Friday, March 12, 2010

18 More Groups that have Infiltrated the Church

Since Glenn Beck keeps ranting about left-leaning Christians* who use the word “social justice” to advance their agenda, I thought I’d also point out a few other groups who have infiltrated the church, many of whom use the Bible to support their agendas:

18. White Supremacists
17. Atheists
16. Pagans
15. Right-wing Tea-party Fruitcakes
14. Pedophiles
13. New Agey Crystal-Wearing Vegans
12. Labor Unions
11. Jerks
10. Libertarians
9. Glenn Beck Listeners
8. Self-avowed, Practicing Gays and Lesbians
7. Self-avowed, Practicing Homophobes
6. Self-avowed, Practicing Evangelicals
5. Unreformed Calvinists
4. Unrepentant Arminians
3. Closet Papists
2. Sinners
1. Christians

These people are inside your church! Some of them are clergy! Scary!

——————————————————-

*He didn’t actually say “left-leaning” - he said “communist” and “Nazi.” That’s part of what makes this particularly dishonest. He knows very well what he’s talking about: Christians who support healthcare reform and justice for the poor because they believe in the Biblical mandate to love their neighbor with more than superficial charity.

I really hope he keeps talking about this. The more he talks the more transparent he becomes.

Edit (3-13-2010): Credit where credit is due: Lewis Archer was the first person I heard the phrase “self-avowed, practicing evangelical” from. Now I think I want a bumper sticker with that phrase.

Thursday, February 18, 2010

10 Reasons Ash Wednesday is Better than Christmas

10. No braving the malls looking for Lent gifts
9. No pressure to send “Merry Ash Wednesday” cards
8. No explaining why using chi-rho isn’t “X-ing Jesus out” of Lent
7. No dominionist fundagelicals trying to fight culture wars by putting “Jesus resisting temptation in the wilderness” displays on public property
6. No celebrity holiday albums
5. No Ash Wednesday sitcom specials
4. No saccharine email forwards about “the true meaning” of Ash Wednesday
3. No tacky Ash Wednesday sweaters
2. “Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return” extremely difficult to use in consumer marketing strategies
1. Nobody ever says, “Ash Wednesday is really all about the children.”

Monday, February 08, 2010

Dawkins, Literalists, and the 10 Scientific Commandments

Here is an excerpt of Salon’s interview with Richard Dawkins back in the fall:

You say in the beginning of the book that you would like to convince people that creationism is not a feasible or a viable belief system, but you also make it clear that you’re not a big fan of creationists.

That’s putting it mildly, yes.

Doesn’t that make it difficult for a creationist to read this book without feeling insulted? Won’t that hurt your goal?

No, I’m not really aiming it at creationists. I don’t think they read books anyway, except for one book. It’s aimed at the intelligent layperson who does read books and who vaguely knows a little bit about evolution and who vaguely knows that there are creationists and maybe even vaguely thinks that he’s a creationist himself, but who is curious and wants to know the evidence.

The part that rankled was “except for one book.” What Dawkins doesn’t understand is that most creationists don’t read the Bible. In fact, I’ve found that literalists of any stripe do not read the Bible much because they believe they already know what it says. What they tend to do is read the same collection of inspirational memory verses over and over again.

It used to bother me that so many people show such a stunning lack of curiosity about the Bible. But then I realized that curiosity takes work, and requires a scientific openness to seek answers. If either Biblical literalists or Dawkins took the time to actually read the creation accounts in Genesis:
1. They would notice that the creation orders are different.
2. Their curiosity might lead them to look for other differences (language, style, etc.)
3. They would seek out sources that might be able to explain the differences (pastors, commentaries, scholars)
4. They would look for dissenting opinions
5. They would formulate their own reason for the differences in light of the available evidence (e.g., these stories were written by two different authors for two different audiences).

As I said, curiosity takes work. Literalists dismiss their curiosity by simply saying, “it’s the Word of God, sometimes it’s hard to understand, but I’ll just accept it on faith.” They just don’t think about it.

Dawkins doesn’t have such an excuse. He is supposed to be a scientist, for crying out loud, but he just accepts the literalists’ interpretation of the Bible. He even thinks they read it! If there is anything like a list of scientific sins, I think one of them would be lack of curiosity.

1. Thou shalt not be incurious
2. Thou shalt make thy methods discernible to all
3. Thou shalt not falsify evidence or results
etc.

