Author Topic: 20 Questions with Alan

sam

20 Questions with Alan
« Reply #20 on: September 01, 2024 »
Can you recommend the ministry as a vocation?

Elmer Gantry

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Re: 20 Questions with Alan
« Reply #21 on: September 04, 2024 »
That's a bit like asking "Would you recommend teaching (or lawyering or being a nanny)?" It depends to quite an extent on the doctrine, the setting, the congregation and the personality mix. Pastoring in a small country church to a small group of dying elderly people can be quite a different scenario from heading up the staff on some 5000 member power church in L.A., or in a college ministry. Hospital chaplains are regularly in high tension situations that your Sunday preacher/expositor might not find him or herself in that often. Although they sometimes do. More on that in a minute.

What definitely helps, no matter what the setting, is that the minister be a true believer in what they are doing and teaching, and that they have integrity. If any of that is lacking, trouble can be on the brew. It's easy to get discouraged. People are not always easy to get along with (especially when they are paying your salary) and there are a great deal of expectations. As one example from my experience, a fellow who I will refer to as Vern, a cantankerous chap in his seventies, couldn't live with the possibility that I might have taken a quiet afternoon off to not be in the church office. Consequently, he found a reason every day to call sometime between one and three in the afternoon, just to make sure I was there. People who want to befriend the minister and use him to increase their own influence in the congregation, and get quite upset if you don't oblige. Frequently, they are the very people who hire you.

Then there was the time one of our younger members, a mother of three young kids, died suddenly at work from an aneurysm and guess who gets to walk into the middle of that and have something of comfort to say to the grieving, shocked family. Just sayin', one has to have a firm center.

What wrapped it up for me was when a knock came on the door of the church office where I was ostensibly studying a commentary on St.Paul's letter to the Ephesians but in effect checking out the new Dave Matthews Band album. On answering, I met a woman in her forties who asked if I would heal her son, who had been diagnosed with leukemia. In a parked Dodge in the lot, I saw a young man with a Led Zeppelin t-shirt sitting in the back seat.

I told her,"I'll be happy to pray with you, but I'm sorry, I don't have the gift of healing."
"Then what GOOD are you?" she barked back, and drove off.
I returned to my office and spent the remainder of the afternoon trying very hard not to remember what she said. To this day, I don't really have an answer for her.

I really would have been a better professor of theology than a pastor. An early mentor of mine even suggested as much when I first went into the ministry. But the academic approach has its drawbacks as well. As some British divine once said, "Pity the theologians, for their faith often crashes on the rocks of their subtleties." I heard tell of a group of ministers who would meet regularly and after years of conversation eventually concluded that their spiritual beliefs had since grown beyond those of their congregations; at the same time they felt trapped because they needed the paycheck to support their families. Should they persist in hypocrisy in their preaching, or be bold in where their thinking had gone and to heck with the consequences? Not always so easy to decide.

I'll end it with a joke. Four ministers go out fishing one day and decide that, since it was just the four of them, they confess to one another any secret vice that might be hindering their spiritual live. The first minister admits he is a bit of a gambling addict, nothing major but he plays the lotto a bit more than he should. Then second guy says he never had much temptation that way, but on the other hand he sure does like looking at those pretty girls from time to time. Third man says he keeps a bottle of Jim Beam in the desk drawer and takes a swig now and again. Really needs to kick the habit. This just leaves the fourth guy, who has sat there rather placidly through all this, saying nothing. His fellows insist that he confess something. "After all, we just did!" Slowly, very slowly, he breaks into a wide grin. "Well, if you must know, I'm a terrible gossip. And I can't WAIT until we get back to shore!"



sam

20 Questions with Alan
« Reply #22 on: September 11, 2024 »
What were you doing on 9/11, and how did it affect you?

Alan Handman

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Re: 20 Questions with Alan
« Reply #23 on: September 11, 2024 »
At the time I was working as a campus minister at a university in North Carolina while finishing up my Divinity degree in Johnson City, Tennessee (a place I hope to retire to some day). September 11 was a day I needed to commute to school, which involved a lengthy drive down a winding road from Boone, which was up in them thar' hills down to Johnson in the Tennessee hollers.  It would take about an hour, and since it was impossible to pick up a radio signal and the cell phone hadn't quite yet become the extension of the human arm that it now is, I was essentially cut off from the world. It could have ended during that hour for all I knew of it, and in a sense it did. I filled the time by listening to Dolly Parton's recently released bluegrass masterpiece, Little Sparrow, on my CD deck and revel in the lush green of the hills while praying not to have the car break down. Otherwise, not a care in the world. You can listen to bluegrass on anything, but the hills of Appalachia breathe it.

