Lutherans and Sexuality

Don't, unless you do

Garrison Keillor, Star Tribune

The ELCA had the good sense to issue its report on sexuality the week before a major snowstorm and so the church's new guidelines on blessing same-sex relationships and ordaining people in an SSR didn't arouse the storm and fury one might have expected. People were thinking about shoveling their sidewalks, a life-and-death issue for those of us in the coronary stage of life. And when you imagine toppling over into a snowbank with chest pains and your last thought before expiring is "Boy, she was right, I shouldn't have," then the whole issue of whether Pastor Sandvik should bless the union of Bruce and Kent -- it's just not that big a deal. Up in Stearns County, you've got Catholic priests blessing snowmobiles, for crying out loud, and on the Feast Day of St. Francis the Episcopalians are bringing cats and dogs and hamsters and newts and amoeba in to be blessed, so what's the harm in blessing two young guys, even if maybe they do fuss over their hair more than a person should?

The report was a lovely example of muddling through, which Lutherans are good at. They are people of great modesty and even greater compassion. And also bravery. The question of SSRs is one that firebrands on both sides are up in arms about and ready to burn villages and blow up bridges. The Task Force was given the assignment three years ago, long before the wave of gay marriages, and it proceeded to hold hundreds of elaborately patient and painfully respectful meetings and discuss the thing to (yawn) death and finally write a report that restated the question in terms you wouldn't understand and took 40 pages to avoid answering it and affirm a policy of Don't ask, don't tell, never mind.

In 1996, the church had said, "Marriage is a lifelong covenant of faithfulness between a man and a woman." It was willing to ordain gay people who were in a chaste, or unconsummated, relationship, a USSR, but not in a sexy one. After due study, the Task Force acknowledged the deep divisions over the whole SSR question, reaffirmed the 1996 position while accepting that people in good conscience might choose to challenge it and asking them to be careful if they do and not make a big show of it but saying that if they do do what they will, probably nobody would give them a hard time about it.

In other words: Nothing has changed essentially, we don't approve, though in a sense we do but probably not, but if you go ahead and do it, don't feel bad about it, we understand.

This is the beauty of bureaucracy. It absorbs and deflects violence and anger by causing confusion and annoyance and writing a lovely amorphous mishmash of sentences like extruded marshmallows and thus the peace is kept. Militants on either side are outraged, but they enjoy outrage, that is their art form. The rest of us are grateful to be spared the sound and the fury and to be able to attend church on Sunday morning without having to wear a badge. As important as sexuality may be, it surely isn't any more important than snow, and if you feel, in good conscience, that God didn't intend snow to be part of your life, then you may want to head for Arizona, which is OK, though we will miss you and I do beseech you to return my shovel before you go, it is hanging in your garage, not that I want to go ask you for it, I don't want to put you on the spot and make you feel bad, though it's hard to understand how you could forget about a thing like that but if you do and you go off to Phoenix, don't beat yourself up over it, we will get along somehow as best we can. This is the Lutheran way.

Trois

I finished Alexandre Dumas's The Three Musketeers yesterday. My first reaction was that it isn't half the book that The Count of Monte Cristo is, and I'm not talking about page count (although that's true too). After sleeping on it, I've decided that my reaction is justified, for I have two significant problems with Musketeers that prevent me from enjoying it as much as I expected to at the onset. First, the three musketeers and D'Artagnan are too easy going; they drink too much and gamble too much. While one might argue this is the source of their charm, it is unacceptable in light of how many good-guys are murdered through the course of the story. If their losses were none, then I could forgive them their indulgences, but as it is, I feel like they fail to do enough. Second, the four heroes sometime seem a powerless as a result of the book being set in an historical context and including major players of French history. Cardinal Richelieu in particular seems untouchable, not in the way that Sauron of The Lord of the Rings is untouchable, but simply because the fictional swordsmen can't be allowed to interact significantly with the real-life churchman. I don't think I'll be reading either of the sequels anytime soon; I've had my fill of Monsieur D'Artagnan.

Double Take

Something about my list of required books has been bothering me. I couldn't put my finger on it, but somewhere in the dark recesses of my mind I knew that there was something odd about the collection of books I've purchased this semester. In the past couple days I began to realize that something seemed slightly familiar about the name of the James Joyce expert who is often sited in my copy of Dubliners. And when I received my copy of Ulysses Annotated: Notes for James Joyce's Ulysses in the mail today, I understood why. That same well-known Joyce scholar also happened to edit a little book called The Literature of Architecture: The Evolution of Architectural Theory and Practice in Nineteenth Century America, which has been assigned to me for my course in American post-colonial architecture. The book of annotations for Ulysses is newer, and it simply says:

Don Gifford was Emeritus Professor of English at Williams College at his death in 2000.