Wednesday, July 22, 2009

Curmudgeonly Lectionary Reflections - Feeding the 5000

Speaking as a fairly mainstream liberal white Protestant, I am so sick of this story and its typical liberal white Protestant allegorical interpretation. In the usual reading, we (the church) are the disciples, and Jesus tells us to feed the hungry, and we think we can’t, so Jesus says try anyway, so we try and lo and behold, a miracle! Blah, blah, blah. Because, you know, it’s all about us. 

Another problem I have with the usual reading is that we have to pretend to be surprised, and it becomes a story about how much we believe. Really, you know about Jesus, don’t you? He heals people, walks on water, and raises the dead. Are we supposed to be wowed that he can produce pita bread out of thin air?

So I want to put on my curmudgeonly preacher persona and wave my cane and yell at the kids singing Kum-Ba-Yah to get off my lawn. I really like Mark’s version more than John’s so I’ll start there.

1. In Mark’s version, Jesus invites the disciples to come away to a deserted place all by themselves. Mark says this twice, in 6:31 and in 6:32. Mark has a fairly conservative economy of words, so when he says something twice, he means it. Dripping with sarcasm, his disciples say, “hey, teacher. Since we’re here at this deserted place of yours, how about sending them away to get something to eat?” Nice relaxing spot you picked, Jesus! I love that Mark lets us see the disciples get sarcastic with Jesus.

2. Now, most preachers will say that this crowd is made up of the poor and downtrodden, and they don’t have any money, and the miracle is about feeding the hungry. Hogwash! These people have money. The disciples say plainly, “send them away so that they can buy themselves something to eat.” The text does not tell us they were poor, sad, chronically hungry, or anything of the sort. It says they were like sheep without a shepherd. I suppose because we think of sheep as fleecy white innocent creatures, we automatically go into churchy mode and think that the sheep need someone to take care of them and feed them.

But the “sheep without a shepherd” comment is a reference to 1 Kings 22:17, in which Israel’s army without its king is compared to “sheep without a shepherd.” This crowd is not a bunch of hungry people looking for food. This is the army of Israel looking for a king! They want leadership, not bread. Also, the feeding of the masses recalls Elisha’s feeding of his own disciples in 2 Kings 4:42. These aren’t a bunch of poor downtrodden people. They are a prophetic army.

3. I’m glad I wasn’t there. Had I been there, I would not be thinking charitable thoughts. Here come all these people, interrupting my intimate spiritual time with Jesus. I mean, they just ran around a lake in order to go hear this guy talk. Is there not a sensible person among these 5000 who thought, “hey, maybe I should pack a lunch?” This is Galilee, circa 30 AD. There are no drive-thru windows, people! Plan ahead! It’s part of being a grown-up!

4. In John’s version (6:5-7), the disciples’ testy exchange with Jesus’ is replaced with this laid-back Socratic dialogue. “Where are we going to buy bread for all these people?” Because in John, the disciples aren’t idiots and jerks (which is why I could never have cut it with John’s crew).

5. John gives us a little kid who has 5 barley loaves and 2 fish. In pulpits all over the country on Sunday, this little boy will be the hero of the story. I’m sorry, but does nobody else think that 5 barley loaves and 2 fish is a LOT of food for a kid to eat? Maybe if the kid is 6’2” and weighs 240 pounds, this would be a reasonable dinner. Right, right, someone is going to pull out some obscure historical reference that they were small loaves. Whatever. Just consider this: what if it isn’t his food? Is he the only one out of 5000 adults who packed a lunch? Or is he supposed to be delivering this food to someone else? I like to imagine that there’s one guy in the crowd saying, “hey! that’s the kid who I hired to go get my takeout!” Or maybe the kid drives up in a beat-up Honda hatchback. He gets out and approaches the crowd of 5000. He looks at the order slip in his hand and asks, “hey… somebody order a pizza?”

