Author Archives: Jen

About Jen

Jen isn't quite sure when she lost her mind, but it is probably documented here on Meditatio. She blogs because the world needs her snark at all hours of the night... and she probably can't sleep anyway.

The Good, The Bad, and The Completely Uncalled For

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Such was my day:

  • The Good: The Heisey Glass Museum hired me as a clerk today. I interviewed with them on Monday afternoon and I thought I might have a shot when the director asked if I wanted a tour of the museum so he could show me where things were. I start on Tuesday, September 9th. It’s only 20 hours a week and they were apologizing to me because the pay is only $6.25/hour; but duuuuuude… it’s a job! The other wonderful thing: the fact that I have web skills compensated for the fact that I don’t have tons of experience with Access.
  • The Bad: I have wicked PMS (bad abdominal pain, dizziness, and nausea) and a wicked migraine (light hurts, loud noises hurt, and smells make me doubly nauseous). I owe my migraine to the fact that we have some BIG storm systems rolling through, which have prevented me from seeing Mars most nights this week.
  • The Completely Uncalled For: The Pop Tarts Kissing on the VMA Last Night — it was distasteful and an affront to the confidence put in them by the teen girls who actually idolize Brit and X-tina. Enough said. (Note: I’m not protesting because I’m anti-lesbian. I’m anti-excessive PDA of all kinds.)

    • Friday Five

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    1. Are you going to school this year?
    Nope… still on sabbatical.

    2. If yes, where are you going (high school, college, etc.)? If no, when did you graduate?
    High school: 1998
    College: 2001
    Seminary: 2008 maybe?

    3. What are/were your favorite school subjects?
    High school: History, government, economics, French, Biology, and AP English
    College: all my History classes and my Religion and Social Change class

    4. What are/were your least favorite school subjects?
    Calculus and my 10th grade Chemistry class — incompetent and racist teacher who let the Asian kids cheat

    5. Have you ever had a favorite teacher? Why was he/she a favorite?
    In high school, it was probably 3 of my 4 English teachers. In college, it was my choir director Margaret and my advisor Cindy. Cindy kicked my butt around until I got my major finished. We still keep in touch.

    Musings on Faith That Have Been Ruminating in My Mind

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    I’ve had miscellaneous thoughts on faith that are kind of developing a little bit at a time. To maybe flesh them out and make space for things related to my job interview tomorrow (!!!), I’m blogging them.

  • In my devotional reading on Monday, the author commented on people who “try to live from one dramatic mountaintop experience to another”, whose relationship with Christ is “based on their feelings at the moment”, and who “go from Bible conferences to seminars to Bible studies trying to maintain an emotional high”. I tried to be one of those people and that really failed when my depression got horrendously awful during my second year of college. We in America tend to have a feelings-based faith and this is really not quite what is intended for us. Many of us don’t have to think about where our next piece of bread is coming from, so we sometimes fail to understand the whole joy concept that comes when you see God work powerfully in your life to provide that bread.

    I was talking with a friend of mine who had been to the candidacy retreat for our synod. She told me that our bishop had talked of his experiences at the Lutheran World Federation meeting in Canada and of being the room when the bishops were discussing the gay clergy issue. The bishops from Africa, Asia, and Latin America would all argue their position against gay clergy intellectually and theologically. The European and American bishops would use anecdotes and feelings in their arguments. Does anyone else see a problem here? We are having such a hard time with the issue because we aren’t speaking on the same terms. I think that we need to be more in touch with the Word in our Christian lives and not solely with our feelings. The most powerful “Jesus times” I’ve had have all been centered around Scripture either in spoken word or in music, and I think there is something to that.

