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In the middle of the political and pseudo-celebrity flapdoodle over Mark Sanford, governor of South Carolina and occasional voice for family values conservatism, there’s a question I keep asking in the back of my mind.
How would I handle this if he were a member of a church where I served?
All too often, when a high profile married man in church life is caught out publicly in infidelity, he can’t get away from the church fast enough — and candidly, most of my experience pastorally is where the woman attended but the man did not, and wasn’t even an inactive member.
But in this case, while I’m hearing — to my great frustration — the usual rationalizations and justifications interwoven with the acceptance of responsibility and request for forgiveness, there is clearly a glimmer of a sense that this man knows he has done wrong, knows he should not have gone down that road, knows he should have stopped himself long ago . . . and yet he went back down to Argentina, which he seems to have figured out was a bad idea to start with, but didn’t quite regret so much as was sorry he’d gotten caught.
But let’s say he went down “to break it off” (yes, I know, that means he thought there was still a chance, since whether across town or around the globe, going to visit the person “to break it off” is never a good sign), and now he is . . . well, let’s say he’s trying to change his ways, and realizes, or is starting to realize, that this was sin and he is in it up to his ankles, head first.
How, pastorally, do you talk to and work with this man? And how do you speak to the wronged spouse — and don’t give me the “it takes two to tango,” since a) that’s not in the Bible, and b) no, it often doesn’t take two, just one — so when the offender asks you to speak to the offendee, how do you respond?
The Sanfords have CNN and a house on Sullivans Island and a million Twitter comments, but in many ways the story, with the attractive other woman, the father-in-law sitting on the porch, and children caught in the middle . . . it’s a story that plays out in and next door to our congregations, I dare say almost every month, if not every day.
What would your pastoral counsel be? Not just for clergy, but for church leaders in general? Do we just stick with the hollow joke of “who gets custody of the church?’ which we know often ends up being “neither.”
And we just can’t leave Jon and Kate + 8 out of the picture, where I keep thinking of the counseling I’d hope they each could get (and i’ve never seen any of the shows except last Mondays, so I’m new to this one). The Sanfords and the Gosselins have presented themselves as struggling, conflicted, believing, committed Christians. As Christians, how would we as church reach out to them?
[This was my weekly “Faith Works” newspaper column on 5-09 in the Newark (OH) Advocate.]
Yes, I am a Trekkie.
It’s said that hard-core fans of Star Trek prefer “Trekker,” but i’ve never heard anyone use that term for themselves, and I have trouble believing I’m not hard-core enough.
When “Star Trek” was a TV show (now, with so many later elements of the franchise, that is known as TOS for “The Original Series”), I saw it first in black and white. It was made in color, of course, but I may have seen one of the four or five I saw as a kid on a color set.
Then it went into syndicated reruns, but the basement TV was black and white, so I had a pretty shaky sense of who wore what color – for instance, I was slow on picking up the fact that a red shirt, unless your name was Scotty, meant you were plot filling dead meat, waiting for Bones McCoy, ship’s doctor, to look up and (never) say “He’s dead, Jim.”
I knew where my crew berth was, on Deck 8, aft portside, sector 24 on the TOS USS Enterprise NCC-1701, on Deck 13 (they aren’t superstitious in the 23rd century, or the 24th) on TNG’s NCC-1701D. It looked out from the underside of the saucer section towards the prow of the port nacelle, with an external bulkhead that sloped inwards towards the deck.
Is that Trekkie enough for you?
What I didn’t see a place for in the Star Trek universe was my faith. This was, obviously, no accident; the crew was certainly multicultural enough, with Uhura, Sulu, and Chekov, and more than multiracial with Spock on TOS and Worf on TNG. So presenting any kind of religious perspective would have been challenging, but should have made sense.
Anyone who has ever known a chaplain in any branch of the military would understand the challenge, and have stories about how you work past and around and through them.
But Gene Roddenberry, the creator of the Star Trek universe, saw from the traumas of World War II and in the optimism of the 60’s where it all began, a future where science would give everyone a rational, reasonable, evidence-based, faith-free world.
He couldn’t resist giving Spock a coldly rational kind of spirituality that hinted at . . . something, but for the rest of the crew . . .
It didn’t matter to me, since I always inferred for myself a chaplain and a chapel just around one of those endlessly curving corridors, just out of sight. After my call to ministry came and I went to seminary, one of my papers was written essentially as a story, only vaguely disguised as the Trek universe, with the protagonist a chaplain on board a ship that wasn’t quite the Enterprise. (Actually, it was a Miranda class starship called the USS Bozeman, but that’s another story.)
The professor found the basic elements of what the paper was supposed to contain, graded that, and then added a note “but what happens next?” That’s what makes the Trekkie experience what it is, I guess – it doesn’t end when we leave the theater or turn off the TV.