The architecture book, on the other hand, was published in 1966 and is far more interesting:

DON GIFFORD is a Professor of English at Williams College, where he has taught for the past fifteen years. He was educated at The Principia College in Illinois, at Cambidge University, and at Harvard University. During World War II he drove an ambulance in the American Field Service before serving in the Army of the United States. After the war Mr. Gifford tried his hand at writing novels and working on commercial films before he settled down to teach, first at Mills College of Education in New York and subsequently at Williams. His teaching career has occasionally been interrupted by periods of work as a consultant to various industries on the process of invention.

I wish I could have had taken a course with him. I certaintly wouldn't have minded spending sometime in Williamstown, Massachusetts. I enjoyed my one brief visit in October 2002, and I've wished for some time to have a chance to vistit the Clark Art Institute, which has an impressive collection.

Downward

I looked at my AIM Buddy List this evening; 36 of my buddies were on, and all 36 of them were away. I continued my reading of The Three Musketeers, but instead of more swashbuckling action I got a tragic account of the brainwashing of an innocent young man by a most evil woman. Everyone I expected to see around the dorm this evening showed up late and showed up drunk. When I hit the Play/Pause button on my keyboard I got "The Downward Spiral" from the Nine Inch Nails album with the same title. I'm not done with the book yet; the bad-guys are still winning, but I'm too tired to continue. I'm going to bed; I'm sure things will seem cheerier in the morning.

My neck of the woods

Ryan, the instructor of my Environmental Conservation course, seems to be a full out Mac-geek, and before class today I had developed a theory that his favorite toy is the 360°-panorama feature of Quicktime. He'd started two of the first three lectures by spinning us around a photographed landscape, and the trend continued today. This time we got the exciting opportunity to look around a farm in Brooklyn Park, Minnesota, the suburb directly east of my hometown of Maple Grove. Ryan told us that it was an example of "regulation of landscape." I asked him why he had chosen Brookly Park of all places. He answered that there were only a limited number of sites that have been recorded in a panorama. I think my theory holds.

KO'd

Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings have established themselves as sleepy-time. I have two fifty-minute lectures back to back. This first one (Environmental Conservation) moves very slowly and puts me in a state of drowsiness. The second one (Ancient and Medieval Art) is reasonably interesting but takes place in a dark room with padded chairs, which thus far has made sleep unavoidable. I do not want to sleep through Art History; I want to learn the material. I'm considering two option to amend the present situation. I can start drinking a glass with Mountain Dew with breakfast, hoping that the caffeine will keep me awake without making me to antsy to focus. I'm not keen on this idea, since caffeine sometimes makes me feel irrationally trapped. The other option that readily presents itself is to start skipping the first class some days, and just reading the lecture outlines off of the website. I'm not thrilled with this plan either, since I don't like to miss lectures, but I have to say that today's class encouraged me to go in this direction.

The instructor's prepared lecture ended when we still had ten minutes remaining. He managed to start up a loose discussion among the students about Native American's effect on the land and whether European travelers were coming to a largely natural or a substantially cultivated landscape. The lecture had covered shifting agriculture, controlled burns, irrigation and other methods employed by the indigenous peoples, and the following discussion revolved around how invasive or how "natural" the techniques were. Opinions varied widely. One male student argued that it's better to compare Native Americans to river-damming beavers that to the Europeans that invaded the continent. One female student said that the excessive hunting of beavers by natives during the fur trading era proves that Native Americans never had any more respect for the land than Europeans. I tend to fall in between these two views, for I feel that both have merit. But I was annoyed when one girl said she wondered what "the Native American perspective on the matter" was. Our instructor (I won't call him a professor because he had yet to earn is PhD) said that she presented an interesting question, and then he asked if anyone in the room was of Native American heritage. I didn't like where this was heading, so I interrupted, "I'd like to point out that the various nations and tribes of North America would likely have widely varying views on this matter. I've been researching the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge; there are two groups of people living there, the Gwich'in and the Iñupiat. The the Iñupiat are the poster tribe of Big Oil and firmly support drilling in the area, and the Gwich'in are fighting tooth and nail to preserve the land. I think it's too simple to think of there being a single 'Native American perspective.'" The instructor said that I had an excellent point. He continued on that his own wife was one-eighth Native American, and that she had been surprised to learn that her ancestors had employed substantial landscape-altering techniques, so we shouldn't assume there is a single view. I didn't try to participate after that.

Limited Visibility

I may not get to be in NYC for their snow this weekend, but we're getting a nice little fall of our own here in Madison. I took a short stroll with Sarah and Evan; I wish more of the people with whom we were sharing the sidewalks had been sufficiently sober to appreciate the beauty of it.

