Merit Badges

I’m sitting in my room at the Sheraton in Arlington near Dallas across the way from the currently idle Texas Rangers ballpark complex, including a structure under construction that looks like the space ship from “Independence Day”, I guess the new haunts of the Dallas Cowboys. I’m unimpressed with the hotel, which doesn’t even provide vaseline with their buggery at $14/day for internet and $4 coffee (I managed a $1 refill by whining) though the plastic seat on the toilet slides all over the place, the shower spurts hot water like a guy with prostate problems, and the light above the door mysteriously flicks on and off. But where Jesus calls I must follow, so Matchmaker Don and I hoofed it up here on Sunday four days ago for the annual ‘tri-synodical theological conference’, a gathering of the, say, three hundred ELCA pastors and ‘rostered personnel’ here in the Texas-Louisiana environs to do the kinds of pastor-to and/or with-pastor stuff we gotta do in such a gathering which includes also some theology in the bar, talkin’ the Spirit while sippin’ the spirits, though I’m no longer the guy who closes the place down, having passed the torch of werewolf philosophy on to a younger, stouter generation. I am wiser now, sanctified through aging.

(An aside: a couple of weeks back one of the Sunday readings included St. Paul’s exhortation to ‘shun fornication’, or ‘SHUN FORNICATION!’ as I belted it out climbing into the pulpit for the sermon creating a stirring silence among the geezers. Then, ‘Well, that’s at least one sin we don’t have to worry about, eh? Nobody in this room has the energy for it anymore.’ Titters of recognition.)

The attendance—or really, lack of attendance by so many of my old pals has left me disappointed and disconcerted like the sudden absence of cousins after years of family reunions when you look around and see a new generation of strangers rising; the old dudes missing because of the usual congregational crises and relocations, but more frequently now also retirement. The new dudes rising were raised in a culture alien to mine, born electronically and immediately connected to the whole world for whom it is the norm to carry on an in person conversation while at the same time a cell phone text conversation. These are people for whom the Vietnam war—one of the defining politicospiritual experiences of my life—is nothing but a paragraph or maybe a chapter in a dreary high school history book. There you go. Life rolls along; the generations rise and pass.

Or at least they would if we had an inhabitable planet to pass on, providing my clever segue into the theme of the conference, ‘This Good Earth’, complete with a cast of star presenters sounding the urgency of the moral imperative of dealing with the environmental disaster now descending upon us, people with long lists of degrees and publications and work after their names: Sallie McFague; Larry Rasmussen; Jerome Ringo. People worth listening to, sayin’ we better do some rethinking about creation and God and our place in the whole thing, ’cause our theology with its historical lack of respect for the dignity of the earth as its own being has helped cause the mess. Plenty to think about there.

But first, the doofus of the decade award goes to the emcee of the whole affair whom let’s just call pastor Areyouotofyourfuckingmind? Pete. Most pastors enjoy being in front of the crowds, else, of course, they wouldn’t be doing what they do. It’s fun to be up front and have everybody looking at you, depending on you, under your control (at least, talking-wise). It’s fun enough to do it in the parish, but to do it in front of three hundred other clergy—to have them looking up to you—is a clerical wet dream. I know. I’ve been there—as have the great majority of us over the years, taking turns as emcees and the such, all making of course our public blunders (jokes, e.g.), thus tending to go easy on each other. The job is primarily to make the announcements, call the agenda items, maybe lead some some singing, that sort of thing. It’s pretty basic and easy.

Unless, of course, you think you’re real important to the whole thing, which is apparently what happened to Pete, whose rushing around in a collar and bouncing pectoral cross were a dead giveaway right from the get-go that he was big time into the performance, ’cause a clerical collar, well, okay, but a pectoral cross is an affectation unless you’re a bishop in a formal setting, a top hat at church camp, as it were. When a guy’s wearing a pectoral cross you look at him and wonder ‘what’s that about?’ (Whereas when a woman wears one you look at her and wonder, well, nice pectorals?) I didn’t think his performance very good there for that irritating half hour before the speaker when we have to do that whole hymn-singing, praying, and church commercials thing, being subjected to unclever cleverness and witless wittiness, but I know that’s less than charitable, because I dislike that time whoever’s leading it, but the irritation grew as the fun and commercials ran overtime. I was interested in the presentation called “As the world burns, who do we think we are?”