When I made it into Johnson, I stopped, as was custom, at a kind of mini-mart along the way to pick up my donut and coffee on the way to class. On the way in, I noticed something a bit unusual, a group of customers gathered near the check-out, watching the little TV the clerk had on a shelf behind him. I thought, "That's weird but whatever." and got my repast. While checking out I saw that the screen was on a news station with a picture of a smoking wreckage. I asked, "Um...did something happen?"  "Yeah, someone is plane bombing New York City, son." WTF?

Without further ado I took off to class, where I found everyone seated in solemnity around the discussion table, talking about what had happened, which at that moment was still only vaguely understood. I did come to glean that an American Airline jet was involved. It took me a moment to process, but then it clicked with a dull horror that my sister was a flight attendant on the Boston-New York route. And it was just about impossible to call anyone because the lines were all jammed. (As it turned out, she had missed pulling that flight by just a couple of days, and in fact - being the intrepid trouper she was and still is - was on the next flight when they resumed service. She said there were about fifteen people on the flight, and basically everyone sat up in first class with the flight attendants and talked about what had happened.She knew most of the crew on that fated pane.)

Well, there was a lot of shock, people crying, people getting enraged. A lot of young southern lads driving VERY fast and hard in their jeeps and pick-ups looking like they would love to kill someone right about then. Someone of swarthy middle eastern caste, that is. And in fact, people in that demographic began withdrawing quickly from public life. I remember a couple of charming Persian sisters who worked at a local cafe I would frequent who suddenly just weren't there anymore. And I won't deny that some political dread filled my mind, because I knew Bush would eventually parley the attack into an excuse to do some stupid neocon aggression that would only worses the problem. W. didn't let me down.

I didn't make it back to New York for a while, so whatever went on their had to be related second-hand by friends. Most is not worth going into, since copious New York stories after the attack are available. I remember the sicking horror I would feel when as a kid I looked over the viewing balcony on the newly minted tower (or even contemplated what that crazy Frenchman Phillipe Petit did with his tightrope). The idea of anyone plunging from such a height still gives me shudders and questions the benevolence of any deity.

I understand that for about three days the city was, probably for the first time since the invention of the motor vehicle, deadly silent. When traffic started again on the third day my friend Ed quipped, "It was the only time in my life that I said 'Thank God for the sound of New York traffic.'"

It remains, for me anyway, an indelible reminder of how thin a line it is we all walk, and how stupid any country is to be less than fully mindful of what is going on within, or coming over, its borders.

sam

20 Questions with Alan
« Reply #24 on: September 15, 2024 »
What standard advice do you think might be wrong?

For example, I've heard that you should never go to bed angry. However, could some good come of it?

Alan Handman

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Re: 20 Questions with Alan
« Reply #25 on: September 25, 2024 »
The version I heard was more along the lines of "Don't let the sun go down on an argument." Speaking for myself, I've found that a good night's sleep is better had when a ugly scene has been at least somewhat resolved. Then again, maybe people need a night to process things before they can move on. I suppose it's up to the individuals involved.

This may sound a bit whiney or world-weary, but a truism I have found to be not so true is the one about "Work hard and reward will follow."  In my own experience and that of many others I have heard vent, working hard (except when aimed toward a personal project or ambition) rarely achieves more than an person in authority going "I can count on that person to take care of that bit of drudgery for me, so there they shall remain." Advancement in the workplace seems to have a good deal more to do with being liked by the people upstairs, or perhaps having some kind of personal connection or, in the current stream, meeting some kind of checklist of virtue signals. Lest it be suggested I am speaking out of personal bitterness, I should say that I myself have been the beneficiary of these influences as well as the one shafted.

Then there is that phenomenon which has come to be called "failing up." Years ago in my day working at a Grand Central area bookseller, a popular volume was written called The Peter Principle. It explored the dynamics of what happens when, as we so often see, someone in a certain position crashes and burns, metaphorically speaking, at their job, only to find themselves being promoted to an even highter position, or finding a still better situation somewhere else. Just recently I have heard about how a certain school principal I had the sorry experience to work for has found yet another, even higher paying and more prestigious job after being let go for various ethical violations at his previous school. I should say that even when I was working for the person concerned, they were on something like their fifth transfer, every previous one terminated for some kind of bad conduct. Yet, their career trajectory goes up, up and away.

So, without demeaning the virtue of a diligent work ethic, my advice for the ambitious would be to make friends in high places, ideally in an organic and unforced way, rather than working one's fingers to the bone hoping to be noticed. The world is indeed blessed by such people; they are what keeps the boat floating so to speak and perhaps that is its own reward. Yet fortune favors the prepared mind (that is true) and that mind should understand the terrain of reality, even when it doesn't match what Grandma taught.

sam

20 Questions with Alan
« Reply #26 on: October 04, 2024 »
Where did it all start to go wrong? (You choose the what.)

Alan Handman

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When Did It All Go Wrong?
« Reply #27 on: October 18, 2024 »
My vote would be May 20, 1954. The day when Bill Haley, a cherubic 30 year old with a kiss-curl over his balding pate and a smile reminiscent of Private Pyle from Full Metal Jacket, released Rock Around the Clock. The beginning of the Great Wrong Turn commenced with "One two three o'clock four o'clock rock..."

