Jay Furr's Dreamwidth Blog

Friends, consider the video embedded below. If I’ve done things right, clicking it should cause it to start playing at the 13 minute and 50 second mark. When the video cuts away from the the Rev. Dr. Carol Gregg encouraging us to share the peace of Christ with one another, look to the front row on the right. You’ll see a couple of idiots — a man and woman both wearing loud Hawaiian shirts — dutifully smacking each other on the forehead. You can’t hear what they’re saying (it’s probably best that way), but it, um, might have been a cheerful “Ja-HEE-zus!”

Might.

Carole and I were in Durham, NC over Memorial Day weekend.

We used to live in Durham (me, from 1993 to 1998, and Carole from 1996 to 1998) and would go to Duke Chapel now and then, usually for special music, like performances of Handel’s Messiah or for a Christmas concert by the Choral Society of Durham (Carole sang soprano). You really can’t beat it for quality of music and for the ambience.¹I’ve been to a Thanksgiving service at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. Nice, but not better than Duke. Services are your basic ecumenical Christian, but people of all faiths are welcome.

It would have been easy to sleep in on Sunday morning, but I insisted we get up and go to the Chapel for the 11:00 service. The place is enormous and I wanted to see well, so I grabbed us seats close to the front. I hadn’t considered that the services are web-streamed every week and that, by sitting up front, of necessity we’d be on camera every time they pulled back to a shot of the audience, but there we were.

All told, it was a really nice service. Nice sermon from a visiting minister and Duke Divinity grad, Dr Michael Brown, former chief pastor at the Marble Collegiate Church in New York City. Wonderful music. You can watch the entire service if you want using the video link. The program for the service is here.

Oh, you’re still wondering about the head-smacking?

Well, I grew up in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia where fundamentalist ministers were thick on the ground. Any number of ’em had weekly TV shows that permitted the pagans among us who didn’t go to church to turn on the tube on a Sunday morning and watch with perplexity and befuddlement at their faith-healing antics. These pastors all had their weird little customs and habits, but the head-smacking comes from a particularly amusing member of their clan (I think it was Ernest Angley) who was very fond of smacking people on the head and saying things like “You are HEALED!” and sometimes just “Ja-HEE-zus!”

Carole, bless her soul, missed out on that sort of thing by virtue of a) growing up in Ohio instead of the mountains of Virginia and b) attending Christ Church Kettering (Methodist) each week. But her soul apparently cried out for such a thing, because after I told her about my childhood experiences with TV preachers in general and that one guy in particular, she started smacking me on the head each week during “Sharing The Peace of Christ” at our church here in Vermont and, not to be unkind, I took to returning the favor. (I suspect the other members of our church regard us with mild confusion and alarm, but no one’s said anything about it yet.)

So anyway. We’re immortalized on the Duke Chapel webstream for last Sunday, for some definitions of “immortal”. (I haven’t watched the service end to end for fear of what else it might have caught us doing.)

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At times, when I stop and attempt to be “thankful”, I realize that I have life so absurdly good that it’s almost embarrassing. And I don’t mean in terms of the amount of money I bring home on my paycheck or the amount of luxury stuff I have sitting around the house (we have one (1) luxury item, a hot tub). I mean in terms of intangibles, tangibles, opportunities, everything.

I’m employed and have been so since May of 1998. Same job, even, although I’m on my third employer. I’ve got a great work situation where I am respected and valued and am not over-managed. I’ve got a nice house to live in. I live in a nice part of the country that rarely if ever has disaster-level weather. I’ve been married 21 years and counting to someone I’m still in love with. I’ve gotten to go to Europe this year and in a few weeks am going to Curaçao. I’m fortunate to have a few friends who are willing to put up with my neuroses. (Thanks again, folks!) I have four excellent kitties (up from three as of a month or so ago). I’ve got skills and knowledge that serve me well in life. I’m white, male, and just ooze with privilege. But at least I know that I was basically born on second base. I’m under no illusions of having hit a double.

