Off the Hook

My daily prayer regimen -- "Prayer before Facebook" -- is plodding along, and I have, in fact, been praying every day, sometimes more perfunctorily than others. It has also brought attention to the fact that I don't actually find Facebook that interesting (though it does have its charms), or perhaps, in a moment of cosmic levity, it has become less interesting to me at just the moment I've decided to make it the carrot to help me keep my prayer promise. One reader suggested I write out some of my prayers, but to be perfectly honest they're a bit boring.

A couple of months ago I sent some of you an email about my future at the church -- namely, that there is some buzz about making my position full-time with me in it -- and several of you have been asking if there's any news on that front. The big question was: do I really want to be full-time at a church? Is this the right next step? And it caused no small amount of soul-searching and pondering on my part. I was only asked if I would be willing to have that conversation; I wasn't being asked for a decision, and it could be as long as a year before such a decision even became a live option. But I also indicated in the email that I felt if I leaned into this it would probably happen, so the decision isn't completely irrelevant to the here and now. How I think I'll answer that question when it comes up has some inescapable bearing on how I comport myself in the meantime.

As my wife and I have kicked this around, we keep coming up against our own reservations. There's a kind of built-in distance to being part-time, a kind of buffer against getting sucked in too much. There's a certain attractiveness to not having employment by people to whom my "real" thoughts would be anathema as my bread and butter. And, at bottom, there's just a basic intuition that this is ultimately a bad idea. Seemingly insignificant changes to the church's internal culture or to my own tolerances could leave me desperate to get out, and being full-time could in and of itself prove to be too claustrophobic. Moreover, I think my real passion is teaching and writing, and the church needs someone whose real passion is worship. Not just music, either. I do church music because I'm good at it and I enjoy it, but that's not the same as being a person who sees their life's work wrapped up in the liturgical life of the church.

What's interesting here is that I had one of my regular meetings with our pastor on Monday, which I went into wondering if I should bring this up. I didn't need to wonder, because he brought it up, and it seems there have been some developments in the conversation that I assume come out of a recent elder's retreat. Going for a full-time worship person has been made more of a priority, and the nascent job description leads more toward a comprehensive "worship arts" producer-type person, someone big-picture enough to oversee drama, dance, tech, music, etc. I'm not that person. And the pastor gently articulated some of the same concerns about my academic life; they would expect a full-time person to be "all in" in a way that he thinks would cause me to shrivel and I know I would balk at anyway.

He was hesitant to bring all this up but I saw it coming, and headed him off at the pass, for which he was grateful. My current job is not in jeopardy; the preferred option is to keep me on as more of a musical director (which I like better anyway) and hire someone to be my immediate boss. The pastor also indicated that he had a personal interest in keeping me around for my brain, though he added something to the effect of "If only I had half your brain, or maybe just 40%," an idea that I hope he doesn't take too literally.

Sweet Hour of Prayer

In our planning for the services at church, January 3rd was what I call a one-off: it wasn't part of a series, just a stand-alone Sunday. Dec. 27 wrapped up our Christmas series, and January 10 begins a new series which will cast vision for the life of the church. Last Sunday existed, then, in a kind of limbo. Our pastor decided to use it to tie into the New Year's resolution vibe and call us all to prayer. For the next six weeks, we're supposed to pray every day, just to see what might happen.

I admit I was a little disappointed. This seems terribly typical, and prayer isn't really my bag. I recognize the place of prayer in the Christian tradition -- I always pray if I'm asked to, and I'm not squeamish about praying in public -- and it's hard to cast aspersions on a pastor calling his or her congregation to greater prayer. How is that not legit? Besides, it's rather shrewd, even if he didn't intend it to be; we sometimes get accused of not being "spiritual" enough, and this attention to piety will push some of the right buttons in a certain segment of our congregation. So I roll with it.

We've also launched a blog where the pastor can post something inspiring or whatever and people can comment. There's also a place for prayer requests, and another to record answers to prayer. Testifying goes Web 2.0. As staff, we were asked to "get the ball rolling" with some comments before the official launch, to seed things a little. I ignored this. Until the pastor called me.

He doesn't ask me why I haven't responded. He says, "I need your wit," and explains the plan to get some comments rolling before it goes public. He doesn't say "Hey, didn't you get the email," he just appeals to my vanity: "I was hoping you could add some color." Like I said, he can be shrewd. He's this weird combination of earnestness and savvy, and I can't always tell if I'm being played -- well, really I am being played; what I don't know is if this is calculated or just intuitive on his part. It doesn't matter, of course. I have to say yes, which means I have to come up with something to participate in the discussion.

So I post something lighthearted about already being a morning person and deciding that my new mantra is "prayer before Facebook." And what's funny is that, of all the staff pre-comments, the one that garnered a response is -- you guessed it -- mine. So now someone I don't actually know, inspired by my transparency, is joining me in my prayer-before-Facebook campaign. This means I'm committed, not because somebody joined me but simply because I said I'd do it.

I'll let you know how it goes.

Sickness Unto Death

I spent New Year's day with the stomach flu. I thought I had dodged the bullet -- the rest of the family had contracted it at different points but I was, so far, unscathed. Alas, as the ball dropped on New Year's Eve, I was praying to the porcelain god -- and not for the usual reasons. So, after a rough night, I spent the following day camped out on the couch, variously reading, sleeping, and watching Battlestar Galactica. Except for being sick, that would have made for a fun day.