  • This is probably the monthly “Jen loves liturgy and thinks it’s better than free-form worship” thought but… when I was pondering curriculum for someone I might be prepping for baptism, I was pondering how our church year is cyclical and goes through the life of Jesus and the church. It starts with Advent in late November/early December and culminates with Christ the King Sunday the next November. Advent is the Old Testament prophecies surrounding the promised sending of a Messiah; Christmas is the birth of Jesus; Epiphany is His life and ministry; Lent is his 40 days in the wilderness; Holy Week is the last week of His life; the Triduum is His death and burial; Easter is His glorious resurrection; Pentecost is the life of His Church; and Christ the King Sunday is kind of like the end of the Book of Revelation. As one of those freaks who loves Lent and Advent, this cyclical thing is cool — it serves to remind us of the story of the One who we serve and also includes us in the story.

  • We had the kick-off for choirs last night at the house of one of the couples who does both choir and bells and part of the night was going through music for the first couple weeks. We’re having to still worship in the fellowship hall because the sanctuary is still in pieces (we’re putting in a new heating/air-conditioning system and the completion date is now a month later than planned) and all our choir music has to be “piano-friendly” because of this. Much of the music we’re doing is “textually-based” as in it’s a text from Scripture put to music and as Judy (our choir director) commented, most of us can sing the lessons read in worship because we’ve sung so many texts.

    We are singing Fauré’s Requiem for All Saints’ Sunday and I’m thinking that I will so have to fly back to sing it with them if we’re at another call by that time. Judy picked it because we’ve had such a hard summer in terms of the 9 or 10 funerals that have happened since June 15th. (We had two funerals last week and we have yet another one this Sunday afternoon.) This brought back to mind the comment on how we can sing most of our lectionary and it morphed into the thankfulness that I sing in a choir whose director understands the importance of music being appropriate for worship. Granted, we do special music for that day anyway but the Requiem by Fauré is mellow compared to the Requiem by Verdi or the one by Mozart. The latter two are BIG production numbers, while Fauré’s is fit to be sung in worship.

    When in our music God is glorified…

  • Along the lines of the last musing is the thoughts relating to how essential music is to the Lutheran understanding of Christianity. I mean, we’re the church from whence greats like Bach came and most Lutherans grow up on Bach either through organ pieces in worship or through singing his arrangements of some of the hymns in the Lutheran Book of Worship (LBW). Every Lutheran church has a choir and while some may be absolutely horrid, the choir sings at EVERY service and helps to lead music in the service. At Jon’s internship parish, the choir has been known to out-number the parishoners during blizzards and we definitely can out-sing them even with a full church. 🙂 Almost every Lutheran has at least 1/5 of the text of the hymns in the LBW memorized (which I can say with fairly good certainty as I watch people sing as they process up for Communion) and probably 60% of the tunes as they tend to repeat from hymn to hymn. One of the things that attracted me to Lutheranism was the fact that they have such a rich musical tradition and that many grow up with at least some musical training even if it isn’t extensive. Music is such a big part of worship that it helps me to be in a church where music is paid attention and where people understand that the lyrics of the hymns frequently are for both aesthetic and edification purposes.

    • OK… I think I should probably let my mind rest and head to bed now.

    Jon’s First Call

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    Here at Casa K-M, we’re playing the “hurry-up-and-wait” game as we wait for the Bishop’s Draft on September 18th. We’re making to-do lists for the stuff we have to do before we move and I’m looking at the websites of the synods we put down for preferences.

    In my search (of 4 synods in Minnesota so far), I think Northeastern Minnesota Synod is the front runner. Why, you ask, would you want to go to the frigid north? Well… other than being close to Canada, there’s this. 🙂

    My Take on the Alabama Monument Fiasco

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    CT Weblog: Ten Commandments Watch Continues

    I’m torn on this. On the one hand, I applaud Roy Moore for standing up for the faith and defending it against those who seek to remove religion from society. On the other hand, I believe in the separation of church and state and Moore’s religious defense of the monument on state grounds is a violation of that.

    The Left Hand
    Jon of Blog One Another raises an interesting point:

    Helen, let’s say you belonged to a church in Indonesia. Your church was attacked by Muslim extremists: the building bombed, people hurt and killed. You identified the assailants and pressed charges against them. You, a Christian, and your assailants, Islamists, appear together in a court of law. And behind the judge, carved into the wall in large flowing Arabic script, are the words, “There is no God but Allah; Muhammed is the servant of Allah.”