Unclear

I popped into The University Bookstore this morning on my way to class to pick up a new notebook for my MWF classes and a couple of cards for some birthdays that are coming up in the next couple of months. I couldn't find a birthday card I liked (all that had fun covers had irritating attempts at humor within), so I reverted to my usual plan B and tried to find a quirky blank card. I think I succeeded, and grabbed a pair of the same design (which I won't describe beyond saying that they're a touch on the fuzzy side). I went to pay, and the check-out woman praised me for what great cards I had chosen. While I felt 'great' was too strong a word, I simply said that I hoped that the recipients would agree with her. She looked at me with a puzzled expression and asked me who was sick. I assumed she had misheard me (the 'si' sound is in both words), so I said, "oh, no, I said recipients." But that didn't seem to do if for her. "Recipients:" I continued hesitantly, "the people who will be receiving the cards." This was apparently what was needed to clear things up, for she smiled and gave me a good natured "oh, I see!"

Joe Ienuso, Chair of the Emergency Management Operations Team and Acting Vice President of Facilities Management at Columbia University emailed me just a few minutes ago and warned me that New York City may be getting up to a foot of snow this weekend. I wish I could be there to go walking through Central Park early one of these snowy mornings.

Spring 2005 / Ywimpled

Today marked the first day of classes in what is presumably my last semester here at Madison. I'm taking seventeen credits, and my course list is as follows:

Introduction to Cryptography
James Joyce
Environmental Conservation
Art History: Ancient and Medieval
The Rise of American Post Colonial Architecture

I started the first two classes this morning. The math course went as expected, although I had the distinct impression that there are few math majors in there besides the professor and myself; most of the pasty male-dominated class seemed to be from the computer science department or the engineering school. James Joyce was another matter entirely. We took attendance, and then our professor sighed and said that it was time for him to try to dissuade us from taking the class. He spoke at length about the tediousness and difficulty of reading Ulysses and quoted criticism from a few of the novel's more esteemed detractors. He suggested we read one of particular episode of the book tonight so that we can see if we really want to continue. (The episode he recommended is generally known as "Oxen of the Sun," a name given to it by Joyce himself, although never within the pages of Ulysses.)

I've finished Thursday's actual assigned reading, so I've been "reading" the section. In truth, I've found it to be impenetrable thus far, but intriguing nonetheless. Heck, just a title like "Oxen of the Sun" has me interested. Still, sentences such as 'Before born babe bliss had.' are quite challenging. Even individual words give me a run for my money. This is almost certainly the first time I've ever encountered "ywimpled." For this word, I did a quick Google search. jheem on Wordsmith.org says "The y- prefix is from the earlier Old English ge- prefix, which like its cognate in German, is one of the signs of the past participle in Old and Middle English...A wimple is a nun's hood which covers the nun's head and hair. It's sort of like a Christian burqa, but different from a snood. So, ywimpled would mean wearing a wimple or being a nun."

I think this class has the potential to be one of the most highly educational of my college career.

Back In The Madtown

My last week or so in Minnesota was quite cold, and today I confirmed that the phenomenon extends at least as far eastward as Madison. As a result, I've been constantly wearing the scarf that my dearest friend Claire made for my twentieth birthday. It's a beautiful thing, crocheted in long stripes of white, green, and charcoal yarn; with the fringe at both ends included its about two meters in length. I think fringe looks right on a scarf, but so far it's been quite a neuscence (and will be for couple more weeks, Claire warned me). Lint from the fringe has been getting everywhere. I was in the shower a couple mornings ago, having not touched the scarf for about ten hours. My hair was shampooed and I was soaping up when I felt somethng on my tongue in my closed mouth. What did I find? Some of the green. Later that day I was guarding at the pool and I felt something on my eyelashes. What did I find? Some of the white. Today looked down at my Cheerios. What did I find? Some of the charcoal.

Back In Action

We bought a copy of DOOM 3 for my Dad when Best Buy sold it for thirty dollars as an after-Christmas special, but it ended up sitting unopened until I completed the last of my graduate school applications. I haven't played it for more than 100 minutes or so, but I'm already very impressed. The atmosphere is chilling, and the simplicity of the weapons is refreshing. There are no alternate fire modes, which makes the gameplay manageable for my dad and sister haven't done too much gaming since DOOM II, which didn't involve looking up and down, but only left and right. I've played a few other games (primarily Counter-Strike and Jedi Knight II), so the three-dimensional environment is nothing unusual, but I'm appreciating having a single fire-mode since it allow me to focus on the more important process of switching back and forth between a gun and the oh-so-helpful flashlight. If you like computer games, I'm already sufficiently impressed with this one to recommend it, although I'd suggest waiting for a good deal.

All Good Things

I finished Stephen King's The Dark Tower series today. I've been reading the quest of the gunslinger Roland Deschain for...how many years now? Five, I suppose. That's not nearly so long as the journey has been for many readers, but it's long enough that I'm sad to have no more ahead of me. It was well-written and engrossing throughout, and I was left with no doubt that King earned his Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2003. He is a gifted storyteller, and The Dark Tower captures his ability to bend language, creating new words that by the end of a story seem as familiar as any we can find in the Oxford English Dictionary.