The Blog With No Name

I recently turned 40. I’ve been waiting eagerly for this day for some time. I figured one of these days I’d get over that “what I’m going to do when I grow up” feeling, and that 40 would do it for me. Can’t say that much has changed though. I’m still easily pleased (Cider! ON TAP! Woot!) by the small things in life (Prayer of the Day already translated into Spanish on the ELCA web site, yay!), which is not a bad way to go through life.

I’m more shocked at the fact that I have a TEN-YEAR-OLD daughter, who knows the names of ROCK STARS I’ve never heard of, and a seven-year-old son, who just yesterday was a Bob the Builder fanatic and now goes camping with his dad on Scout outings and is almost doing long division. NOT TO MENTION, all of a sudden being tall enough to go on the big water slides at the pool!! WTF?? When in the heck did that happen?

I, who am now 40, have just wasted two hours of my life at a library committee meeting for my kids’ school. Four other people were in the room; all nice, smart, politically agreeable, knowledgeable people. With no agenda, and a bottle of wine (I was drinking Pepsi, thankyouverymuch). AT LEAST two of the people in the room should have known better. Much of the material we discussed could have been distributed before the meeting. Much of the random gossip and chit-chat could have been eliminated. I could have been home an hour ago, starting some laundry, making cookies for the boy to take to school for his SEVENTH BIRTHDAY (yikes). But no, I was sitting in this nice woman’s dining room, wanting to strangle someone. Anyone. I’ve obviously been reading too much 43folders.com. Sigh. So much for getting to bed early tonight.

We had a staff communications workshop recently at work. How to not avoid conflict, but make it work for you. Conflict as a tool for growth, an idea well-known to any good student of the dialectic. My boss fears that as the congregation grows, and consequently the staff, more opportunities for conflict and misunderstanding will arise, so she scheduled this workshop to head it off at the pass, so to speak. It was well done, and gave me a few insights into my work style. It crystallized in my mind a problem that I am having with a co-worker; or rather not having, as I have not addressed the issue directly (I appear to be engaging in triangling, which means bitching talking about one person to another person):

I resent being made to feel inadequate when I am repeatedly asked to do things at the last possible moment. Discuss.

I also realize that I completely ignore congregation members who are not online. That is not good.

It’s a sad day for me, as I’ve just learned that I’m going to have to start buying whiskey. Some time ago I found a very simple marinade online for salmon that contained whiskey. The first few times around, I simply omitted the alcohol. The other day though I had access to a bit, and made the marinade properly. OMSFJ (see if you can expand that…) it was outstanding. I should have photographed it.

My daughter, as the result of a mother-daughter shopping trip recently, is the proud owner of her first bra. Sigh. As we wandered through the local mall department stores, looking for the right section, we came across objects that were puzzling to my daughter, and sometimes even to me. Lingerie for women who wear much fancier clothing than I do, that’s for sure. And of course, my daughter being my (endlessly inquisitive) daughter, there were the questions: why do women wear bras? why do men not always have to wear shirts, but women do? Why do women do (fill in the blank) to look attractive? And so on and so on – entire college courses in marketing, sociology, and women’s studies all rolled up into a two-hour chicks night out. It was exhausting.

I just finished this book the other day, and found it really interesting. He spends a great deal of time discussing how manuscripts were copied back in the time the books of the New Testament were reproduced up through the middle ages. One the one hand, a lot of what he says falls into the “duh!” category, if you really think about it – copyists, being human, made mistakes; transposed letters, skipped or repeated lines, all those things that error-prone human beings do.

(As a sidelight, he pointed out that by keeping track of different errors, you can make a sort of genealogy of manuscripts – if three copies of one book were made, one copy going to Alexandria, one copy going to Rome, and one copy going to Antioch [I'm making those examples up, by the way], and each copy had a different error, you could track the subsequent copies of each manuscript made by tracking the errors found only in the original copies, if that makes sense. Neat!)

Now here is the part that had never really struck me at all, given that I’m not a theologian and have never studied the Bible in any serious way. The author, who was born again in high school and went through some pretty hard-core evangelical education, finally realized that there is no way to know what the original documents said. Consequently, since God could have preserved His divinely-inspired words to the apostles, and since we know that we don’t have the original words, therefore God did not inspire the writing of any of the New Testament. So the books of the New Testament were written by and for the early Christians, human beings prone to error and given to politicking.

Rather sad to learn, on the other hand, that the King James Version of the Bible is complete and utter crap. Oh well.

So all in all I am confirmed in my belief that people who wave their Bibles in the air and talk about the INERRANT WORD OF GOD (in English! It is to laugh) are complete whack jobs.