Did I get everything I wanted in life? No. I didn’t get to have kids. I still have a lot of headaches. I’ve been diagnosed with major depression. My blood pressure and cholesterol are both higher than I’d like them to be. I never did write the great American novel.

¡Ay de mí! I’ve got it so bad, don’t I?

I’ve been absurdly fortunate in life and feel kind of guilty about it. But I am aware of, and thankful for, my many, many blessings. And I hope all of y’all, out there in the world, are happy and healthy and full of joy this holiday season.

I’ve got an Amazon.com wish list. Woo-hoo!

So do a lot of people. I’ve clicked on author profiles on various forums and websites and found links to one form of wish list or another, posted on the off chance that some random reader might be so taken by the author’s analysis of Freud’s seduction theory as to want to drop $25 and send the author a pair of Hello Kitty snow socks. Some people want a lot of Harley-Davidson miscellany. Some people want semi-precious rocks. You name it, someone’s probably hopefully added it to their wish list in hopes some stranger might one day have a momentary lapse of reason. (Okay, I can’t recall seeing anyone posting their wish list for Leather Masters, but that’s probably because I don’t tend to hang out in those communities.)

If you were bored enough to look at my wish list, you’ll notice my tastes and wishes are a little more boring — mostly I use it to keep track of books I’d like to buy and read but haven’t because I, er, already have a library cart full of impulse purchase books and don’t want to have to buy another right away. But I also keep a few stupid-ass items on my list just to confuse someone who might wind up there, maybe some randomly-paired Secret Santa partner who winds up trying to buy me something despite having absolutely no idea who I am.

Case in point:

Well, Carole usually has no idea whatsoever to get me for birthdays and Christmas and most years just gives me a card and shaves my back and calls us even, but this year she decided to put in a little effort. And promptly wound up on my Amazon wish list, which I hadn’t actually expected anyone to actually really use — as I said, it’s mostly books I want to remember to think about buying one day, and strange crap put there to confuse strangers.

Punchline:

Thanks, honey!

Oh — I almost forgot.

Secret Santa 2017: THANKS!

Last Thanksgiving, I decided to treat myself to a spontaneous, random trip across the Atlantic to London, England. Just me. (Carole has been to London already — she spent a few weeks there when she was an undergraduate at Harvard.)

I had an awesome hotel just around the corner from Westminster Abbey and Parliament. I spent a lot of time just walking around, visiting parks and the Tower of London and the London Eye and Westminster Abbey. It rained a good bit, but that was okay. It was late November in England; what else would you expect?

There were two high points of my trip.

One was that I got to sit in the Visitor’s Gallery in the House of Commons during a debate over British policy toward ISIS in Syria. Normally, foreigners don’t get to sit in the Visitor’s Gallery during Question Time when the MPs are grilling the Prime Minister, but for whatever reason the session that day didn’t count as Question Time. Members of both sides of the aisle took turns peppering Prime Minister Cameron with policy questions, and unlike our own deliberative body, Congress, everyone was actually polite. And educated. A member of the opposition referenced the Kantian imperative during a question and everyone knew precisely what he was talking about. I doubt the same would have been true of Congress.

The second was that I got to attend a Thanksgiving service for Americans at St. Paul’s Cathedral. It’s an annual event and from what I could see a beloved one — the sanctuary was full of American expats and tourists. The choir was wonderful, the message (delivered by the American ambassador) was funny in parts and solemn in parts, and above all, whenever one got bored, the incredible architecture of St. Paul’s was there to be marveled at.

But the best part of the service came at the very end. After everything was done and people were standing up to go, the massive St. Paul’s organ launched into what someone must have thought a very proper American piece of music: Sousa’s “Liberty Bell March”.

…

Yes, the Monty Python theme. That Liberty Bell March.

No, at the end, they did not end with the usual loud flatulent “splat” at the end. But that didn’t stop me from laughing anyway.