6. Preachers are going to be falling all over themselves to allegorize this story and explain what the miracle means and will miss possibly the most obvious part of the story: Jesus eats with 5000 people. He shares food with an army. Eating together is a sign of friendship, and sharing the same piece of food is way of declaring eternal loyalty, as when Judas dips his bread into Jesus’ dish in John 13:26. If you break your Twinkie in half and give me part of it, you have just declared that you and I are like family, and we have a bond that cannot be broken. The one who eats with hookers and seditionists and thugs just made himself friends with 5000 people at once, because they all shared the same food.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think this is THE point of the story. I don’t think there is only one right reading, and I don’t think it is simply a eucharistic allegory. But the militaristic language is there, the reference to Elisha’s disciples is there, and John ends the story with the people saying, “this is indeed the prophet who is to come into the world.” The very next line is, “When Jesus realized that they were about to come and take him by force to make him king, he withdrew again to the mountain by himself.” The prophet shows up, recruits an army, and leaves.

Edit: Ooh! Ooh! I’ve got another one. In Mark they sit on the grass in groups of fifties and hundreds. Go ahead, look up “fifties and hundreds” in your concordance. You’ll find it’s a reference to leadership and military organization in Exodus, Deuteronomy, and Kings.

Monday, June 15, 2009

The Mean Daddy

If you are familiar with the “pet movie” genre, which generally features adorable kids whose hearts ache to own their very own non-human companion, you’ve probably noticed a stock character I call the “mean daddy.” It is almost always the daddy, and he does not like dogs. Or cats. Or turtles. Or whoever the protagonist of the movie is.

The kids come up to the daddy and they say, “But why, Daddy? Why can’t we have a dog/cat/turtle?”

“A dog/cat/turtle is a big responsibility,” he says. “You have to walk it and clean up after it and teach it obedience. How about a goldfish?”

“A goldfish!?” they reply, rolling their eyes.

Then the mom/other sympathetic adult authority figure says, “Gosh, [insert name], would it really be that bad to have a dog/cat/turtle?”

“Look,” the mean daddy says desperately, “I don’t want to have to clean up messes/schedule animal sitters for trips out of town, [et cetera] for the dozen or so years this animal is on the planet.”

Eventually, of course, after various hijinks and capers, the mean daddy finds the protagonist animal endearing, or the animal saves the family from burglars/fire/cult members/financial ruin. There will be some incident in which the mean daddy gets pushed into a pool/wedding cake/mud puddle/sewage treatment plant. The camera will zoom in for a close-up of his impotent rage.

What I find most distressing about this caricature is that I must admit to myself that I, like it or not, have become the mean daddy.

Today I arrive home to find that our octogenarian dog has managed to defecate in our living room in an intricate pattern that reminds me of the systematic floor-covering strategy of a Roomba. If you can imagine a grid of 12-inch squares upon our white carpet, there would be at least one dark brown turd in the center of each square, oriented in a spiral pattern. It is truly a testimony to the power of mammalian evolution that this creature with a brain the size of a deck of cards is able to do the complex geometry necessary to cover the maximum surface area of a floor with his excrement. He has mastered the approach we call “poo on the move,” where he manages simultaneously a) to sniff, b) to waddle wherever his nose leads and c) to drop logs of varying lengths behind him. He reminds me of a multitasking CEO who paces, clipping his nails, while dictating to his secretary. The dog watches me while I march about the living room, cleaning up his poo using the inverted-plastic-bag method, muttering to myself. He has one paw crossed over the other and stares, regally, like Anubis surveying the liturgy of pagan priests.

He doesn’t have much longer in this world, I realize, and I will be sorry when he’s gone. If nothing else, he’s expanded my repertoire and my appreciation of synonyms for dookie. I dread the day when my son, who will be 8 or 9, the age when literature and film love to pit the hero child against their tyrant father, comes to me and asks, “Daddy, can we get a puppy?” Then I will know that my journey from real life to cartoon is complete, and I will read from my script: “A dog is a big responsibility…”

And for the next fourteen years I will stay away from pools, wedding cakes, mud puddles, and sewage treatment plants. And I will begin stocking up on plastic shopping bags.

Friday, December 19, 2008

Of Money, Asses, and Idiots

One passage of the Talmud, concerning how to carry a purse if sunset on Sabbath eve overtakes one who is traveling, runs thus:

If there is a Gentile with him, he must give his purse to the Gentile.

Why not put it on the ass in the first place? Because concerning the ass there is a commandment to let it rest, but no such commandment exists for a Gentile.

How is the case if the man had accompanying him an ass, a deaf-mute, an idiot, and a minor? To whom must he give his purse in that event? He must put it on the ass.

