag with lots of numbers in it on your Facebook page, and smile and wonder, “Which of my carefully crafted witty status updates are all my ‘friends’ responding to?” Moments later you are mortified to suddenly remember that last post you made right before bed, which seemed like a good idea at the time. It wasn’t.
Remember the old adage about the difference between major and minor surgery? “Major surgery is surgery on me, and minor surgery is surgery on someone else.” The same is true for the difference between interesting surgery, and boring surgery. And no surgical scars please. Remember LBJ? Nobody wants to see your scar.
If you have an interesting story to tell about your friends the Andersons, and you ask your friends the Smiths if they know the Andersons, and the Smiths say, “No,” don’t tell the story.
If your child or grandchild just learned to use the potty that is a grand thing but don’t share it. Same thing for cute pictures in the tub. Cute now, but the kid might not appreciate it when he’s 13 and the class bully finds it on the Net.
Your Irritable Bowel Syndrome may well be very preoccupying to you, but it is not of general interest. In my thirty years of pastoral ministry I patiently listened to people’s accounts of their bodily ailments. We call it an “organ recital.” You can and should share such concerns with your pastor and your doctor, but not with the world, and not on the Internet.
Pastors are notorious for telling cute stories about their children from the pulpit. Everybody loves this, right? Well, no, actually. The children usually don’t. I would ask for permission. Same policy for posting. Children and other family members have a right to privacy. I have sometimes observed this rule in the breach, as my children have noted.
When I go on vacation I take lots of pictures, and love to look at them again and again to relive the experience. This is something that you want to share with all your friends and dinner guests, right? No. Pictures of other people’s vacations are not everybody’s idea of a good time.
We live in an age of scientific miracles, and have medications available that can make us feel younger, happier, healthier and, just better. Nobody wants to hear which ones you are on.
Have a new hobby? Yoga or origami? Just because it excites you doesn’t mean it will excite others. Same for religion. If someone asks you what you believe, don’t lay out your systematic theology. Say, “I’m a Methodist.” Or, “I affirm the Nicene Creed.” A balance between talking and listening is a good anditote against oversharing. Remember Bette Midler’s character in Beaches? She says, “But enough about me, let's talk about you, what do You think about me?” Don't be her.
Tighten up you privacy settings. Not just on Facebook, but in real life. All of us experience ups and downs in our lives. Most of us are battered and worn one way or another. Some of us have had really traumatic events that have left us permanently scarred. How and when (and whether) we share these parts of our story is something each of us must discern in our own way. But such sharing implies some level of trust and intimacy, and although the Internet may sometimes give the appearance of allowing that, it is a risky medium for such sharing. Be careful with yourself and others.

But I’ve shared too much.

(And yes, I know “oversharers” isn't a recognized word, but it will be. Just watch!)

Friday, January 14, 2011

Ridiculous and sublime: Richard Bauckham's “The Pooh Community”

More and more I am finding satire the proper vehicle to address some of the more foolish antics of both the church and the academy. So I was delighted to come across Richard Bauckham's delicious deadpan savaging of his own guild in his lecture “The Pooh Community,” in which he employs some of the methods of contemporary New Testament scholarship to analyze A.A. Milne's “Winnie the Pooh.”

His careful sifting leads him to posit the existence of several “communities” behind the final redaction of the text. Here's a sample:

“The very distinctive nature of the Pooh community can be further appreciated when we compare it with other children's literature of the period, such as the Noddy books or the Narnia books (though it may be debatable whether these were already written at the time when the traditions of the Pooh community were taking shape). Words and concepts very familiar from other children's literature never appear in the Pooh books: the word school, e.g., is completely absent, as is the word toys, even though the books are ostensibly about precisely toys. Conversely, the Pooh books have their own special vocabulary and imagery: e.g. the image of honey, which is extremely rare in other children's literature (not at all to be found in the Narnia books, e.g., according to the computer-generated analysis by Delaware and Babcock), constantly recurs in the literature of the Pooh community, which clearly must have used the image of honey as one of the key buildingblocks in their imaginative construction of the world.

