Upstaged in Montréal!

Disclaimer
 [Brethren People: I'm not seeking to ridicule you.  I'm trying to like you.  Many of you make it impossible to do anything but like you a lot.]

Shunning In Practice

To understand the following at all, you have to understand how shunning works.  In many religious groups, including the Plymouth Brethren, Amish, Mennonites and Mormons, you can get into trouble (not following rules, not obeying church leaders), and you are excommunicated.  Our Brethren culture works like this: you're only supposed to be kicked out temporarily, to see the error of your ways, and then they are supposed to "restore" you.  1 Corinthians has Paul chiding them for not kicking out a motherf... well, for not dealing ecclesiastically with a member who was having it off with his father's wife.  One likes to imagine it wasn't his biological mother, but just his father's second wife.  Dunno, though.  Anyway, Paul writes "put you out from among yourselves that wicked person."  He doesn't say they can put him away "from the Lord's Table" or anything like that.  Just "from among yourselves."  2 Corinthians, by contrast, has Paul chiding them for never letting him retake his place among them.  Forgiveness.  Supposedly part of the whole Christian thing. (it's easily evaded, of course.  If you just continue to judge the unforgiven person "unrepentant," then it's his or her fault, and you never have to demonstrate the actual depth of your own ability to forgive.)  But in 2 Corinthians, Paul writes "Ye which are spiritual, restore such a one."  "Lest he be overcome with overmuch sorrow," he says.  I can tell you that after sorrow can come snarkiness.  Sarcasm, even.  That just might have overcome me. 
  I have often heard brethren groups claim that they are so lacking in strong leadership, in spiritual people, that they can't do restoration (or shepherding, which is supposed to be offered, gratis, before that).  I have never heard a group claim that these lacks make them unable, though to kick people out left and right.  (mostly left)  Makes me suspect things as to which takes more spirituality.

  So here I am, literally kicked out like a mofo, but I'm out for life.  'Till death do us part to an even greater degree than we are already parted," apparently.

Montreal Bible Conference

  When I was a kid, and a younger, less overcome with overmuch sarcasm man, I used to go to Montreal to meet all the other Plymouth Brethren people from all over the place.  Montreal would get people from all over the States and Canada, and sometimes beyond that.  It was a place to go be with people like you.  To fit in more than you did at school.  Girls were there, too.  If memory serves, I believe crowds approached two thousand people some years.  All I know is they had to fit everyone in a really huge high school gymnasium, and they didn't, really.  The high school was called Riverdale High School, just like in Archie.

  So, lately I've been ignoring the lines of division that have subdivided and resubdivided our Plymouth Brethren groups around here and have been just showing up and saying hi to people.  It was suggested, perhaps half jokingly, on Facebook, that I show up this year at the Montreal Conference.  

  Now, I grew up knowing how this works, as to bible conferences: if you're excommunicated/out of fellowship, you can come to the Conference alright, but you don't get given a place to sleep, nor meals.  Everyone else either gets a hotel room, or a room at some church person's house.  And meals are catered. The people who are "out" just have to duck out for food, and get a room themselves, or not stay for both days.
  I remember getting all high and post-conference buzzy, feeling warm and tingly for a day or two, and being told there about "the mountaintop experience" and how this didn't last and how once we went back into the daily day to day of The World, it would not be as good. But I can tell you that who you are and where you are in life has everything to do with how nice you think something like that is. If you're there with your girlfriend or wife or husband or kids, overdosing on the natural endorphins created by that human experience, mixing with others who are (more or less) like you, it's a very affirming experience. I remember.

That Was Then, This Is Now
But it was going to be a totally different experience to go now.  I wasn't going to be a happy camper.  I wasn't bringing my wife, nor my kids to play with other kids.  I don't have those Brethren accessories, largely because I was purposely cut out of the Brethren dating pool by power folk.  Forbidden to attend young people's and so on.  And I'm a negative bastard.
  But people wanted me to go.  No doubt hoping I'd have the time of my life.  Would see how nice everyone was.  Would learn things in the meetings.  Would reconnect with God in some way that had been lacking.  Would feel the magic. No doubt they'd regret this, once they saw how negative I can be about things that please those people who can kinda make "groups" work for them, more or less.

   But I thought it was maybe a silly idea to go.  Didn't know.  Emboldened by the suggestion, and various people chipping in online and saying "Yeah!" I emailed the webmistress listed on the website for the event (of course there was no website back when I went, and the web mistress was just a well-dressed young party girl who happened to be the daughter of my mother's foster brother.  So I emailed her.)

  No response from her, so I emailed again a week later.  I had expected no answer would be the tactic.  I was clear about having been excommunicated, but wondered if I could come anyway, maybe only for one meeting in the afternoon.  This time the email got shunted to hubby, who I also remembered, and he eventually surprised me by answering quite civilly, to tell me that, yes, I would not be offered meals or a place to sleep, but that they couldn't stop me from coming, if I was determined to do so.  Very business-like.  

  Quite unlike any of the dealings and correspondence I am accustomed to from the "gathered saints."  My friend Mark calls it "sliming."  (there will be an example given at the end of this missive for those unclear on the concept) You have an interaction with them, and come out feeling like they disagreed, but somehow they really  haven't committed as to what or how or why, and you feel strongly disapproved of, and judged, but oddly, you remain fairly unclear about exactly what or how or why, and you generally feel like you need a shower. This email was an entirely better interaction.  They wouldn't feed me or house me, but they were being polite and upfront about it all.

  Then, like an afterthought, a couple of days later, another email from hubby arrived.  It said that, upon talking to older people, it was felt it was "better" if I didn't come.  As usual, it was about "You aren't invited if you're shunned, and if your church won't unshun you, that's not really our problem, nor do we make allowances for things like that."