Why so? Because the deaf-mute and the minor are human beings, and he might by accident give it to an Israelite who was not a deaf-mute or a minor.

How is it if he had with him a deaf-mute and an idiot only? He must give it to the idiot, because a deaf-mute has more sense than an idiot.

How is it with an idiot and a minor? He must give it to the idiot.

And so to this day we continue to give our money to asses and idiots.

Tuesday, August 26, 2008

The Problem with Political Speechwriters

Not only are we going to make every sentence eighteen words too long so that when it is read out loud it must be chopped up in unnatural places before the speaker runs of breath, but we will also finish as many sentences as possible with a triad like this next one so that our declarations will sound authoritative, well-reasoned, and final. We are going to use passive verbs at every opportunity, even when an obvious active verb is at hand, and we will fill each sentence with fluff, redundancy, and repetition to help us reach our target word counts.

Friday, October 19, 2007

Why is Church Anti-Boy?

I’ve said before that Raising Cain is one of my favorite books, and the documentary isn’t bad, either.

There’s an interesting scene in the documentary of a kindergarten class taught by a progressive teacher who allows the children plenty of self-determination in classroom governance. At one point, the kids share stories. One of the boys tells a story in which a villain gets killed.

The teacher asks the class what they think of the story. Some of the outspoken girls don’t like the fact that the villain gets killed. The class takes a vote and makes a new rule: in stories, characters cannot die. They can only faint.

The boy who told the story seems to deflate. Another boy complains that if characters can only faint, there’s hardly any story to tell.

Michael Thompson makes the point in the documentary that although there has been plenty of research on how boys have an unfair advantage in co-ed classrooms, education isn’t exactly fair to boys, either. They are required to sit and be still to learn, even when their bodies are telling them to wrestle, tumble, and move. They are therefore disproportionately diagnosed with ADD and medicated simply for being boys. They are punished when they share their rich and often violent fantasies.

Likewise in church our main way of doing ministry is sitting around and talking about our feelings. It’s not that boys don’t have feelings, or that they don’t need to be emotionally intelligent - on the contrary, Thompson demonstrates that boys have a complex emotional life. But instead of celebrating boys’ natural aggressiveness and physicality, we pathologize it and moralize against it. Violence is bad. Killing is bad. If you like fantasizing about those things, you are bad.

So I have little patience for critics of video games. Hand-wringing about Halo’s violence seems to me to be another classroom rule directed toward men and boys which says, “we can’t have any killing - only fainting.”

Some people argue that playing Halo in church is selling out or pandering to our violent culture. I believe we play into our violent culture’s hands when we alienate boys. We completely lose credibility with them when we act as if they don’t have the capacity to tell fantasy from reality. So instead they check out from church and check into corporate culture which will validate their sense of masculinity, and will tell them what it means to be a man.

Boys need to play soldier, and cops and robbers, and pirates and ninjas. If the church were truly concerned about reducing the level of violence in our culture, it might begin by addressing poverty, or the images of women in advertising, or, I don’t know, the war in Iraq. Scapegoating video games is a cheap way to avoid the more controversial and systemic sources of violence in American culture.

Tuesday, October 16, 2007

Prayer for a Belligerent Panhandler

I do not know what he really needs.
Perhaps it is money.
Perhaps it is justice.
Perhaps it is a life lesson.
Perhaps it is something else.

Whatever it is, God, you know.
Lord, let him have it.
Really hard.

Likewise, you know what I need better than I do.
Lord, let me have it.
Not so hard, if you don’t mind.

Amen.

Tuesday, September 11, 2007

Confessions of a Mac Bigot, and a Plea for Help

Yes, I prefer to use a Mac. I like the way someone sat down and thought about the way I actually want to use a computer. In fact, it is generally so pleasant to use a Mac that when I run up against design flaws in the real world I begin to wish Apple built everything. I feel my brain release stress hormones into my blood stream when I run up against technology that gets in the way of getting work done.

For example, I would almost pay for an iPhone just for visual voicemail. I hate, with the blind passion of ineffectual rage, dialing my cell phone and hearing, “you have… 2… skipped messages and… 1… unheard message.” I stab a button and then I hear, “first skipped message.” No, no, no! I skipped this message the first time. Why is this the first message I have to listen to again? Put it at the back of the queue! It should be the last message I have to listen to because it was not worthy of my precious time the first time I heard who it was from. So, I stab another button.

