Communion

Last night I had communion in a pub. I didn't plan to, it just kind of happened. And I have to say, it was pretty awesome.

I get together at this pub every couple weeks or so with a few friends to have drinks and discuss various culturally relevant topics of interest to all of us. We call ourselves The Philosophers Club, I guess because we couldn't come up with anything much nerdier than that. (I mean honestly, could you?) But inevitably, no matter what topic we start out with — the evils of Facebook (that's usually my idea), the nature of truth, the pursuit of happiness — we always end up talking about church and Christianity. And last night was no exception.

Confession time: I haven't been to church in several weeks now, because my church is in my black books lately. It's hard for me to articulate exactly why, but basically I'm annoyed at the whole programmatic aspect of the endeavor. Church isn't a place to be anymore, if it ever was, at least in America. No, it's a whole new To Do list, especially when you add up the myriad of activities beyond the Sunday sermon to help you get "plugged in" or "connected" (and notice the terminology of mechanization).

As if we weren't busy enough already in our lives.

Here's the thing. I don't want to join a "small group", or lead one. I don't want to go on a missions trip. I don't want to go on my church's annual retreat, a decision that people simply can't understand when I don't offer up a good excuse along with it, such as, "I'm dying." And so help me God, if I hear the word "community" or the phrase "doing life together" one more time, I'm going to puke on someone's face.

What I want is rest. I want silence. I want mystery. And I want communion. But I don't particularly want church. At least not right now.

I said some of this to my fellow philosophers (all two of them) last night. Not in so many words, but that was the gist. At least it must have been, because the next thing I knew, one of them was flagging down the waitress (who, I thought, was already a tiny bit annoyed at us for not buying beer or food this time, just coffee and dessert) to tell her, "We'd like to do communion. Can we have some wine and a side of bread?"

I felt a little weird about it at first. Praying over the bread and wine when it was brought to our courtyard table, while some sports event played out on the big screen TV behind me. Passing the elements around and trying not to look at fellow diners to see if they were looking at us. But after we prayed, after we read the Passover passage from the Gospel of Luke off of my friend's iPad, after we broke the bread and shared the wine, we sat back, looked at each other, and said, 'Wow. That was really nice."

And you know what? It was. Really, really nice.

An interesting little addendum to this story: Today I found out that last Sunday the topic at my church was... the meaning of communion. Weird, right? Maybe God's trying to tell me something. Maybe I'll try not to think about what it might be. Because I have this sick feeling it involves the word "community." Ugh.

NanoWriMo 2010!

Well, it's November and that means it's also National Novel Writing Month. Somewhat to my own surprise, my friend Drew managed to talk me into participating this year. "It works out to 1,667 words a day," he said. Which sounded doable.

Until today, of course, when NanoWriMo officially begins. And of course my mind is blank.

Soooo, anyone have a first sentence lying around that they don't need? Just curious.

Honk If You REALLY Love Jesus

The other night I was driving along Los Feliz Blvd when I found myself behind a car with a bumper sticker that said, "Honk if you LOVE it!" And I found myself wondering if people who have these "Honk if you love [whatever]" stickers on their car actually remember that they do. I mean, if someone behind them honks, do they think, "Cool, that person liked my bumper sticker!" or do they freak out and wonder if they did something wrong, or do they just plain go from zero to road rage and flip off whoever honked?

I considered honking to find out, but L.A. isn't really the sort of place where you want to drive around playing games with your horn, so I didn't.

Besides, the "Honk if you LOVE it!" sticker was underneath another sticker that said, "Real men find Jesus sexually attractive," and that gave me other stuff to wonder about. Mainly, why?

It's mostly a rhetorical question.

I Obsess Like

While the rest of the world is riveted by the saga of the Chilean miners, I have been obsessing over the I Write Like website. This should tell you something about me, but I hope you'll ignore it..

The important thing to note is that I finally got the website to say that I write like someone I wouldn't mind writing like. Someone other than Dan Brown, Stephen King, Chuck Palahniuk (I really can't believe I got compared to the author of Fight Club), Isaac Asimov and Rudyard Kipling.