  So, I went online and said the whole thing was "off," if it had ever really been on.  Got some annoyed comments saying "Don't lie down and take that!  Stick it to the Man!" and suchlike, from a surprising cross-section of other varieties of Brethren people, so I kinda did a sweepstakes/email in contest: the first person who was actually going to show up there, who sent me an invite, would get to meet me there.  I really didn't expect anyone to answer.  That very day, I got one phone call and a PM on Facebook, both inviting me to come.  "I guess now I'll have to go" I thought. "Hmmm."

   I've been really noting lately that I don't deal well emotionally with crowds, or traffic, or crowded rooms, or meetings, or random people saying random stuff to me, or any of that.  Fills me up to the eyeballs with adrenaline and a desperate desire to leave immediately.  Also makes me negative about and to people who already want to dismiss me as bitter.  Burns bridges.  Oops.  Brown trousers time.

Actually Doing It

  So today I got up, hopped out of the shower (I didn't actually sleep in there, but it sounded like that earlier in this sentence, didn't it?) bought overpriced gas from a stupendously malodourous gas attendant (actually, what's the job title for the "insert your card.  Here is your receipt" guy who doesn't dispense gas?) to avoid buying even more overpriced gas in Montreal, and headed for Quebec.
  I had lunch on the way, and despite the very street I needed to take being closed for construction, still found my way right there without getting lost once. I always get lost every time I drive in Montreal.  I also always see cowboy driving of the most aggressive stripe.  This time was no exception.  My favourite is the old "I'ma cross four lanes in one go without signalling, with cars everywhere."

  I parked my car in a shopping mall in front of a Burger King and walked a couple of blocks to the place.   Standing right in the very doorway itself was the hubby I'd exchanged emails with, with his last one being the one saying it would "better" if I didn't come.  

  "Is he waiting to tell me I can't come in?" my paranoia asked.  I walked in and went straight to him, shook his hand (my plan was, anyone who refused to shake my hand was going to have my rejected hand raised in an offered high five.  If they didn't go for that, I was going to invite them to pull my finger.) and he needed to ask who I was.  I remembered him from twenty years ago, told him who I was, who his father and brother were and he said he didn't remember me.  He had a nametag.  Many people did, but I wasn't registered, so people had to ask me.

  Hubby (let's call him Tipper McJimminy) started by saying "We're really glad to have you here..."

  (really?! said my paranoia to me, thwarted.  What's the second half of this sentence going to be, though? it rallied.)

  "...but we hope you're not here to...push issues."

  "I'm not here to push issues," I said.  "I'm just here to say hi to people.  Hi."

  "Well that's good.  So long as you're not going to push issues, then we're really glad you came."

  Happy happy. Joy joy.  So in I went.

In The Mouth Of Madness

  I was soon elbow to elbow with people in a room packed with a seething mass of complete strangers, most of whom were dressed even better than I was.  My adrenaline had been at a fever pitch all the way to Montreal, and it quickly started to max out.  Could I even stay in that space?  People knew what they were doing and they were going around doing it and paying me no mind whatsoever.  Handsome, affluent, successful and corporate-looking young men proudly caressed their beautiful Plymouth Brethren wives, while the wives in turn proudly caressed their beautiful Plymouth Brethren babies.  (that last was never a Saturday morning cartoon in the 80s, but could well have been.  Nickelodeon's Plymouth Brethren Babies.  Think about the toys you could sell of that...)

  I forgot how the girls all seemed to be able to pull off that magic trick: they all seemed to look like a million bucks, with white teeth and glossy falls of heart-breakingly sensuous hair, nice shoes and all.  But the thing is, they were pulling this off, but still weren't breaking any one of a huge number of unwritten Plymouth Brethren social rules that constrain them, if they don't want to viewed as whoring it up a bit, given that setting.  Their heads had to be covered during the meetings (I saw one girl I used to go to church with walk in late, with her hand over her head until she got to her seat and could put on her hat).  Many had an easily pursable tam or mantilla (Spanish lace veil/doily thing over their hair), but the ones who really cared showed up with all kinds of fashionable hats.  Funky 60s looking things Janis Joplin might have worn.  Jackie O pillboxes.  Flapper cloches.  They couldn't show cleavage, of course, nor leg much above the knee.  They couldn't wear trousers of any kind, so no leggings or Lulu Lemon yoga pants.  Makeup and jewellery had to be so tasteful as to be subliminal.  But they did it.  And they shone.  How could I not have a soft spot for them?  The guys mostly just looked fit, wearing nice jeans and shirts, with tidy haircuts. As in days of yore.

  I was totally freaked out, though.  It was just like going to a wedding I hadn't been invited to and standing awkwardly around.  I went to lean on one wall.  Then another.  All the rooms were named after Greek gods.  I didn't even know which one was for the meetings.  Apollo?
  When I'm in a  crowded room, the first thing I do is stand or sit with my back pretty much against a wall so I can survey the whole room and not get blindsided, dry-gulched or otherwise ambushed, for instance by an irate gunslinger or sheriff's marshal.

  Then the sister of one of my best friends walked by.  I hadn't expected to see her there.  She thinks I'm kinda okay, but we're not close.  In characteristic fashion (she loves to toy with social situations and people's expectations) she had a bit of fun for anyone looking, and did me a solid also.  Though we're not really on a handshaking or back patting level (we're more on a respectful headbob level), she stepped in, grabbed me by both shoulders in an undeniable grip, embraced me heartily to her bosom and kissed me on both cheeks.  This didn't help me stay cool, but I got what she was doing and was very thankful.  Contact made.  Ice shattered.  She invaded my personal space all up good.  For effect.  (I will call her Rose BurgerKing to amuse myself.)  Then we were done, and didn't talk to each other again after that.