I'm not saying there was a direct cause and effect between the Rock Music and the social decay and political and economic collapse into which we head full sail. It is more the soundtrack accompanying the tragedy, which both enhances and dialogues with the Signs of the Time (thank you, Prince, R.I.P.) Nor am I saying I'd rather be listening to Perry Como and Lawrence Welk, or that doing so would have spared us. As one who has been known to proclaim "rock n' roll saved my life!" I can simply hold two ideas in my head at the same time: Rock is both great AND hastens moral decay.

This didn't happen quickly, or all at once. The founding Daddy-Os of the era gave repressed kids a place to put their pent up energy, to acknowledge "feelings they weren't sure they should be having" as Colonel Tom Parker once said. These early rockers were anything but philosophers, and no one would have dreamt of asking one for their political opinions were unless it was for comic effect. (Ike just got the Fats Domino endorsement!) Still, when Jerry Lee Lewis showed up with his 13 year old cousin/bride carrying her few possessions in a doll house converted to a make-shift suitcase, it was a harbinger of things to come.

To be sure, untamed debauchery (and the view that things are falling apart) have, like the poor, always been with us. But rockers gave the generation a license to give bathos, heedless self-indulgence, and giving the finger to basically benevolent institutions a hop, skip and jump. After all, drink, drugs and rapacious screwing couldn't be too bad if Jimmy Page was doing it! Well, so went my thoughts...Then Dylan, Lennon and Townsend et al. gave the scene an intellectual component, no less. Even really smart nerdy guys could get on this train, where women and girls we had no business being with would offer their very selves for no more than a few drops of rocker semen before being thrown out like a used condom. Depravity became a virtue. The court of public opinion celebrates the grotesque.

Not surprisingly, we now find ourselves in todays solipsistic era where the chief concern is how our needs will be met, preferably at someone elses expense, personal responsibility is moribund, and common sense has taken a ride on the Crazy Train. My kids listen to stuff that I'm not even sure qualifies as music, but I try to stay neutral on it. I made a vow early in life that I would never know the younger generations tastes (as mine were mocked) simply because I don't get it. My own farewell to the top 40 began around 2008 with the advent of Miley Cyrus. I couldn't tell you what is going on anymore.

So what's an aging whiskey rock and roller to do except put on some Dark Side (via download, of course) and bliss out?



sam

20 Questions with Alan
« Reply #28 on: November 06, 2024 »
How are you feeling after Trump's win? Feel free to use all adjectives at your disposal.

Grover Cleveland

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Reflections on the Cusp of a Second Trump
« Reply #29 on: November 07, 2024 »
"Basking in sweet relief"
 
I had been gearing up to spend the next four years (if not the remainder of my life) in seething bitter cynicism and becoming a cantankerous old man. Now it looks like that will be in abeyance for a little while.

"Astounded"

While I am delighted with how things turned out, I really didn't expect them to go this way. It doesn't help to be in a heavily blue state, surrounded by people who lap up the Democrat talking points like ants on a melting ice cream cone. I am examining the specifics of the vote closely, taking into account the in-state percentage of who voted for whom. A problem with our "winner take all" system is it compels us to think in terms of red and blue states, as if everyone in said state shares the same mentality and if you don't, you must be some kind of freakish oddity. But 45 percent of a states total vote is NOT a small number. That's a lot of people who aren't buying the bill of goods.

"Prepared for battle"

There is no way the other side is going to just let this roll. It will be interesting to see what happens on November 26 when Trump has to go before that activist creep of a judge to be sentenced on this kangaroo court trial. To be sure, Trump is not going to spend a minute in jail (at least on this side of his presidency) but it can still be weaponized to cause him grief. The two federal cases will need to find some kind of dismount, since one cannot try a sitting president. But I'm curious to see if they will be appropriated as grounds for impeachment.

"Mildly amused"

I took this opportunity to tune in to the left leaning news networks. Ay kevultch! The funereal voices, the tearful histrionics, the doomsday predictions, the absolutely loony worries. "Women chained to birthing tables" "Concentration camps for reeducation" "News anchors assassinated over lunch".

I hear Biden and Trump are going to sit down and have a chat during the transition time. I can only imagine how one chats about giving over the reigns with the guy you've been calling a tyrannical Nazi for the last couple of years. Apparently Joe will be attending the inauguration along with Jill, Kamala and Doug. I can't wait.

Finally, "stirred in the loins"

Usha Vance. Oh my. Why do I keep picturing her in a Star Trek mini-uniform as communications officer?