Today I achieved... drum roll, please... no, really, I want the drum roll, so please do it... thank you... get ready now...

Ernest Hemingway!

Now, I'm trying not to think about the fact that I allegedly write like old white guys. I'm also trying not to think about the fact that I have actually been obsessing over what a website has to say about my writing. And I'm also also trying not to think about the fact that I got Hemingway after typing the following three lines into the "analyzer":

"The unicorn was dead when they found it. Nothing they could have done. That didn't make them feel any better."

I know. I have issues. Lots of them. But hey, so did Hemingway. Did I mention I write like him? A website told me so. Booyah.

A Rant of Biblical Proportions

Yesterday on my way home from breakfast, I stopped at a local used bookstore that specializes in books on Christian theology and spirituality. I wasn't looking for anything in particular, but as I walked in I remembered that I had been thinking about getting a chronological Bible and decided to see if they had any. But I was only in their "Bibles" section for two seconds before I felt the familiar weariness that is my standard reaction to Christian bookstores as a whole.

There were so many Bibles. I'm not talking about translations here; I'm talking about "The Couple's Devotional Bible", the "Celebrate Recovery Bible", "The Groom's Bible" (subtitle: "preparing spiritually for the most important day of your life"), and the one that really made me gag, the "Busy Life Bible" ("Got a minute? Only a minute? This Bible is designed just for you").

There were Bibles for students, for dads, for "all people" (I guess just in case, God forbid, a niche market was overlooked). There was an "Inclusive" Bible, which sounds like the Bible for all people, except it's not; it's an "egalitarian" Bible, meaning it uses words like humankind instead of mankind, and so on. There were indeed chronological Bibles (none of which I ended up buying), as well as one-year reading plan Bibles and study Bibles — including the "Inspirational Study Bible", edited, to my complete lack of surprise, by Max Lucado.

I'm not going to make some big point here (probably to your complete lack of surprise). I just feel kind of sad. It's bad enough, in my opinion, that American Christianity has been commodified into bumper stickers and T-shirts with saccharine slogans on them, or Jesus Christ action figures, or (God forgive us) this. All of that is plain awful, period. But what can you expect from people who see in the sacred text itself an opportunity for profit? Every carefully branded iteration of what used to be simply The Holy Bible is yet another triumph of marketing over mystery.

We talk about Christ paying the price for our sins. Well, believe me, he still does.

Technical Difficulties... Again

OK, so I just posted something which may have gone out via RSS or whatever, but I had to delete it here because for some reason that I can't figure out, Blogger is cutting off the last part of the post. I've tried re-creating the post, re-publishing it, etc, but it's not working. So I'm going to try again tomorrow. In the meantime, please enjoy the music during this brief intermission...

What, there's no music?? Dang. I can't do anything right today.

You Know How Something Can Seem Like A Hilarious Idea At the Time....

...and then later, you realize, no. No, it really wasn't.

Yeah, I'm kind of having one of those days.

On another note (because no, I am not giving details), it's a gray day here in SoCal and I can't decide how I feel about it. I mean, OK, last week's record high triple-digit temps were a bit much even for this sun-lovin' girl, but it's a bit weird that a mere few days later I could be bundled up in a sweater, a beanie, a scarf and jeans.

But hey, that's how we roll in the Golden State anymore. Thanks, global warming!

Anyway, I'm sitting in a coffeeshop today, trying to write but (as usual) mostly not succeeding. I kind of think I should just give up today, but I'm feeling stubborn. Sadly, my stubbornnes is not directed so much at getting anything done as it is at complaining about the fact that I'm not getting anything done.

I am a woman of very badly prioritized determinations, what can I say. And no, I really am not going to tell you about the Hilarious Idea That Wasn't. Sorry. Some things are better left to the imagination.

(Actually, I'm starting to wonder if my writing might fall into that category Gah! Let's hope not.)

UPDATE: I'm glad to note I'm not the only one winning awards in the Ideas That Weren't Incredibly Awesome In Retrospect department.