  Then I found her kids, who are older teens and young adults, so I went and talked to them a little bit.  Then the girl who suggested I come, the guy who phoned me and the other guy who'd PMed me, all found me and said hi, we agreed that I looked shorter and older than I do on Facebook, and then everyone had to go.  Kids and things.  And the first meeting of the afternoon was about to start, and they'd marked their seats with their bibles and hymnbooks, and I hadn't yet staked out a claim.

A Business Conference For The Elves of Lothlorien

The picture here is the venue advertising the room we were using for our meeting.  Not quite like a high school gym, like back in the day.  No, now it looked just like this. (With the tables all removed and the chairs in an "audience" formation.  But still, you know, like a business conference for the elves of Lothlorien.  Thom York would have found fake plastic trees anywhere he cared to look. No green plastic watering cans that I could locate, though.)

   I sat down in the back of the room with Daniel, the eldest of the BurgerKing lads, who is always kind and helpful.

  At first, looking out over the crowd was like looking at a Christmas tree with the lights out.  (being Plymouth Brethren, I never had a Christmas tree, but I've seen them.  They're fake plastic trees, usually.)  

  Suddenly, like the Christmas lights coming on, randomly over the tree, one by one, the strangers started transforming into Brethren people I grew up with, and instantly aged twenty years.  People I went to high school with.  People who'd excommunicated me.  I tracked all the "who married who" and relatives and kids and stuff. Some seemed gnarled and twisted and greyed on the inside, by the erosion of the winds of brethren time.

  And a guy went up to speak for an hour.  In order for you to really understand what happened next, I have to flash back to 1998.

Flashback to 1998

  I'm sitting in Sven the City Planner's living room with the other two guys he's got with him.  They are quizzing me about whether I feel that, like the Jews, Christians must keep the Jewish law.  They want to know if I'm "clear about this matter" they say.  Am I clear about if we're under the law?  Not the bits about pork, but the parts they call the Mosaic Law, after Moses. 
  Christians are divided between people (like me) who believe that the New Testament presents Christianity as a whole new deal, and that although the Old Testament is terribly useful, we don't use it to become kinda "Jews with a Christ upgrade."  Other Christians believe that you get saved from Hell through Christ, but you get into Heaven by obedience/just saying no to fun stuff.  They say you go to Calvary to escape Hell, and to Sinai to get into Heaven.  These guys badgering me aren't happy unless you kinda say both and neither.

  So, Sven is quizzing the crap out of me.  I'm on fire, laying out my case.  He's spewing nonsense about "the old nature" and I'm asking him if he can still make his points about what Paul wrote, only using the same terminology that Paul did.  Shouldn't be hard, right?  For instance, Sven says we have to always fight the "old nature" and keep it under control each and every day, or we sin and lose our practical relationship with God.  So we're kinda under the law. It is our schoolmaster.  For our entire lives. Because none of us is perfect, right?  I don't think I'm perfect, do I?

  I point out that Paul says "the old man" rather than the old nature, and what he says is that we (that old man/person) have "died" with Christ, and are no longer under the law, which law bound Jews before the work of Christ only, and gentiles never, and that Paul clearly writes that we are to "reckon the old man dead."  Like, move on.  It's dealt with.  To try to add to a finished work is an insult.  Like me adding a solo and some new verses to songs on Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon.  No reason to be lawless, but no reason to get out the yarmulke either.  No reason, either, to make up a list of Christian churchy laws/rules/guidelines that no self-respecting Jew would dream of trying to keep.  The imagery is that we have been reborn (born again) and have a new life to live, unchained by the faults of the old one, and destined to grow beyond its limitations.
  Sven says we have to reckon the old man dead, while always, ALLways remembering that he is very, VERY much alive, and that we have to fight him. Every day. This is the Christian life.  This is what Christ died to achieve for us.  We have to fight the flesh, the old nature.

  "With what?  The flesh?  With that mythic old nature?  With the old man's best efforts?" I want to know.

  Sven doesn't know how to answer that, so he repeats himself.

  I respond, "You realize that we can't simultaneously 'reckon' (consider, view) the old man to be dead, yet also 'always remember that he's very, very much alive'?

  I get accused of trying to use 'man's reason' to plumb the depths of the ineffable wisdom of God.  I want to tell them all to eff off.   They tell me firmly that it is irresponsible to tell anyone, especially young people, that Christians don't need to try to keep the Old Testament law, because then they will just sin. Like, drink alcohol and go to movies and stuff.  They are to live as under it.  It is their schoolmaster, even though they aren't Jews.  Being Plymouth Brethren is more like being Vulcan than Jewish, in my experience.  And Nimoy is Jewish.

  The meeting is then pretend-wrapped up, and suddenly, on a cue, a purloined copy of my parody Sunday School paper is brought out as a pretend afterthought, with Sven and the other dude pretending not to have known about it when it is brandished triumphantly by the third dude, just when they were pretending to be done.  It takes less than two minutes before the two supposedly unaware brothers are quoting bits of it from memory.
  It gets stupider from there and I'm out on my ear before you can say "heretic."  There is no restoring such a one as I.