“Second skipped message.” No, no, no, no!! Stab.

“First unheard message.” I have now wasted upwards of 30 seconds listening to absurd menu options. Now, there may be a way to skip this stuff. Maybe some arcane key combo involving hand gestures and mumbled spells, but I shouldn’t have to learn or remember them. Our office voicemail is even worse. “Welcome to voicemal.” No kidding! Who’d of thought I could push the “voicemail” button and get “voicemail!?” Thank you for announcing with robotic precision exactly which button I pushed 3 or 4 seconds after I pushed it. Did someone request this kind of audio feedback? Did the people who designed these things actually think about the way people would use them?

We use Shelby church management software. Its interface is about as intuitive as an accountant’s ledger, where credits are sometimes debits and debits are sometimes credits. It is as elegant and smooth as a sheet of corrugated steel. If I could attach a generator to the mouse and somehow harness the energy I expend in mouseclicks, I could probably power all of Birmingham. What I want is something that looks like a combination of Quicken, Filemaker, and the Mac’s Address Book, something where I can pull up pretty pie charts and graphs, can move and drop cards representing contacts, can customize fields and basically use it however I durn well please.

Instead, I have to navigate the dark recesses of the designer’s mind, and think, “if I were an accountant or a programmer who was trying to think like a pastor, where would I hide this feature?” No offense to accountants or programmers, mind - y’all are wonderful people and often fill the planet with joy, etc. It’s just that in this particular instance, when I want to quickly look up a member’s phone number and drop it into an email I’m about to send to a committee, I click on the member, open their file, see the phone number I’m looking for…

AND I CAN’T SELECT IT.

I. Can’t. Select it. I can’t select it by double clicking on it, which works in 99% of the other applications I use. I can’t drag from one side of the text to the other. I can’t do a freaking thing except STARE AT THE NUMBER. That’s great if I want to simply dial the number, but more than likely if I had wanted to interact with physical things in the physcial universe I would have picked up the printed directory that sits at my elbow. Now, there’s another screen where I can edit or change the number, but it’s buried in a series of tabs containing all kinds of information, and I’ll likely have to click three or four times before I remember which screen has the magical property of being able to SELECT A TELEPHONE NUMBER. This means that instead of simply [CTRL-C] copying the number and [CTRL-V] pasting it, I wind up WRITING IT DOWN ON A POST-IT NOTE BY HAND. At this point I’m wondering why I’m even using a computer, when it would be so much easier to chisel the number into a slab of rock, heave it into a trebuchet, and fling it in the direction of the house of the person with whom I’m trying to communicate.

So today I’m at my office computer, using Windows 2000 (because it’s always nice to feel like you’re living in the 21st Century), and the straw that breaks the camel’s back is that as I’m clicking through menus in Word and Outlook, I realize for every menu command I want to select I’m clicking three times. Not once. Three times. Once to open the menu. Another time to extend the menu which some programmer has thoughtfully decided to reduce to an unuseable selection of options, and another to actually select the command I want. In one case, a menu has two available commands, and requires you to expand the menu to see the rest. What complicates matters is that I don’t always remember which menu a command is hidden in, especially when they have such useful and descriptive titles as “edit” and “tools.” (Where would you hide the command “check spelling?”) This means that I don’t click just three times, because I have to keep expanding menus to see if the command I want is buried within. In reality I have to click a bazillion times.

So I go on a quest through Microsoft’s “Help” menu, both in Word and in Windows, in which I learn all kind of wonderful things about how I can customize the desktop, show more programs in the program menu, and change the font of a menu, but nothing about turning off this infuriatingly condescending feature. If anyone has a clue, like a little button hidden away in volumes and volumes of control panel settings, I would be forever grateful if you could share it with me, because apparently it is knowledge too exquisite, too wonderful to share with normal people in the conventional way. Like in a HELP MENU.

By contrast, I buy an iPod for the spousal unit. The instructions fit on a folded 4x6 sheet of glossy paper that has lots of pretty pictures. And after about thirty seconds with the thing I know exactly how to use it, and if there’s something I don’t know I am confident I will be able to find out. I sit down at a new Mac and I know everything is going to be where I want it, and if it isn’t, again, there will be a fairly easy way to find out. I look at the iPhone and I lust for visual voicemail, and I hardly care that it also plays music, surfs the web, and cooks breakfast.