    How would you feel? Would you have a fair trial?

    Now let’s say you are a young girl in high school. You and your family are practicing pagans. You are tired of being harassed in school — of being called a witch, a Satanist, being told you’re going to hell, having your locker trashed, being pushed down and cursed by people who identify themselves as Christians. You press charges against your assailants, and against your school for not doing anything to stop it. You, a pagan, and your assailants, Christians, go to the judicial building. In the lobby of the judicial building is a two-ton monument of the Ten Commandments — a tribute to a religion that is not yours, and to a god you find antithetical to your beliefs.

    How would you feel? Would you have a fair trial?

    Jon’s point is this: is the placement of such a monument which conveys a religious message that may not be the one of the defendant a hinderance to justice being served? Is the message of such a monument the rules by which we are playing and are those that follow the tenets of that monument the ones who have the judicial advantage? Do only Christians deserve justice while pagans are denied?

    Next question: if the argument for keeping the monument is that it represents something that influenced our justice system, shouldn’t there also be a monument to Hammurabi’s code or to Napoleon (i.e. for the Napoleonic code)? What about something relating to English common law (a monument depicting the Magna Carta)? Our justice system has many influencing origins and we shouldn’t be favoring one over the other.

    Last point/question against the arguments in favor of the monument: I heard someone say on the news that it reminds us of our Christian moral heritage. (My apologies for not getting the name. I was listening to NPR on my way to the store.) So is it there so that people might see it and convert to Christianity? When exactly did our moral heritage become Christian. I’d argue that it’s Judeo-Christian at least and Abrahamic (including Islam) at most. You are not going to automatically drop your idols and believe in the Christian God just because you see 10 moral theses chiseled on a piece of stone. If it’s to inspire civic behavior, I’d argue that we are not a theocracy and therefore, not all of the 10 Commandments apply to our civic laws. If they did, the freedom of religion guaranteed to us in the Bill of Rights would not exist.

    The Right Hand
    As much as I argue for the separation of church and state, I think we are too overzealous in separating the church from the state. I like that the ACLU argues for my civil liberties but they take it way too far. We can’t have manger scenes in public, but we can have menorahs and crescent moons. The people at my church in Santa Cruz used to joke that we went to the MLK Convocation every year because it was the one university event that was allowed to start with prayer. (I actually had a Biology TA ask me “what the h*** [I was] doing in Biology as a Christian????” That was the last time I wore my [very tiny] cross when I went to class.) We can’t sing religious Christmas carols in school; but we can sing Hannukah songs all we want.

    I can understand the anger of many of those protesting the removal of the 10 Commandments monument. It’s a sign of their faith and denying its inclusion in public is equal to denying them the right to be practicing Christians. I am not ashamed of the Gospel even if I might occasionally be ashamed by some who claim to spread it; and I reserve the right to stand up for my faith in public. I support those who are there keeping vigil because I understand their position and respect their desire that their faith not be overlooked.

    The Hands Clapping
    So what is the action that should be taken? Should we engage in civil disobedience (a Romans 13 violation) to prevent its removal as Dr. Dobson is calling for on his radio address? Or… is Roy Moore wrong for supporting disobedience against the government of which he is an agent and to which he swore an oath to uphold the law? (This would count as bearing false witness [breaking an oath and in effect lying], which is one of the prhibitions in the commandments that Moore is trying to protect.)

    We have a 10 Commandments monument in the courthouse square of the town in which I live which has the commandments in Hebrew and English. A fuss was made a few years back and the majority of people voted to keep it, with the added thought that the inclusion of the Hebrew added a cultural memorial aspect to it. Could they maybe chisel some Hebrew on there? (That might call off the ACLU dogs.) Or… could they maybe incorporate other judicial influences into the monument, which would make it a historical thing and not specifically religious?

    This is definitely not a black and white issue!