Outlaw
 But back to the 2012 Montreal Bible Conference I went to. (see how I shifted verb tenses again after that flashback?  My creative writing class was annoyed by an assignment in which I made them do just that.  Back to the present, after talking about the past in present tense.  Past tense for the present now.  Here we go.) 
  I sat in the chair, focusing on the speaker, who I didn't know.  He was odd for Brethren.  Actually, he had all the hallmarks of regular pastors at churches which aren't brethren at all.  He had the stubble-head, the tentative, soft, almost effeminate voice and beseeching eyes, the kind correcting of names of absent people like John Piper and Ray Comfort (wait, this Brethren guy not only peeks over the fence at non-Brethren preachers, but references them aloud like everyone's heard of them?  They might not like that...).  And he was bringing out actual doctrine.  Here.  You can listen to his talk by following this link.  Like, theology.  Not just a huge steaming pile of "How privileged we should feel to be us being here, feeling honoured to be blessed and privileged to be us, being here, with others of us."  Not just happy burbling. Not just big scoops full of the group selling itself to itself.  Ideas.

  And before he'd barely gotten started, I realized he was giving the very same talk to the crowd that I gave to Sven and the two other guys in 1998.  Christians don't have to become Jews.  We aren't under the law.  The law isn't what makes us Christians.  We aren't started out on it, with it as schoolmaster, and then slowly graduated to the Christ upgrade.  Because we've never been under it before, as Gentiles, and we aren't now, nor should we act as if we are.  We aren't doing something bad if we don't preach it as 95% of what we call the gospel, leaving 5% for what we call grace.  We are dead to the law, and again, as gentiles, weren't ever under it, nor will we be.  

  It was insane.  The very thing I had been lectured for in 1998, being told it was irresponsible to tell anyone that, was getting taught here to this huge crowd, including all three guys who told me not to teach it.  I looked to my right, and Sven had come in late and had sat down, right in my line of sight, more or less at my three.  It was surreal. I'd forgotten he sometimes wears a bolo string tie.  With a short-sleeved dress shirt. (note: I'm being neutral and reportive here, and not negative.  Unless you yourself disapprove of his sartorial choices, in which case, you're being negative and not me, you negative bastard, you.)
  The only thing I didn't feel was this guy's typical comment that eating the fruit in the garden "gave man a conscience which knew right from wrong."  I thought "You've talked about the limits of the Old Testament Law.   Its limits are that it addresses only what was right, and what was wrong, under law.  Ethics.  God and the relationship we now occupy transcend mere questions of ethical behaviour, of morality.  To deal with God is to deal with the essence, the source and inspiration of goodness itself, not merely "right."  And there is stuff that's worse than unethical, worse than "wrong"  There is evil. 
  If man had eaten of a fruit from "the tree of being able to tell right from wrong," rather than one that gave knowledge of actual good and evil, he would now lack the capacity to move beyond the ethical considerations of the law.  He wouldn't be able to grasp God any more than anyone under Law, because God is more than what is addressed by the Law, more than about right and wrong and  ethical behaviour.  He isn't just right.  He's goodness itself, which we know and can recognize, thanks to knowing good and knowing evil.  We don't merely know that God is right if we know Him at all. 
  So, I was counting how often he said "right" and "wrong."  Over and over and over.  That's how we brethren think.  We build our thoughts almost entirely out of them.  They underlie most conversations.  Everything's about there being only two choices: one right, and one wrong.  In these stupid divisions. One right side, and one wrong side.  Very limiting.  You're not able to grasp the scope of the bible, if you do that.  Especially the stuff Paul wrote."  So, it's wrong, right?  (kidding)
 

  The talk wound to a close, with me worrying throughout about one person's kid which was perpetually being mothersmothered to keep it docile and silent during this gripping hour-long kid's show, and was repeatedly, miserable as any living creature I have ever seen, carried out of the room by whichever parent's turn it was, for whatever invisible, silent offence it had allegedly committed, to get a stern talking-to and who knows what else outside the room, and then brought back in, looking at me on the way by with eyes like an open wound.  There was a kids' meeting next meeting.  This kid wasn't at it.  Probably too "bad."  No doubt if they keep this up they need not fear their kid will ever turn into anyone like me one day.  They might just be creating the angriest of young men, with years of therapy in store, overcome with overmuch snark and spite.

   The man finished.  Everyone stood up for the half hour intermission.  I asked "Who was that masked man?" and found out who the speaker had been. The son-in-law of Sven the City Planner.  Wha---?
  But it turns out he's a missionary.  Missionaries are allowed to do anything they want.  They have ecclesiastical immunity. They're in different continents giving up the western lifestyle, at least somewhat.  Or taking it with them.  So they can read up on John Piper and disagree with him and stuff.  But some don't like that kind of thing. 

Intermission

  As I stood with my back not quite touching the back wall of Lothlorien Business Retreat, I got a confusing mix of punches on the arm and warm smiles from quite a few, and coldly averted eyes from others.  One managed a coldly averted smile after a pointed glance at my hair.

  One girl came up and introduced herself.  I have called her sister the made up name "Bethany McBrethreney" on the Internet to try to give some futile, token anonymity because of what association with me costs people like her.  But her sister, it turned out, is actually, really named Bethany.  She came up and said "I'm _____'s sister Bethany.  Bethany McBrethreney."  Like, the real one.  Funny.  When I'm writing, I pretty much just call all Brethren girls Bethany.  Except the ones who are called that for real, which is half of them, it seems.

  Hearing my little Internet scribblings show up in the lips of strangers in real life always gives me a start.  Another girl came up, carrying what was no doubt her child.  She said "I'm so glad you're not here to eat our babies" (something I once jokingly wrote that Brethren people seemed to fear. I forget when I wrote that.  I forgot that I'd written it, until she said it, like an echo of my typing).  Then she said "stoppit!  stoppit!" just like I'd written on this blog last week.  Gave me a real start, again.  Made me feel awkward, but appreciated. I make her laugh.  That's something, right?