It's funny how disorienting being sick can be, especially with a slight fever. Things seem surreal, like the aftermath of one of those naps where you sleep too late into the afternoon or evening and are then perpetually groggy. This is compounded for me by the already somewhat disorienting effects of a holiday break. Several days on end with no agenda, or a radically different agenda from the usual, and time seems to take on an added liquidity. It's actually somewhat anxiety-inducing for me, though I think I've done better this year than most, allowing myself to enjoy the respite (as well as getting some things done that I'd put off).

So, me being me, I couldn't just be sick -- I was also observing myself being sick, pondering the effects of sickness on my sense of self, pondering the fragility and contingency of that sense of self. It took only a virus to threaten it, a slight temperature difference to make me feel out of sorts. A change in routine, or suspension of it, can throw me off my groove. In a general sense, I am arguably a different person today, if only slightly, based on my choices and experiences of yesterday.

I have a friend who has worked hard to find the right antidepressant that allows him to feel "like himself." I don't begrudge him this. I used to follow a blogger who chronicled his own journey with depression and medication, and while the diagnosis and treatment was clearly a boon to his family, I felt like his writing was not as good. I'm sure the trade-off was worth it, but it's there. When we were young, my mother discovered that my sister became almost tolerable -- or at least less unbearable -- when we took sugar out of her diet. Our youngest can go from angel to demon and back again based on what (or if) he's eaten, or so it seems. A change in our blood sugar or brain chemistry can have significant results, even altering who we are or who we feel ourselves to be.

While we insist -- and probably must insist, for our own sanity -- that we are more than the sum of our parts, that we are not merely a sea of chemicals in a bag of fat and protein, that the brain transcends the bioelectrical matrix it comprises, this insistence is challenged by the sheer chemical and environmental malleability of that very project. In other words, if I need a particular drug, or diet, or routine to feel normal, then what is normal? If I need these things, or some combination of these things, to feel like myself, then what is this "self" that I claim as mine? Aren't we really just defining the parameters of a particular collective fiction, or choosing between competing versions of that fiction?

I haven't even addressed the internal factors -- how what we think or believe affects our sense of self, the extent to which we can change our whole world based on how we narrate that world to ourselves. A very simple part of my own journey is this: I don't like who I am when I'm trying to be either too religious or too atheistic. Both feel forced, like I'm trying too hard or protesting too much. What's funny is that the path that feels the most authentic is the one that leads me to the conclusion (which is mostly what I've been getting at here) that authenticity is bunk.

"Bunk" might be too strong, and anyway I'm tempted to pull back because the truth is, I believe in authenticity, or at least I find some version of it helpful in my own meanderings. It's just that, like so many things, it's slippery, shifting from view whenever we try to apprehend it directly. If I decide against this skepticism about the self, for instance, on the basis that I don't want to be that cynical, I only play into the same dynamic. It's like those people who argue that God must exist or we'll lose our moral compass -- which might be a reason to believe in God (though not a very good one), but it has nothing to do with existence.

My church gig is going well. Well enough that the conversation has turned to the possibility of making it a full-time gig. Some of you recently got a message from me about this very thing, and some of you have asked how that conversation is going. Here's where we are: the pastor and I agree that to do this job well, it needs to be full-time, and that -- so far, at least -- I'm a good fit. And though I'm sometimes tempted to put in full-time energy (and something close to the hours), simply because that's what it needs, I can't afford to do that. So there's some tension there. I, however, really need to finish my dissertation before that becomes a live option, and the church actually needs to hire two full-time staff people in other areas before we take the conversation further. This buys me at least a year, maybe closer to 18 months, before I really have to decide if I'm that person, or just the guy who's going to help them find that person.

What I have to laugh at myself about is the way this parallels the earnest believer's quest to discern the "will of God." What's the right choice? What's most authentic? What's at stake in making the wrong choice? Is there a wrong choice, or just competing versions of the good? Am I being pushed or led in a particular direction or am I facing a pure choice? What does the choice, either way, say about who I am?

I like what I'm doing here and I'm willing to run with it, especially if I can convince myself there might be some higher purpose involved. Or if it allows us to stay in an area we like a lot. Most of the people I queried said "go for it." But I can't give up teaching -- I'm getting PhD, for God's sake; what else am I supposed to do with that? -- and I've much more consistently wanted to be and envisioned myself as a college professor as anything else, including being a musician. I can teach part-time, of course, so the choices are not necessarily exclusive. But would I have time to write books?

There's also, as my wife points out (correctly), an added level of perceived duplicity to being a full-time minister and a deeply skeptical agnostic. As a part-time person, I can imagine myself still something of an outsider, a hired gun come alongside for a time. It's like being on assignment versus some kind of deep cover. Who I am on the inside doesn't matter so much. There are questions that just don't come up. Going full-time would seem to mean going all in; it narrows that critical, ironic distance in an uncomfortable way. Right now, I can theoretically look forward to a day when I don't have to be so careful about "Ira" versus my IRL persona (or would I still be careful so as not to jeopardize an alternative career path? I'm such a whore sometimes).

On one level, it doesn't matter right now. I have other fish to fry and things are fine the way they are. But there's part of me that doesn't do well with this "Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason..." which informs my blog title. I'm a a reacher. I think it makes a little bit of difference, which way I think I'll answer that question when it comes up.

Even if authenticity is a vapor.

Even if it's nothing more than the willingness to make the choice.