Science fiction doesn’t always ditch the clergy or religious context of life in the future. Orson Scott Card, a committed and active Mormon, always shows the life of faith in his novels; not always the Latter Day Saints, either. The best example (from my point of view, anyhow) may be in “The Mote in God’s Eye” by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, where an obvious homage to the Trek universe can be seen in the descriptions of the bridge of the INSS MacArthur.
The CoDominium Navy in this future history has chaplains, and in the “first contact” at the center of this book, an Anglican clergyman and linguist is sent along on the voyage, shown performing both roles in the narrative; another ship in the novel, crewed largely by ethnic Russians, is the INSS Lenin, which has an icon corner on their bridge with a nearby samovar of tea bubbling away.
Many science fiction authors, if not Gene Roddenberry, see a lively and vital role for a robust faith when they look into the future through their unique lenses.
Our family went Thursday night to see the new, “rebooted” Star Trek movie, and I’ve blogged about it as a movie at the newarkadvocate.com website. There’s still no chaplain, unless you count Bones, who strikes me as a doctor whose grandfather was a Southern Baptist minister just outside of Atlanta and has issues, but still questions that take him back to that childhood congregation, where . . .*
See? We just can’t let it alone. Where else do you see faith at work and at play just under the surface, and how does your own faith weave into those imaginary pictures?
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he holds the rank of Lt. Commander in Starfleet on a Cultural Contact Mitigation team (in his imagination). Tell him your story, true or imaginary, at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow “Knapsack” at Twitter.com.
*In fact, DeForest Kelley’s father was a Baptist preacher!
(This appeared as my newspaper column, “Notes From My Knapsack” in the Granville (OH) Sentinel 4-23-09, just before Ms. Saberi was convicted and sentenced, and word came out of her planned hunger strike pending an appeal in the Iranian court system. Please keep her in your prayers! No word in subsequent coverage about whether she got her books, but i’m praying for that, too.)
Roxana Saberi is a freelance reporter whose work has been on NPR along with other national venues.
Her profile may have gotten a small boost from being Miss North Dakota over a decade ago, and her ethnic background with Iranian parents led her to try to cover the story of women’s lives in Iran from the inside.
If you’ve heard her story, it’s likely because she’s been arrested by the Iranian government on suspicion of espionage; which friends, family, and most recent employers all agree is balderdash. Sharing accounts of how women have to live in the Islamic Republic of Iran may be as worrisome to authorities there as the possibility of spies checking out their atomic program, since neither issue gains them much favor around the world.
What caught my attention about Ms. Saberi’s story is a recent development, when her parents traveled to Iran and finally got the chance to visit her in prison. They asked her what they could bring her, and she asked for books.
Specifically, she requested Plutarch’s “Lives,” a biography of Gandhi, and a French dictionary, since many Iranians speak that language (odd quirks of colonial history pop up across the Middle East – lots of older Iraqis speak German, especially if they worked on the railroads).
Still no word (as of this writing) about whether she will be allowed these books in her cell, but it set me to thinking “what books would I ask for if I had a long undefined stretch ahead of me?”
For myriad reasons, I’d ask for a Bible, ideally with the Apocrypha (extra books, y’know), but it isn’t clear whether that would be allowed in any case, just as they are entirely and shamefully illegal in Saudi Arabia.
Beyond that Book full of books, what else would I request? If I could only have, say, five other books, what would I pick? “Tristram Shandy” would top my list, and then . . . this gets hard! They would have to hold up under re-reading, not just be long, although length would have to be a criterion.
Herodotus’ “The Histories,” Dickens’ “David Copperfield,” “PrairyErth” by William Least Heat-Moon, where he does for Chase County, Kansas what I hope to do for Licking County someday, and then I think “Walden” by Henry David Thoreau.
When Shannon Lucid was up on the Russian “Mir” Space Station in 1996, and the internet was new, there was an interactive feature on a NASA website that allowed you to click through a series of pictures showing life during her then-record-setting nearly 200 days in space.
In one shot, within a mesh bag near her berth, I could make out the distinctive cover design of the Penguin Classics edition of “Walden” and I thought “Brilliant! The perfect book to take on such a trip.” When the Mir was “de-orbited” in 2001, I wondered, as we saw the footage of the burning hulk slash into the South Pacific on TV, did anyone bring that copy of Walden back home?
Having said all that, I wonder if poetry might not be a better choice for re-reading: a volume of Shakespeare’s plays (his birthday today!) and a collection each from Frost, Maxine Kumin, Jaroslav Seifert, and Billy Collins. What five books would you pick, in a prison or for a season in space? It’s an interesting thought experiment.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; toss him a list of books at knapsack77@gmail.com or on Twitter at “Knapsack.”