  Then another girl walked by with her kids.  I had last seen her in the 90s.  She has pretty eyes.  She beamed at me and whispered "Don't put me in your blog!"  I told her I certainly wouldn't dream of it.

  An older guy who went to teacher's college with my dad came over and we had a great talk about teaching history, as if we were buddies already.  I love how that goes.  Different century, but same job, same problems, same stuff, so you just start in talking and it's a shortcut to relating really fast, identifying and liking one another too.

  The seemingly endless foot traffic continued, a mix of (literally) childbearing people smiling warmly on the way by, with other people pointedly looking past me  (the more I'd grown up with them, the more likely they were to not acknowledge me, and to look gnarled and gnomeified by the winds of brethrenhood, their eyes glassy and asymmetrical, their posture skewed).

  The next meeting was due to begin.  It was going to be a doozy.  An hour and a half, no break, of upprofessional speakers speaking, stretching the time I was going to spend sitting in a chair listening that afternoon, to just under two hundred minutes between lunch and supper.
  Right before it began, the "stoppit!  stoppit!" girl who was glad I wasn't going to eat her babies, ran up and actually handed me a glass of water at my chair.  "At least you can DRINK with us!" she said, referring to the fact that I wasn't going to be allowed to eat with them.  I was quite overwhelmed.  The multicoloured accent light beside my foot on the floor lit the glass of water up like if I looked in it, it might show me the Scouring of the Shire.  I imagined I was backlit by it, like Galadriel.

  I wasn't really feeling up to sitting for the rest of the afternoon in this room, with my adrenaline having lowered from complete panic to "be ready for imminent peril."  Neither was the kid who was sitting two people to the left of me.  He was playing the same iPhone game the kids in my classes are always on.  For the entire first meeting about Christians not needing to try to keep the law.  He would play it all through this next one too, stopping only when there was a hymn for us to sing. The singing was excellent.  Like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, but happier.  Happy Brethren singing is rare.  It was nice. I thought I caught Bethany McBrethreney on her phone during a hymn, but it turned out she seems to have a hymnbook app?

Leading

  This 1.5 hour meeting was one that is called a "Ministry As The Lord May Lead" meeting.  This means no one picks who is going to talk, or a topic or anything like that.  It's a surprise.  There is a limit of three guys, max, getting to talk.  Hymns can be sung between.  You supposedly never know what's going to happen.  Usually it's just the typical "how thankful we should be to be us.  We thank thee, Oh Lord, that we are not like unto other Christians, for instance, Lutherans.  And Catholics...what's up with THEM?!" stuff.  But sometimes someone has a bee in his bonnet and goes off on a tangent.  I'd half-jokingly put on Facebook that I'd "go to the ministry as the Lord may lead, to see if He does."  You be the judge:

  As soon as it was open season on speaking, an older guy I am familiar with bolted up out of his seat and went to the front like it was a bit of a race.  He started in and it was pretty interesting.  Like me, he is sick of people, it sounded like, who go on and on about us (how unworthy we are to be as blessed as we are to be thankful to be us) and then clearly can't talk about God for more than two sentences without mentioning us immediately.  I said this online once and was told that any belief that humans can understand or relate to God in any way apart from relating Him to ourselves is some bad "istic" or other.That wasn't what I thought I was doing, but whatever.  Tried to be pragmat(ist)ic.
  But this guy was cosmic.  Literally.  Not talking about us and how grateful and blessed and privileged we should feel, and willing to remember what we're supposed to remember (to be grateful).  No, he was talking about the Big Bang or whatever.  The Start of Everything.  The physical and the spiritual and the soulful.  Everything getting made, and in what order and why.  Human existence.  Life after death and transcendence.  "This guy sounds virtually Eastern" I thought.  "How's he getting away with this?!  Do brethren people sit and take this kind of thing nowadays?  It's not just about them.  It's awesome.  What happened?"
  The girl I call Bethany McBrethreney (not her sister Bethany) was in and out of the room quite often.  She was all aflutter.  Her hair was so shiny that her black mantilla lacked the necessary friction to stay atop her glossy dark hair.  But she was in, she was out, her coat was on, her coat was off, her mantilla was slipping and sliding... Why was she leaving the room?  Could she staple her mantilla onto her head? I didn't know if kids were involved (in rooms of those kinds, girls are always all pitching random women's kids in and out of the room like footballs all the time).  Her boyfriend sat there, reassuring and solid as the Rock of Gibraltar.  Probably exactly the kind of man she could be happy with.

  I found out later one reason she was so jittery.  That guy who preached first?  Her friend's dad.  With the cool, cosmic "Never mind about us and our gratitude / ingratitude, our wretchedness / blessedness, what about God and what He does?" message?  That guy, like me, is excommunicated.  Kicked out.  I'm not even sure he was supposed to come out today.  I wouldn't expect they'd let him eat with them.  And he totally.  Went up.  And preached at them.  At their thing.  From their pulpit, there in Lothlorien Conference Centre. I felt wholly upstaged.

  One of the fun things about being me (there are less than you think) is that, after being sick of being the boring, lonely Christian person at work who has no fun and doesn't allow himself any but the nerdiest of pleasures, whenever I go out to a Brethren thing, I am Charles Manson. I am clearly going to have to be warned not to start shit.  I am told it would be "better" if I'm not there.  Any girl who is seen talking to me is going to report afterward that she got a series of friendly "warnings" not to talk to me.  I will eat her faith for breakfast.  I can't count the people who've told me they've been "warned" to stop talking to/listening to me.  The last couple to go to a regular, non-Brethren group, leaving behind the Ottawa Brethren church they'd attended previously?  My fault, apparently.  Not that I even talked to them before they left.  I am apostasy incarnate.  And I am loose on the Internet, children. Lock the doors.  Get out the Hannibal Lecter mask and restraints.

