Midlife Meditation

Jumbotrons somehow manage to make Annual Conference look even more conventional. Thursday night reminded me why I used to love going to Annual Conference. I was there for the annual memorial service, when the conference lifts up the names of clergy and clergy family members who've passed away since the last conference session. I was there to honor my father. This was yet another in the long line of observations of Dad's passing that will culminate next month with the scattering of his ashes. I was prepared for the reading of his name, for the singing of traditional hymns, for the extended sermon by a retiring clergy person. What I wasn't ready for was how much it felt like coming home. In so many ways, it was if I'd never left: all those faces I recognized, so many of them coming up to me before and after the service to warmly greet me, share their condolences, wish me and my family well. Participating in the service was like putting on an old shoe: every...

Have you seen the light? Yes, that's James Brown in the academic robe favored by African-American preachers, and he's calling out the question to John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd as the Blues brothers. It comes in the midst of a stirring rendition by Brown, a church choir, a backup band, and a company acrobatic fan-waving dancers of "The Old Landmark," a gospel standard that inspires the brothers to put their band back together to raise money to save the orphanage in which they were raised. The movie is The Blues Brothers , and it's a shaggy dog of a film stuffed with amazing R&B performances, car chases, celebrity cameos, and occasional blue language. It manages to respectfully poke fun at Catholicism, full gospel Protestantism, neo-Nazism, soul culture, blindness, prison life, government bureaucracy, law enforcement, homelessness, and probably several other politically dangerous topics more successfully than any other Hollywood movie I can think of. See it....

The weddings: Alex Falcone/Megan Niermeyer, Rosena Busse/Erik Grove, Melissa Anderson/Michael Dudleston. The funeral (early next month, and not pictured): Marge Jenkins. In general, I'm not a wedding fan. There are multiple reasons: 1) As a survivor of two divorces and one broken engagement, I'm just emerging from a period of marriage-shyness that has had me questioning the institution even for couples who've successfully practiced it for decades. 2) As a former pastor, I performed far too many weddings that left me with a gut feeling of ambivalence, knowing both that I had inadequately prepared the couple to fulfill their vows and that, even if I had, they were in far too much denial about what marriage means to have really learned anything from my efforts. 3) Also in the former pastor category comes the high stakes impressed upon couples by the wedding industry, all the expensive things that must happen for it to be a successful event. Wedding planners a...