Just on down the road, a dust devil swirled into mad, manic life, and skittering across the dusty pathway, spun out into nothing among the rocks beyond.
He stepped cautiously forward, walking steadily but with hesitations, almost as one with a lame ankle or a sore toe. It was a fact that going up to Jerusalem necessarily meant going down as you left, whether to the east and down the rocky defiles leading to Jericho, or the longer and less steep decline to the west, on towards the Roman’s Mare Nostrum, the Great Sea, the Mother of Storms.
There had been great storms yesterday, and a shaking of the earth, but the western sky had not foreshadowed with “a cloud the size of a man’s hand” on the horizon. It came up suddenly, full of lightning and wind, but who had really been watching the skies off to one side?
Shaking his head, he banished the vision of Friday’s events from his mind, and went back to watching the ground closely, for loose rocks that could make his already shaky legs twist right out from beneath him. One sandal was already mended with cordage, where the leather had torn as he ran up the side of the olive tree covered slope, stepping on a rock in the late Thursday darkness. He’d been able to find the lost sandal and keep running, hopping, ludicrous in his fear mixed with anxiety over having to purchase a new sandal.
Even with Roman soldiers at his back, imagined in pursuit, poverty squeezed his thoughts into their mold. It was a puzzle still that they had not followed anyone, but the teacher, their leader, was apparently all they wanted.
A scrap of cord in a gardener’s shed near the top of the mount let him find his footing and his dignity of a sort. Back to their Passover throng’s campsite among the olive oil presses, the “gethsemane” workshop busy during the fall harvest, but where springtime visitors to the Holy City were welcome as out of season guests.
Among the rattled, confused followers of the Galilean rabbi whom he had recently joined, all that he could make out was that an arrest had happened, spurred by the betrayal of one of the core followers, the students, the “discipuli” who came to Jerusalem from the north.
Some said the soldiers had taken their captive to the main fortress overlooking the Temple Mount, the Antonia, others said it was to the Chief Priest’s palatial home at the other end of the city walls. Most went back to a troubled sleep.
By noon the next day there was no question where the focus of attention had turned, to the Romans’ preferred killing ground just west of the city’s exit to the west, the main road of commerce and travel, where most of the visitors for this sacred week would leave and have to choose to turn away, or to glance up, cringe, and keep moving.
He had stayed far away, but his wife joined a group of women who stood near the condemned man’s mother – odd how it was hard to think of him as a teacher, having been refuted and rejected and tormented to such a shameful death. He was the condemned man, innocent though he might be, but if Rome said he was guilty, then who . . .
Stumbling forward, starting at any sudden movement in the brush or stony slopes on either side, he kept his unsteady route to Ein Kerem. His wife had family there, and when they met near the city gate, after the dead body had been removed from the cross and carried to a nearby tomb, she told him they would meet at Ein Kerem tomorrow, and then Sunday walk on down to Emmaus, and from there back to Joppa. The women would grieve together, while the men scattered.
Cleopas thought about the hope for God’s active working in the world that he had felt so strongly just days before, and how hopeless he felt now, fearful again of bad luck, dust devils in his path, the weight of Roman rule hard across his shoulders.
He was glad the two of them were walking, not paying to rent a mule, but just taking one step at a time, quietly letting the miles wear the sadness down. There was an inn at Emmaus where he had known comfort before, and hoped to enjoy again; there they might find a measure of peace.
That was his prayer, as he walked away from Jerusalem on a Saturday afternoon.
____
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him a story at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow on Twitter at “Knapsack.”
So, clergy and congregational leaders — Easter Monday is an official holiday still in parts of Europe, but sadly it never caught on in this country. Except among exhausted church leadership who have worked themselves to a frazzle over the last eight days and simply collapse in a heap somewhere around 3:30 pm on Easter Sunday and don’t want to stand erect until late in the day that follows.
But my question isn’t “do you catch up on your rest Easter Monday,” since we all know the answer is “probably not,” with folks in hospitals still needing a visit and the last twelve lilies not delivered like someone, you forget whom, said as the Sunday service was ending that they’d take care of (et cetera, ad nauseum).
What i’m wondering about is, given that religious leadership spend so much of Palm Sunday and Maundy Thursday and Good Friday and Egg Saturday and Resurrection Sunday “doing” worship, what devotional practice or re-centering approach do some of you use to celebrate the Easter we often kinda miss while everyone else is experiencing Easter?
Are there particular prayers you go to, books you pick up and read from (other than Luke 24), places you visit (in person or in your mind), retreat practices alone or with others, or anything else you do to “get your Easter on,” on Easter Monday?
I’d love to hear about in the comments what some of y’all do, so others of us can pick up some clues as we groggily recover from the excess of joy, programming, and sugar over these next few days. Plus i’d love to see Easter Monday be a recognized holiday . . .
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