  And this guy goes up and does something I positively would not have had the jam to contemplate.  Perspex, accent-lit pulpit?  Jacked.  Problem is, now his kids and friends will have to deal with the no doubt horrifying, tempest in a teapot, social and ecclesiastical repercussions of what may well have been self-indulgence.  Still, it was the trippiest talk today, and I loved it.  He was so sincere.  He got emotional about time and space.  And he wasn't correcting any absent persons, nor being smug, nor making propaganda, nor making cat's cradles out of bible verses.  A week later, mp3s of these talks would be put up, as I have linked here.  And the cosmic talk?  Not uploaded.  Bastards...

Because I LOVE to Count Things...

  Then a guy I didn't know got up. Here is a link to what I heard, right here.  The kid two people to my left continued his endless iPhone game.  The fake plastic trees held their posts, with the lights and glitter and perpetual pinkitude of themselves.  This new speaker guy mentioned that he wasn't good at speaking English, and it turned out that he really wasn't.  He looked possibly German, but I was having trouble placing his accent.  It was hard enough to work out what he was saying, but I was terribly curious to know what country he was from.  I started trying accents on him like a little girl trying paper clothes on paper dolls.  Sweden and Denmark didn't seem to stick, but I wasn't completely sure if he was German or wasn't.  I got distracted for far too long imagining he was from Transylvania and was himself, in fact, a vampire.  Perhaps even a puppet vampire.  I waited for him to count things or say numbers.  The accent almost fit.  But when he said "Germany" and was too German to say it right in English (Chyerminny) I had that question answered for me.

  He was doing Peter bashing. I hate Peter bashing. It's a great way to fill a time slot, though.  You just take the disciple/apostle Peter, and you read any story about him, and then you point out all of his mistakes, from attitude, to thinking, to clear lack of impulse control. Must have been ADHD, this guy.  The key to the kingdom? Seriously?  Probably lost it.  What a maroon.  You can rhetorically ask people to admit, if they're honest, that they are often like Peter.  Just as silly.  Just as clued out. (just as passionate?) But, the passage of scripture this guy read was the one where Peter walks on water with Jesus.  Yeah.  Pretty silly.  What a spiritual lightweight.  WALKING ON WATER!  Here's the thing: I think that German guy should walk on water, even just three or four steps, himself, before he disses Peter's supermarine performance. He did inform us all that we can't valk on vater.  It doesn't vork.  But he was here to pump us up, so I continued listening.

  I didn't like what he did next, either.  To my knowledge, Peter would go on to do far more miraculous things in the New Testament than ski-less waterskiing.  Healing the sick and casting out demons and things, just by people touching his t-shirt and stuff.  But he [it's horrible that when we hear a German accent, some of us sit there racistly thinking "Hitler, Hitler, Hitler" the whole time a man's public speaking from a raised platform] was stressing that Jesus was making Peter walk on the water like a remote-controlled puppet to teach him a lesson about arrogance, or something like that.  "Don't worry, I got ya.  Whoops!  Now I don't, because you worried and doubted and stuff!  Ha!  Fooled you. I've got you after all! Just trying your faith!  Which sucks, by the way.  Future people will laugh at it.  John, quick, write this down..."  

  As far as I know, Jesus was always berating his disciples for not being able to do things exactly like the crazy things he himself was doing. He was sending them off to cities without him, demanding that they do the stuff he did.  And they often did that stuff, apparently.  So Peter believes he can walk on water like Jesus is doing, because Jesus has been teaching "If you have faith like a grain of mustard seed, you can move mountains" and demanding "Why couldn't you handle this demonaic?"  Jesus has been teaching this SO hard, and all of a sudden that message is reduced to "Jesus was magic. What was Peter thinking? Peter wasn't magic.  And neither are we."  

  Anyway, that's what I thought during that sermon.  It wasn't too bad, though.  Apart from imagining he was a vampire, and Adolf Hitler, and thinking he was trivializing what Jesus was teaching and living and doing, I think my thoughts about that guy were remarkably positive. It is possible I was getting sick of sitting there.

Word Association

  The last guy did something I also don't like (having logged five meetings a week since pretty much birth, and being cursed with an inability to zone out or otherwise not listen, I have a real annoyance with many of the tropes of how people "take part" in these meetings.  Here is that guy, doing the talk I heard, right here. )  It goes like this: you take anything there are a number of in the bible.  Hills.  Sheep.  Staves.  Gates.  Fences. Whatever.  Today it was towers.  There weren't just two, either.  You cross-reference (ha.  see what I did there?) the occurrences of these with whatever verses they first make you think of.  Like random word association.  You say "It says here that it was a GREAT rock.  Now this leads us to ponder our Lord, surely the GREATEST rock of all! Let us turn to a scripture which says God is great!"   You can find a rock or a tree or a fence somewhere in the Old Testament and then tell everyone what snippet of scripture it reminds you, personally, of, like the original author was up to all of that from the beginning.  So, a great tower: God is great.  The tower of the furnace: Hardship and toil.  God is with us in hardship and toil. The tower by the sheep gate: God is our shepherd.  The Hanged Man and The Four of Wands... (no, wait. I'm just making that last one up. He didn't make that part up. I did.) But it always sounds terribly made up to me when people do it.  But then I'm a critical bastard with thoughts, but am never allowed to speak except on the Internet.