The stories afford us a fairly accurate view of some of the rivalries and disputes within the community. The stories are told very much from the perspective of Pooh and Piglet, who evidently represent the dominant group in the community - from which presumably the bulk of the literature originated, though here and there we may detect the hand of an author less favourable to the Pooh and Piglet group. The Pooh and Piglet group saw itself as central to the life of the community (remember that Piglet's house is located in the very centre of the forest), and the groups represented by other characters are accordingly marginalized. The figure of Owl, for example, surely represents the group of children who prided themselves on their intellectual achievements and aspired to status in the community on this basis. But the other children, certainly the Pooh and Piglet group, ridiculed them as swots. So throughout the stories the figure of Owl, with his pretentious learning and atrocious spelling, is portrayed as a figure of fun. Probably the Owl group, the swots, in their turn ridiculed the Pooh and Piglet group as ignorant and stupid: they used terms of mockery such as 'bear of very little brain.' Stories like the hunt for the Woozle, in which Pooh and Piglet appear at their silliest and most gullible, probably originated in the Owl group, which used them to lampoon the stupidity of the Pooh and Piglet group. But the final redactor, who favours the Pooh and Piglet group, has managed very skilfully to refunction all this material which was originally detrimental to the Pooh and Piglet group so that in the final form of the collection of stories it serves to portray Pooh and Piglet as oafishly lovable. In a paradoxical reversal of values, stupidity is elevated as deserving the community's admiration. We can still see thepoint where an anti-Pooh story has been transformed in this way into an extravagantly pro-Pooh story at the end of the story of the hunt for the Woozle. Pooh and Piglet, you remember, have managed to frighten themselves silly by walking round and round in circles and mistaking their own paw-prints for those of a steadily increasing number of unknown animals of Hostile Intent. Realizing his mistake, Pooh declares: 'I have been Foolish and Deluded, and I am a Bear of No Brain at All.' The original anti-Pooh story, told by the Owl faction, must have ended at that point. But the pro-Pooh narrator has added - we can easily see that it is an addition to the original story by the fact that it comes as a complete non sequitur - the following comment by Christopher Robin: "'You're the Best Bear in All the World," said Christopher Robin soothingly.' Extravagant praise from the community's major authority-figure.”

To see the entire lecture go here.

Richard Bauckham is a theologian and biblical scholar who was Professor of New Testament at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. His web site is here.

Saturday, January 8, 2011

Thomas Aquinas ("Venus" by Bananarama)

My high school buddy Larry Grubman put me onto this hilarious video. No need to slog through the Summa anymore. It's all here on YouTube:

Thursday, January 6, 2011

Epiphany Ruminations on the Mystery of Baptism

I have been schooled to consider baptism with a theologian’s precision, what it is and what it isn’t, what happens and how, the various forms and their respective pitfalls. Nonetheless, baptism continues to possess much the same air of unfathomable mystery for me that my marriage does, that there is more going on here than can be properly named or known.

My own infant baptism, however inadequate (as my Anabaptist friends may regard it), held a strange hold over me during my growing up years. I have been accused of having high-church inclinations for a Reformed pastor, and surely my baptism at St. John the Divine in New York, the world's largest Gothic cathedral, got me started down that path. My godfather, Bill Warren, was an Episcopal priest, a lovely man who served in remote parishes in Alaska and Arizona. He was a Jungian analyst who was fascinated by Native American spirituality. A bit of a mystic, his baptismal present to me was a red Morocco leather-bound copy of The Imitation of Christ.

It sat unused until I found it pristine in its dusty box on my bookshelf when I was about 19. My mother had recently died, it was the late sixties, and I was something of a lost soul at the time. I carried that little book around in my knapsack while hitchhiking across America in the summer of 1969, and it had an importance to me far beyond its content, which I found kind of creepy, to tell the truth. It had become for me a talisman of a lost home and family, and of some connection to the boy I had once been in church, singing in the choir and loved by the congregation. Later, when I read about Martin Luther's “I am baptized” in the midst of his battles with the devil I resonated with that.

Now mystics, talismans and incantations to ward off evil are pretty far afield for a Reformed pastor-theologian to travel. It’s a long journey from Thomas A Kempis to Karl Barth. But still, six decades after I received that sacrament in the cathedral, baptism remains an inextricable (shall I say indelible) stamp on who I am, for better or worse.

I started ruminating on all this today because my daughter was baptized by my hand on this day, Epiphany, twenty-six years ago, and she is now discerning a call to serve in leadership in Christ’s Church. She is halfway through divinity school preparing for ordained ministry. I couldn’t have imagined that when I was a child, as there were no ordained women in my church when I was growing up. This is just one of a great many surprises that have taken place throughout my journey. So many changes, and so much of what I once took for granted is lost or long-gone. But baptism remains, full of promise and hope and heavy with many mysteries, connecting the journey of one generation of those who share Christ to that of another.

Some of my other posts on baptism:
Ruminations on Baptism
George Hunsinger: Answer to a Question about Baptism