Jiminy Crackers. So much shit has gone on. I’m tryin’ to pick out what’s relevant to this space. I guess it’d be that I got increasingly frustrated with my pastor being completely unreachable – I tried the church email, his work phone, his personal phone, fuckin’ Twitter – I wouldn’t’ve been bothered but I needed a pastoral reference for seminary. At some point in there, I contacted the bishop’s office and was like “I know everybody’s busy, but I need a thing” and they were the ones who suggested I call the church. And then a couple weeks later, I wrote the them again saying “I ain’t heard from the guy and I’m done with that church”. I mean, I’m still totally good with Jesus and the ELCA is the denomination for me, but I was frustrated with the lack of communication and – being real – the denomination is a buncha cis het white folks. They’re all good, decent people, don’t get me wrong, but do I look like I’d fit in with the squeaky clean middle class? I’ve done more meth in my life than the entire choir combined over there. And the past year has really turned it. I been following all these LGBTQ+ pastors on line, groovin’ on queer theology, workin’ with the homeless, getting more and more radicalized… I want a church community that feels like “my people”.
And my laptop was breaking down. It’s a beat up Lenovo that I got a few years ago, used, which I’ve toted around and dropped and the cat’s slept on it and it was punkin’ out. So I finally went downtown and checked my bank balance and I dunno how this happened, but I make more money than I spend, so I had money, so I went out and got a Chromebook, which is what I’m peckin’ away on now. I fired it up earlier, entered my email address and everything from the old one just switched over to this one which might be normal to some folks, but to me it was like fuckin’ magic. I opened Netflix, just to see what would happen and it just zipped right to the “who’s watching?” page, and friends, I have been using my kid’s mom’s N’flix account for years, so it carried over her login info. That’s almost scary. But I was able to open some emails and I found out that the pastor I couldn’t get hold of sent me an email and he apparently got that reference sent to the seminary of my choice, possibly because the bishop’s office people got ahold of him and said I got ahold of them, which momentarily caused me to feel bad because I wasn’t actually trying to start a big kerfuffle, but then I got over that because how hard was it to read any of the fuckin’ emails I sent and respond? Not hard at all. And I had email from the pastor hisself wondering when we could get together and talk, so I guess gripin’ up the chain of command was the right thing to do. It worked anyway.
We’re in our last week here at ye olde homelesse shelter, because the Pentagon gets $750 billion, but there ain’t enough scratch to keep a fuckin’ shelter open. We’ve literally been operating out of a closed-down grocery store with pieces of floor missing, in the richest fuckin’ country on the planet. Meanwhile, super rich assholes’re colonizing Mars and trying to prevent their employees from unionizing. That’s Babylon right there. That’s the world that Jesus was talking about when He talked about hating the world. I know He didn’t intend for anybody to hate the actual earth, which is God’s footstool, because He spent a goodly bit of time in wilderness and a bit more in gardens, according to the sources we have available, which are the Gospels. Speaking of which, I’ve continued the project of typing out everything Jesus said – I’m in John – so I’ll have that online soon enough. I wanna publish it in some online publishing space, free to download, but if that ain’t easy, I’ll just put it all here.
Oh yeah, the shelter. I’m there now. Some of our folks’ve left, gone to their summer digs. Others’re planning to camp out and some will probably slip through the cracks. There’s rumors that the local socialist collective’re gonna have some kinda protest because they think the homeless should be allowed to camp on the local state university campus – I agree, but throwin’ some kinda protest is about as likely to solve any problems as protests ever do. But socialist collectives gotta act up occasionally or they lose their charter or whatever.
Me and some friends’ve been talking about starting a freak church. They’re a coupla lesbians who used to go to to the local ELCA but stopped because they moved out to the far end of the county and it wasn’t worth the drive. They know some other folks who’d be interested, so we’re gonna figure out how to do that. One thing we know, it’d be high church. We’re all people who love liturgy, so we’ll be basing our thing on the ELCA liturgy and calendar, but getting together in the woods or somebody’s living room. At the moment, ain’t nobody involved even close to being ordained, but the priesthood of all believers is a Lutheran tenet, so we can do the whole Mass without even breaking the official rules. More as it develops.
My kid’ll be vaxxed soon. I really wanna spend some time with my kid.
I was nervous about contacting the bishop’s office. Like, I had anxiety about that whole situation. There’s a part of me that thinks I gotta play it straight, act like a normal person, and get through the whole seminary and ordination process and then I can start rocking the boat. And that’s dumb. I started this thing thinking that it’d take a miracle for me to get ordained, and I’ve proceeded as if God was gonna make it work out – or if He didn’t, then it wasn’t His will in the first place. So, it makes no sense for me to think that I’m in control or that the end result depends on me putting on a front. I’d prob’ly be better off just tellin’ the bishop that I wanna start a freak church where we do the liturgy and then have coffee and split off into affinity groups to make bombs or some shit. Metaphorical bombs, I mean.
I still got almost four hours to go on this double shift. Then I’ma sleep.
Luther von Wolfen 