  Now three guys had spoken.  One hadn't been supposed to, and so maybe that wasn't supposed to count, so a fourth guy just read a passage from scripture without getting up and preaching, or the magic "three" would be broken ("let the prophets speak, two or three, and the rest judge."  I guess I take that last job too seriously.  If I ever wanted to teach or speak to any group of Christians, I would absolutely have to jump up uninvited like Professor Cosmic did today).  The fourth guy read about the Tower of Babel, and how God confused the languages of the earth.

  Then, with more singing, the meeting was over, and it was time for the shared common meal I wasn't allowed to attend.  So, a guy stood up to say a prayer of thanks about the meal that I wasn't welcome to, and looking around at a more-than-usually ethnically diverse group (we'd imported some minority Brethren from other continents, which is actually pretty cool, as diversity has hardly been a strong suit of ours in the past) and said that, before he prayed, and especially in light of God confusing the languages, he wanted to say this: "Languages? What about CONTINENTS? We have brethren from many continents here with us today.  North America, SOUTH America, Europe, Asia, Africa... Welcome to the Body of Christ!"

  (ummmm...)  Old Testament one-upped.  And verily God confused the continents.

  Then he prayed a prayer of us being thankful to be us and being here to be thankful, and afterward people started filing out.

Aftermath

  Bethany McBrethreney asked if anyone had invited me out for supper, thinking someone might have.  No one had, which was okay with me.  I was just going to go home. If I wanted, I could have invited anyone out to supper myself. I had money. I had a car.  I could have done that.  But I wasn't being arsed with it.  

  The girl wanted to see to it, though.  She sure didn't want me to be able to write here that I had to go home with an empty stomach, and that not one just person would eat with me.  She's like that.  Sticks up for anyone who's getting the dirty end of the stick.  So she told me to hold on.  She was all over the place, dealing with who knows what all, and I talked to a few more people.  One of the three guys who interrogated me about my views on being under Jewish Law or not, and then kicked me out of Ottawa, came over, thinking he scented a non-Christian to perhaps preach to.  You see, he'd forgotten who I was.  And then he had a problem: he really wanted to have me stay to hear the preaching after supper, and I told him I had to go, as I wasn't welcome at the meal. Quite a pickle. I guess if I'd ducked out, grabbed a bite, and then come back for the gospel meeting, I would have been the "least saved" person there. A veritable coup, in making it feel less pointless.

  Also, a guy my age who I used to know back in the day stopped to chat.  I remembered staying up late in his basement, as he bemoaned the gorgeous girls of his church who needed to be "spoken to" because the way they dressed made the young men "suffer."  He did that thing where, when I referred to the divisions, and my ecclesiastical peripatetics of late, in answer to his series of queries, he then quietly and stubbornly disagreed repeatedly, without wanting to say what he disagreed with, nor what he thought instead.  Fascinating to see.  And he wasn't walking away, either.  Listened.  Said things like "But, still..." and then something else like "Well, I really think, though..." and would then stop, as if he'd refuted something. Just the starts of sentences, left as if they'd voiced his disagreement.  The System Works.  If something's broken, it's you.

  I then got talking to a really cool kinda granola/spiritual pacifistic guy who helped my sister out of a jam one time, who lent me his recording gear way back in the day before I'd had a chance to try any gear out yet.  I told him if I ever recorded anything and put it on the 'net, that it was clearly his fault.  He laughed.  

  We were having a very nice chat, and there was a guy I grew up with (a couple of years older than me) lurking.  He was pawing through some large bible cases that were on sale at the book table beside us.  But lurking.  For a while.  I couldn't tell if he was hoping to be included in our converesation, or was just eavesdropping (in retrospect, I suspect the latter), and so I called over to him "Hey, Lennie McSteinbeck!"  He had to ask who I was, though.  I almost remembered his wife's name too, even though she wasn't with him.  I was thinking of her sister.  Then we had one of those weird conversations where again, a lot of what he said sounded vaguely accusatory, but wasn't followed up.  Mark might have said he was "sliming" me.

  So, he asked me if I'd enjoyed the ministry we'd been fortunate to sit under that afternoon. This is polite, innocuous Brethren small-talk that I screw up.  I forgot my Ottawa Valley Brethren manners entirely and didn't just say "Yes.  It is a most blessed time for us, who should just feel so very thankful to be us and to be here, being us and being blessed and thankful, under the sound of the Word" or some such.  I didn't say that.  I said "I was really into what Tim said about Christians not being under law, and his points about how grace works.  You know? A rebuttal to the "saved by grace, blessed by works" guys, who think God switches modes like that, in dealing with us."

  "I don't need someone to take an hour to tell me I am saved by the grace of God" he said in flat tones, with an odd smile and a glint in his eye.  He's someone who looks you directly in the eye without moving or blinking, for the entire conversation.  I peered intently at him several times to see if he wavered, but he doesn't. He'd been staring at me during the meetings, too.

  "I thought what Tim said was amazing" I said. "Weirdly, it was exactly what I was told not to think or say, back in the day."

  "I don't LIKE to argue" he replied, with an intent stare.

  "*I* do!" I replied with a huge smile, carefully not saying "YES you DO!"
  I told him arguing was one of my favourite things in the whole world.

  He told me about his son, who is like me, but who he refuses to argue with.  He implied how wise it is to refuse to argue with him.  I asked him if the relationship with his son was improving as his son grew into adolescence, and he got  blanker.  To commiserate, I then told him about a kid I teach who is no doubt his son's age, and who argues all the time when I'm trying to teach.  I told him how every time I tell that kid to start or stop doing anything in class, he always argues. I tell him not to waste my time arguing, and he always responds to "Don't argue" with "I'm not arguing."  It can go on and on like that.  "Quit it."  "But I'm not arguing, though.  I'm stating my opinion."  "Well, don't do that.  Get work done."  "I am getting work done.  And I'm stating my opinion.  I'm not arguing."
  Lennie kept up the blankathon, unblinkingly, and never looked outside of my pupils for a moment.  He stood too close. He gave no expression.  His delivery was flat.  I wondered how many other people in the room were perhaps heavily medicated.