Someone actually studied the way I want the world to work, and then they sold it to me. So that’s why I’m a Mac bigot. If Apple built cars, I would be able to point to my destination on a touch screen and read a book on the way, or enjoy ignoring voicemails on my iPhone, because the car would drive itself.

...

[Update] - So I finally found how to fix the short menu problem, thanks to Google and About.com. But the fact that I had to Google the solution illustrates my point. Who thought this would be helpful? The talking paperclip?

Wednesday, March 28, 2007

A Very Sad Story (Please Keep It Going!)

Occasionally you hear something that changes your perspective on life.

A woman I know was late to work one day. As she went out the door, she shouted goodbye over her shoulder to her husband and child, who she assumed were inside. She climbed into her car and put it into reverse to back out of the driveway. She felt a thump, looked in her sideview mirror, and saw her daughter’s pink playground ball bouncing away. She turned the other way and made eye contact with her husband, whose face was twisted in horror. She leapt out of the car and made it to her daughter at the same time he did. Her daughter uttered one word with her last breath: “Mommy.”

A year later, she dreams this scene every night. Though her friends are still angry at her husband for divorcing her, she says she can’t really blame him. She can’t live with herself either.

So, is that a sad story or what? Now I’m going to tell you something that I hope makes you a bit angry. I made it up.

Now, if this were a viral email, after I’d got your attention with a tearjerking story like the above, I’d go on to say how you should always tell the ones close to you how much you love them, and please forward this to five of your closest friends. Now, while it irks me to get these things in my inbox, I have to admit I’m guilty of similar stuff. In fact, I think every preacher at some point shoots for the easy emotional hook. I mean, I didn’t completely make my sad story up. I’ve heard true stories like it before. It’s more of a composite than an outright lie, I’ll tell myself.

The other side of it is that we excuse this kind of manipulation. This is one of the things that makes Oprah so successful. She’s an expert at finding the emotional hook, and people tune in to get hooked. Sometimes we enjoy being jerked around emotionally - that’s why we go to see movies. It’s also why people forward emails with jingoistic slogans, or about children with cancer. It’s why people slow down as they pass an awful wreck. I suppose there’s nothing inherently wrong with it. These things fulfill an important social purpose. We like to empathize.

What I do object to is having these things passed off as prayer requests with directives to forward them to everyone I know. I have no problem with someone sharing their grief or pain with others and asking for prayer. But I’m not going to pray for a sad story. If I know the person who the story affects, I will pray for that person.

I wish I had the courage to hold people accountable for the stuff they forward to me. I imagine calling them up two weeks later. “You remember little Nancy? How is she doing with the chemo? You don’t know who I’m talking about? You know, Little Nancy, the girl you sent me that heartbreaking email about. What do you mean you don’t know? You aren’t still praying for her? You haven’t followed up? Well, golly, I’ve spent the last two weeks absolutely sleepless, on my knees for three, four hours a day, praying for a miracle. I thought for sure, since it was so important to you to forward it to me, that you must be wearing holes in your carpet lying prostrate before the throne of God, that your pillow must be mildewed with your tears. And you’re telling me you don’t remember?”

Nine times out of ten, these things are not prayer requests. In fact, I suspect they actually discourage people from real prayer. They are the online version of slowing down to look at a car wreck. Prayer and action should flow out of each other. There is enough genuine grief in the world that people of faith should be praying for, but to pray for those things might require them to do more than click “forward” on their email client. If you pray for the AIDS crisis in Africa, God might nudge you to do something about it. If you pray for children dying of malaria, maybe you should check out nothing but nets. If you pray for parents who are grieving for a lost child, maybe you should actually go and be present with them. But it’s so much easier to pray for stuff you can’t do anything about, isn’t it? A child with cancer, or “supporting our troops,” stuff that doesn’t actually require us to put anything on the line. Forwarding an email is the religious equivalent of putting a yellow ribbon on the back of your SUV. It shows folks how sensitive and religious you are.

There’s a real life version of the viral email I get all the time. It goes like this: “Pastor, have you heard of [insert name]‘s [insert sad story]? I think you should go visit and pray with them.” I suppose then I should forward it to five of my closest friends.

Saturday, December 16, 2006

Kitchen Design and Theology

I just mopped the floor.

