Balancing input & output

 

A paradox occurred to me some time ago.  In a way, it relates to the old computer-programming adage “garbage in, garbage out.”

I’m not often at rest.  That is to say, I’m not often simply relaxing without doing something else—or thinking about getting up to do something else—in the next 3 minutes.  I’m often concerned with having relatively high-quality input and will actually consider which pieces of mailed propaganda to take with me on a drive or a walk, if indeed any of it has any redeeming qualities.  I think about whether the piece will have anything to think about, anything I might need X (the number I expect to have) minutes to take in or to understand.  I think about the value and my state of mind and whether in a five-minute walk to “town” on this or that day I might be able to be thoughtful, or merely of a business mindset.

I kept a couple of library books around the house for more than a year because I believed they were of sufficient quality to warrant revisiting/completing.  My reading material is almost all nonfiction[1] and ranges from biblical hermeneutics and church history/issues, to a neurologistic look at the effects of the internet, to exhortations from well-known conductors and other musicians.

In sum:  it’s important to me to have good input for my head and heart.

Leaving alone the question of input quality (assessment:  am I really feeding myself well, or fooling myself?), the output of late has been less than usual.  Part of the reason for that was the different, lesser opportunities I had in the summer.  But one element of output—prayer—had been more lacking than usual, and more difficult, at that.

I’ve been told before (being kicked when I was down, I felt at the time) that when I’m struggling spiritually, I need to spend more time in scripture.  Earlier this fall, I was doing a fair amount of that.  So far, though, this increase in spiritual input has not led to more, or better-quality, output in the form of prayer.

The word “balance” comes to mind.

I once replied on someone’s Facebook wall that I tend to prefer movies known as “chick flicks.”  There are too many fights and sirens and gunshot wounds in “action” movies that males are supposed to like, and so much sci-fi is just stupid.  Someone else responded to the effect that a good street fight or gunshot wound is normal.  Then someone else wrote something about balance, as if to say “one chick flick, then one shoot-em-up Bruce Willis movie is healthy.”  The point here is not to comment on movies.  (If either of these folks had seen parts of “The Untouchables” that I saw the day before I started writing this post, I don’t think they would have responded with any interest in shoot-‘em-up movies.)

On the other hand, I think the Monty Python In Search of the Holy Grail scene in which body parts are being slashed off of an armored knight is hilarious.  The torso alone ends up on the ground, bobbing and hopping around, saying things like “it’s only a flesh wound” and “come back here … I’ll bite you, you pansy!”  The over-the-top “violence” of this scene is more along the lines of televised  pro wrestling, making it more fictional than truly violent.  I definitely don’t mean to get all self-righteous here; my standards are doubtless impeachable, and the input I experience is anything but consistent.

The paradox is that even when I’m most engaged in tremendously filling, nutritious input (read:  seriously involved in scripture), for some reason the output has not seemed to come in a balanced way.  There are more ways and means of output than prayer, and for me, thinking and writing/blogging is one important type of output, and musical compositions and arrangements represent another.

Maybe I’m more balanced than I realize.  Or, maybe not.  (Is there an emoticon for feigned diabolical laughter?)

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[1] Dealing entirely in nonfiction printed matter is one reason I fail to comprehend the proliferating desire for so-called “reality” TV shows.  When I sit in front of the tube, I want fiction.  This is not necessarily an admirable quality, and I have difficulty imagining Jesus needing fiction, but I want to be “taken away” from reality.  Even baseball games, which I love on one level, are hard for me to sit in front of sometimes, because they don’t engage my mind enough that I’ll get a reprieve from pressing realities.

Chartered chaplaincy

The British Monty Python comedy troupe once mocked the “chartered accountancy” profession, which I took as roughly comparable to the in-house-slash-CPA accountant line of work in the U.S.  It’s not that I want to mock the chaplaincy profession, exactly.  I just want to question it.

Hospitals have chaplains.  Prisons have chaplains.  And the military has chaplains.

I suppose it stands to reason that the student government and each academic class on a Christian college campus would have a chaplain.  A student from 3-4 few years ago comes to mind — she had been elected, as she was fond of saying, to serve simultaneously as “chaplain of everything” (three different, somewhat overlapping music student organizations).

In my limited experience, chaplains have been decent, basically good men & women.  My parents have a good friend who served for more than 30 years as an Air Force chaplain.  He’s a good guy.  I knew a guy who was involved in a church plant at the same time that he was a hospital chaplain in a sizable city.  He was a good guy, too.  Especially in the case of students, I assume that those elected have exhibited some spiritually minded trait that at least marginally impressed a marginal number of peers.  Or, peradventure, there were simply more posters and fliers with that person’s name.  (Catch the drift of my faith in the election process?)  I’m not sure what the chaplain of the sophomore class really does, but presumably that person at least gets asked to lead a couple of public prayers every year, and maybe s/he organizes dorm devotionals like a military company’s calisthenics.