    He told me "I work with a Seventh Day Adventist, so I take great comfort in that verse in 2 Peter that was quoted twice today."  And then he stared into my pupils and waited for me to demonstrate that I knew that verse.

  I didn't try to quote it at him, even when he'd clearly given me a trial period in which to do so, so he quoted it at me.    

  "So, you like that verse?" I asked.

  "I find it comforting."
  "With the Seventh Day Adventist?"
  "Yes."

  "To disagree with him, you mean?" I asked.

  "To present to him," he replied.

  "So as to disagree with him and provide evidence that he is wrong?" I continued to press. (I hate people who are doing something and refuse to admit what they're doing, like that means they're not responsible for doing it.)

  "Your words, not mine," he said blankly, still giving my pupils the once-over from very close.

  "So, you'd perhaps word it, 'to present him with scripture, to give him something to consider'?" I asked.

  "Perhaps," he said, recognizing his own turn of phrase, but not wanting to admit to anything much.

  He then asked if I'd like to come eat with him in the dining room, and I reminded him that I was out of fellowship (excommunicated) and not welcome to do so. 

   "Out of fellowship?  From Who or What?" he asked.  

  Normally I would applaud that spirit, but all I said was "I was told I was not welcome to eat here, so I'm not going to mess with that."  

  "Well, I just feel that we are to remain in fellowship with God. So, the first thing we have to do is try to get back in fellowship with Him. I had a sister who needed to do that. I was able to tell her that and help her with it."

  "I think I have maintained fellowship with Him, throughout my life, actually" I said, too confidently for his liking.

  "But I really feel that the scripture tells us to we have to deal with our assemblies," he said, still staring into my pupils.  

  (Suggesting my continued state of excommunication was something I'd been neglecting taking care of?)  I asked what he meant.  

  He evaded.  Then he said "I just really feel the scriptures instruct us to be at peace with our assemblies."  I asked what he meant and he evaded.  I asked him how to get at peace, given our assemblies.  I asked if he meant me.  He wouldn't commit to any of that.  

  He said "I don't know what your situation is, and I don't need to know.  Better I don't, but I feel that we are responsible before God. We will all give an account one day.  The elders.  Us.  They will be called to give account one day.  They certainly will.  But we have to worry about us..."

  I asked "So, if I told the elders I was wrong, and apologized for what I'd done, would that probably be a good start?  Kinda what you're talking about?" (because of course I did both of those things.  The year I was kicked out.  But I didn't tell him that.)

  "I said I don't know your situation and I won't speak about that.   I feel though, that the scripture is very clear."
  He himself wasn't being clear about what exactly it was very clear about, I felt.

  And then he invited me out for pizza.  The conversation was getting weirder and weirder, I thought, with an 80% chance of weirdness later, and no doubt some kind of lecture that wouldn't admit to being a lecture, so though I had to really hand it to him for not blindly shunning and ignoring me, and instead coming over when summoned and talking to me and all, I told him Bethany McBrethreney seemed to be trying to arrange some of the younger people taking me out to eat, as I wasn't allowed to eat there, and that I didn't know what she had planned, nor did I want to be rude. Back in the day, the cool young folk often didn't want to eat with everyone else, so carefully picked some kind of fun Montreal restaurant to go out and eat at, sometimes arriving back a bit late, a bit inebriated, or a bit not at all.

Showdown At Burger King! (a false heading)

  I took my leave of Lennie, went over to Bethany and friends, set to leave with them all (she'd been waiting for me to be done talking to the guy). I apologized for keeping them waiting and told her patient, stalwart boyfriend "Sorry about that.  It was starting to be like wrestling a wet pillow over there."

  "I have never done that," he said patiently and flatly, perhaps somewhat with the air of a sensible man talking to a crazy person.

  And then they all vamoosed upstairs to the dining room and I realized that they were all going to eat up there, and that Bethany McBrethreney was going to take one for the team, and forswear their happy company, just to make sure I didn't have to not eat, or eat alone.  This was putting her out far too much, I thought. Cumbered about with much serving, I told her.  There is a time to go have fun.

  We went up the street, and I ate in the Burger King where my car was parked while she watched and then when we were walking out to my car, right on cue, a bunch of young Plymouth Brethren girls walked up from somewhere and stopped dead and stared at us. Maybe they'd been buying crack, all three of them.  I wasn't sure exactly what being seen going out to eat with evil old me would further do to McBrethreney's already interesting reputation, and here were a cloud of young witnesses of uncertain character, who might well do or say anything to anyone.  

  I panicked and told them "I am just a homeless person of no account.  Never mind me!" and walked off, the veracity of my pronouncement being perhaps somewhat undercut by the car, the alarm of which I then disarmed with the remote.
  Bethany followed me, asked if I'd be interested in Neil Young's autograph in case she could get one because she might be able to, and I said that would be supercool (because it would, right?) and left, stopping only to eat a blueberry muffin at Tim Horton's near Oka, where some cute native women were.  They all had Lulu Lemon yoga pants.  I used my only French of the day when the counter girl, pretty much bilingual, didn't know "blueberry" (as in "muffin") so I casually told her "bluets" to clarify, which told her what she needed to know.

 And then I wrote this, aware that some will think I am mocking everyone and hating everything and in return not liking me for that.  It seems I am unable to be anything but grateful to be here being myself being grateful.  Don't hate me because I'm ironical.  But hate me if you need to.  Let me be your monster.