Dr. Sally McFague is a little lady of I guess 70 with silver hair and an erect, dignified bearing, short as she is, just barely a head above the lectern, and a brilliant theologian. She argued for rethinking our theology of the human position before God in terms of ‘ecological anthropology’, which jazzed me because I’ve been doing my own thinking in terms of ‘creation spirituality’ (ala we need to stop worshiping the crucifixion—‘Jesus died for me, yippee I’m going to heaven’—and start paying more attention to the meaning of the incarnation), and it dovetailed nicely. Her presentation was straightforward, appropriately academic, and nuanced—you gotta pay attention. And it was manuscripted—she read it word for word, not even bothering to pretend she wasn’t reading it (the cleverness of pastors working without script or with the merest of notes is way overrated to my mind; besides, she’s, like 70, give ‘er a break).

It was this reality that somehow escaped doofus Pete the emcee who, first, interrupted her to adjust the mike though waiting until about 5 minutes in, then choosing not to walk behind her and unobtrusively do it. Nope. He strolled right across that stage, stood in front of her while she read—between her and the audience—and twisted that mike all over the place making all those crunching electronic sounds for his minute or so of fiddling. This, of course, threw her—and, natch, anybody trying to follow along. But then things got rolling along again and the sound was better, so okay; you give a guy a break on that. But later, as she’s heading toward the end, addressing those issues she’s laid out in the first half, he comes stomping across the stage again, leans down and starts talking in her ear.

He tells her to wind it up; we’re running out of time.

The place is silent as she looks at him in utter astonishment; he says something to her again, and she starts flipping through her pages, eventually coming to a place where she can end it. Spaghetti Jim, who is not given to profanity says, ‘Larry, is he out of his fucking mind?’ We flew this woman—a past president of Vanderbilt Divinity School among other things—in and paid her to teach us, but it had to be cut short because Areyououtofyourfuckingmind? Pete thought it was more important to dive into a rousing church campfire tune? He later apologized publicly, but it was too late to avoid the doofus of the decade award.

In the campfire song meantime, Spaghetti and I got into a duel over our experiences in boy scouts because I added to my eternal torment of him as a spoiled rich only child (which he is even to this day, witness: if you want to join his church you have to take him out to a restaurant of his choosing) the accusation that he was pathetically and helplessly urbanized, to the latter of which he took exception: ‘Larry, I was in the scouts. We went backpacking every month.’ ‘Big deal. So was I. And we hiked in the rugged Sierras, not the worn out Appalachians’ (he being from Philadelphia).

Which he then escalated: ‘We hiked the trails they gave a medal for.’ ‘Big deal. So did I.’

‘I got the pro deo et patria (‘God and Country’) award.’ ‘Big deal. So did I.’

‘I was in the Order of the Arrow.’ ‘Big deal. So was I.’ (You gotta be a super scout to be in that; or at least popular enough to get elected.)

‘I was a jasm’ (junior assistant scoutmaster). ‘Big deal. I was senior patrol leader; and the troop grew from 8 guys to 25 because of it.’

‘We went to Philmont’ (the boy scout camping mecca in New Mexico). ‘We never got there. You rich kids always get what you want.’

‘I made Eagle.’ ‘Not me. I was having too much fun as senior patrol leader. I came up three merit badges short of the 21 necessary’ (stirring the epitaph of Keene: he was always just three merit badges short of an eagle).

‘Larry, I got 36 merit badges.’ ‘Jim, I had a life. I always thought there was something fundamentally weird about guys who had to wear two merit badge sashes.’ I always like to help folks feel proud of their accomplishments, so quoted Vonnegut on the guy who made eagle scout at the age of 35: ‘Here was a man who spent all of his life striving to attain something nobody was interested in.’

I’m at home now, six days after starting this. This morning I attended as per usual the pastors’ weekly bs session. Spaghetti Jim came strolling in to the room and laid out on the table before me not one, but two! Order of the Arrow sashes showing the yellowing of age. ‘See Larry. I told you.’ ‘Dude!!?? You saved that stuff?? What—are you going to wear it to your funeral?’

I think I’ll show up next week with my Vietnam Service and Army Commendation medals (‘course in true three-merit-badges-short fashion, I didn’t get a good conduct medal, for which I am nonetheless duly proud anyway). That’ll put ‘im in his place. Oh, no, wait—I don’t think I saved them, either.

‘Course we all know that merit badges and medals are nothing in the eyes of God, only symbols of the grace of living. But when it comes to people, well 36 merit badges might be enough to outweigh the doofus of the decade award.

But I doubt it.