Once someone is a officially a chaplain, officialness may take over.  Gone are the days of spontaneous insight and Christian living and more or less apt devotings–replaced by the need to organize and serve in official capacities.  Now, it’s office and liturgy over meaning and content.

That happens to a lot of us.  Once we get ensconced and entrenched, we lose something of the substance.  I worry about this regularly in my work–periphery can so easily eclipse central tenets and essence.  But the more official, public, and visible the person, the worse this syndrome.

Worse, though, than creeping supercession of clergy function over authentic, meaningful Christian influence and leadership is the watering down and amalgamation of everything that goes under the name of religion into the chaplain’s office.  At some point, soon after being nominated or elected to the chaplaincy, one is forced to pluralize, accepting and supporting everything from Wicca to Mormonism, including  those who think it’s cool to be newly Muslim, hippy-California-Buddhists, and an odd Zoroastrian adherent or three.  In the case of a Christian college chaplain, the spectrum will of course be more narrow, but it still may span Seventh-Day Adventism, Calvinism, Romanism, televangelism, Lutheranism, Pentecostalism, anabaptism, Methodism, and community churches.  Whatever.  No matter the mainstreamness or out-in-left-field-ness, it is necessary for a chaplain to be inclusive.  This is his job.

Soon, the chartered chaplain either passes out from exhaustion or retreats into officialdom, having lost his reason for being (elected or hired).

There once was a Chaplain named Jones.
Wasn’t Jewish or Hindu or Muslimmy.
Let’s rub Buddha’s tummy
Then temper the Jewish rummy.
Now Jones has retreated to talk on the phones.

Forgive me.  That wasn’t exactly standard limerick form, I know, but it was fun nonetheless.

King Arthur & God

In the cult-classic comedy Monty Python’s “In Search of the Holy Grail,” the King Arthur figure is on his quest for the “grail” — supposedly the cup used by Jesus at the Last Supper — when he approaches some peasants in a field. They are living under the illusion that they are responsible for themselves in some sort of democratic commune. They have no idea who Arthur is, much less that he is the king.

ARTHUR:  How d'you do, good lady ... I am Arthur, King of the Britons.
         Can you tell me who lives in that castle?

OLD WOMAN:  King of the WHO?

ARTHUR:  The Britons.

OLD WOMAN:  Who are the Britons?

ARTHUR:  All of us are ... we are all Britons.
      ... and I am your king ....

OLD WOMAN:  Ooooh!  I didn't know we had a king.
            I thought we were an autonomous collective ...

King Arthur becomes irritated as one of these peasants drones on and on about their supposedly democratic form of government.

ARTHUR:  "Be quiet!  I order you to be quiet!"

OLD WOMAN:  "'Order,' eh?!  Who does he think he is?"

ARTHUR:  "I am your king." (After all, he is.)

OLD WOMAN:  "Well I didn't vote for you."

~ ~ ~

While the character of Arthur in this movie is questionable, and the situation of his dictatorship only legendary, there is something for us here.

Who are we, after all, in the scheme of things? We may at times find ourselves misguided — living in a sort of parallel non-reality in which we assume we have some power or status that we actually don’t have. (Cf. also the ludicrous, blasphemous Shirley MacLaine story — video here, and an analysis here.) The fact that the peasants in the movie thought they were an “autonomous collective” doesn’t mean that was reality. The concept that we have the right to vote on just about everything is at this point rather inherent in our (U.S.) existence, but this is not the basic reality of creation.

Sometimes we just seem to go on about our business of everyday life with no apparent realization that we have a King. And our King wasn’t made a King by some legendary ceremony involving a “Lady of the Lake” and the sword Excalibur. He simply is the King of the universe. God, Yahweh, the LORD, is King. We may live, sometimes, without realization that He is King, but the fact remains that He is. Not because we voted for Him, but because that’s the way things are.

The church is constitutionally no democracy, although there are many mundane situations in which the will of the people can and should be considered. The church is no oligarchy; that’s a good deal worse model for us than the democracy. The church is no military state, of course–we are not in a hostile scenario involving martial law and the killing of “infidels” who disbelieve. And it’s self-evident that no human may be in a megalomaniacal position of “church dictator.”

We might as well realize that our primary citizenship is essentially in a monarchy, and we should recognize God as King. In so doing, we’ll please Him, and we’ll be better off for it ourselves. The reality of God’s position affects everything: the world order, daily bread, church polity, our living and our dying — everything! The sooner we adopt a mentality that humbly accepts our estate as servants (not peasants, but benevolently treated servants of the King), the better.

The Mighty One, God, the LORD,
speaks and summons the earth
from the rising of the sun to the place where it sets.

(Psalm 50:1 … and read the rest, too!)