Every time I mop the floor I have time to reflect, and the subject upon which I reflect is this: crumb-catchers. Specifically, why crumb-catchers? Why that little space under the cabinets that makes the floor so difficult to clean? When I’ve asked this question aloud people respond “so you don’t bump your toes and scuff the cabinets.” What kind of stupid answer is that? How about making the counter-top extend further so you a) have more room to work and b) don’t kick the stupid cabinets? Why not put a steel plate around the base of the cabinets? How about amputating your feet and walking on your ankles?

While I’m on the subject of kitchen design, let me rant for a minute about soffits. There’s a word for these things. I learned what they were called by watching TLC or This Old House or somesuch. This is the area above the kitchen cabinets that some people decide to wall off. Neurons in someone’s brain actually had to fire to make this happen. It was an intentional decision. Somebody looked at the space above the cabinets and thought, “hm. What do we do with that space above the cabinets? Put in more cabinets? Use it as a shelf to store all the souvenir coffee mugs that people collect? No, I’ve a better idea. Let’s wall it off. Who could possibly need more storage space?” When I’ve voiced my amazement over this decision aloud, I sometimes get the response, “well, you don’t want to look at the stove vent pipe, do you?” I don’t care! Paint the thing fire engine red and let it be a design feature or something. If we’re going to talk about the aesthetics of kitchen design, let’s start with the spaghetti that has dried to the floor under my freakin’ crumb-catcher.

Somebody in the last decade got smart and realized the kitchen was where people spent the majority of their time in their house. Newer houses have bigger kitchens in a central location That’s because we prepare our food there and eat it. “Primitive” cultures often had their cook fires in a central location, because they understood this idea. But at some point in the 50’s or 60’s (forgive my lack of historical house-building knowledge, here) people started building “living rooms” that nobody actually lived in and kitchens tucked away in the back of their houses, as if they were going to ring their staff and have their help bring the dishes out while they entertained in the “living room.” In spite of getting direct mail featuring photographs of white families in front of their McMansions which says, and I wish I were kidding:

...life is too short to clean your own house…

I’ve found that we are simply too poor to be able to afford our own cook and wait staff. Therefore the whole living room / kitchen / formal dining room arrangement is pretty irrelevant. Now, don’t for a minute think that I’m complaining about my own house. I really, really like the parsonage we live in. It’s the best place we’ve lived since we’ve been married. It’s just that I see these design - we’ll call them “features,” with the understanding that, like the PR experts at Microsoft, we really mean “bugs” - in most houses.

There are some key things that go on in whatever kitchen we use. We prepare food there. We eat there. We hang out and talk there. I will, at least once each presidential administration, mop the sticky goo off the floor (or at least smear it around a bit). We must also store approximately two metric tonnes of plastic containers with mismatched lids. We do not need soffits or crumb-catchers.

And would it kill someone to put a drain in the floor? I’ve asked this question before as well. The response I got was “well, apparently they do that in Sweden.” Well, hooray for the Swedes! God bless ‘em! Can we please ask them to invade?

Once, when I was Resident Manager at the theology student housing at Candler, as I was using a shop-vac to suck up water from an overflowing bathtub on the second floor at 3 AM, I asked the Japanese theology students, a very sweet couple, why they had not been concerned when their bathtub began to overflow. He said, “I thought the drain in the floor would take care of it.” I said, “there isn’t a drain in the floor.” He asked, “why not?” Exactly! Some homebuilder - someone American - should have thought, “you know, sometimes bathtubs overflow. Sometimes dishwashers leak. Sometimes, when people are operating indoor plumbing, water will actually flow in a downward direction. Maybe we should put a DRAIN IN THE FLOOR. And because grown men occasionally but of course very seldom miss the potty while urinating, perhaps we should reconsider carpeting the bathroom.”

Since I’m always on the lookout for implicit theologies, I’m thinking there is an implicit theology wrapped up in the design of houses. I think the dominant theology of the 50’s and 60’s was sort of a traditionalist evangelical pseudo-Puritanism a la Jonathan Edwards, and the house design reflects his famous sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” Crumb-catchers and soffits are a holdover from this earlier period, and they are here to remind us that we are very, very bad people, and that God doesn’t so much love us as hate our stinking guts, and were it not for grace He would fling us into the eternal fire and torment which we truly deserve.

This may be why keep procrastinating about mopping the kitchen.