Three months and no additions to this weblog, and now two in one day!

Here's a seasonal essay with a thoughtful edge: an analysis, first published in "Commonweal", of the social context and subtext of "Going My Way", which i first found at --
http://www.kcmetro.cc.mo.us/pennvalley/biology/lewis/crosby/goingmyway.htm

But here's the text of it if you don't mind reading it here...

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Going which way? Catholicism and pop culture.

by Dennis O'Brien, Commonweal, Sept 22, 1995

In 1944, Bing Crosby starred as Father Chuck O'Malley in Going My Way. The film won seven Oscars. Father Chuck, alias Crosby, made a deep impression on Catholic imaginations (Weblog note -- And mine, too. Fr. O'Malley is still one of the most vivid "models for ministry" i have among my mental furniture....sorry, last editorial intrusion! jbg).

In 1977, Fleetwood Mac's single "Go Your Own Way" sold 12 million copies. If Going My Way was popular culture for the decade of the forties, one can sense a radical change in pop just by song titles. What happens to popular music from Bing to the Beatles and beyond? Going whose way? My way, your own way, the way of Christ or Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols who proclaimed himself--for what that is worth--the Antichrist?

Start with the Crosby image of Father O'Malley. We first see him seeking directions to Saint Dominic's Church in black clericals and a straw boater. A peculiar combination of religious restraint and jauntiness which perfectly defines the developed character. It turns out that Father Chuck worked out with the Saint Louis Browns and led a small scat band in his previous existence. He may be a priest, but he is a real OK guy. There is even "romance." In a later scene an old flame, played by Rise Stevens, invites him to her dressing room at the Metropolitan Opera. While dressing in the adjoining room she asks through the open doorway why he had never
answered her letters, "You wrote to me in Rome, Florence, in Naples, Vienna, Budapest ... From there I went to South America. There were no more letters. What happened Chuck?..." As it happens, Chuck has been wrapped in a raincoat up to now so that Ms. Stevens has not seen the clerical collar. She emerges from the dressing room: "What happened Chuck? What hap--." She sees the Roman collar, beams in surprise, "Father Chuck!" Father Chuck knows all the American ways of sports, jazz, and romance--but from another life.

Father Chuck's actions in the film express a sort of magical priestliness as he solves every problem great and small from the finances of Saint Dominic's to street gangs. The problems are solved in disguise, as it were, just as the straw boater disguises his true priestly power. Novelist and critic Mary Gordon writes:

Father O'Malley's great gift is to see everyone's need and provide for it. He is infinitely flexible, infinitely equipped with resources. He's both the ideal father and the ideal mother, nurturing yet with access to power, particularly in the sacred American precincts of show business and sports. Although his aura is maternal, his identity is necessarily and inextricably connected to maleness.... His maleness is iconic, but it is a particular kind of maleness cut off from the implications of sexual demand.

Desexualized power, the iconic male capacity to fix things as if it were all improvised on the spot, a lucky accident, a spot of grace, expressed in the nonchalant manner of the Groaner, Der Bingle. In the sequel film, Bells of Saint Mary's, Father Chuck reassures a distraught Sister Ingrid Bergman that when in trouble she need only dial "O" for O'Malley. Mary Gordon reports on a priest friend who claimed that for generations, Father Bing was the paradigm for priests. So be it for the "golden oldies," but I suspect that somewhere in the passing years, Father Chuck's line has been disconnected.

It is not just the magical power of Father Chuck that attracts. Consider the message in the music written for the film by Johnny Burke and Jimmy Van Huesen. All the songs are songs of aspiration, cultural uplift, and deferred gratification. The Academy Award winning Swinging on a Star is sung by a street gang converted into the Saint Dominic's choir. The point of the song is that if you don't go to school, you may grow up to be a mule. On the other hand, attention to the books, and you "could be swinging on a star." If you are "going my way" "...this road leads to "rainbowville." Gratification is deferred -- "happiness is down the line."

The most interesting message for this priestly story is in the first song of the film. The local very Irish cop brings to the rectory a young girl who has run away from home. The cop is afraid that she may end up, ahem!, on the streets. The girl tells Crosby that she will make it on her own as a singer. Father Chuck offers to give her a tryout to his accompaniment. The girl sings the song with some awkward "jazzy" gestures. Father Bing tells her to put heart into the song and he shows her how. The song reads, "The day after forever / All through a lifetime / I'll be loving you / And on the day after forever / I'll begin again."

Again the dominant theme of gratification deferred. Just as Father Chuck's "romantic life" is elsewhere in another time and place, so fulfillment is elsewhere: Take a short cut to what you wish and you may end up as a fish, happiness is down the line, and love is not just today, it is "the day after forever." So, if you are going my way, the destination is tomorrow, not today.

The songs in Going My Way are in no way idiosyncratic; they are wholly within the Tin Pan Alley tradition which dominated American popular music down to the revolution of rock 'n' roll. Briefly put, Tin Pan Alley's great composers, often Jewish immigrants trained in traditions of European operetta, wrote music of cultural aspiration and deferred gratification.

If deferred gratification, cultural uplift, and commitment to the day after forever are the metaphysics of Tin Pan Alley and the theme song of Going Father Chuck's Way, all this changes radically for contemporary rock culture. Happiness is not "down the line," in the words of two best-selling albums of the Rolling Stones, it is Satisfaction and Now. A lyric by Robert Hunter, one of the principal writers for the legendary band The Grateful Dead, states the themes of rock. The song is called "Aim at the Heart" and the message seems the very antithesis of "the day after forever":

Time doesn't fly
Just hangs over like the sky
It's we who go by
Makes no difference how or why
Everything you cherish
Throws you over in the end
Thorns will grab your ankles

From the gardens that you tend
Damned if you do
Double damned if you don't try
Caught on the fly
Hello fades into good-by

What can you say?
Here tomorrow, gone today
Faith fades away
For idols with their feet of clay

The chorus is: "Aim at the heart / Don't ask whose love you're stealing." I am certain that swinging Father Chuck would be horrified by the theme of Robert Hunter's lyrics. Hunter's world is as fragile and transient as the title of his 372 pages of collected lyrics, A Box of Rain (Viking Penguin).

Plato says in The Republic that changes in musical style indicate profound changes in the culture. For this reason he is determined to prevent of the Lydian mode into his ideal state. Rock music broadly conceived is one of those radical changes in musical style that deserves notice for what it promotes -- especially what it might promise or deny to religious sensibility. What does rock culture suggest: a new religion, an emotional collectivism which will rule the world (Peter Townshend of Who), or "overblown nonsense" (Mick Jagger)?

It seems clear enough from title alone that Going My Way and Fleetwood Mac's "Go Your Own Way" inhabit different emotional territories. Everyone has listened to enough rock -- willingly or not -- to have some idea of the musical character of such songs. Clearly this is not Crosby crooning "the day after forever." It is, as music critic Greil Marcus has written, "an assault, a hammering ... moaning, pleading, damning...."

The religious question I want to ask is contained symbolically in Marcus's description of the music. It is, he says, rough, harsh, hard to follow." As spiritual advice, is "going your own way" rough, harsh, a prescription hard to follow? Does "going your own way" lead to traumas and tragedies well beyond the gentle comic life of "going Father Chuck's way" where the burden is easy and the yoke is light?

Sam Phillips, the legendary producer of Sun records out of Memphis, the discoverer of Elvis Presley, characterized rock as the music of disillusion -- "the passion of a moment that was meaningless." Jimi Hendrix stated its metaphysic: "I am what I feel." If, as Robert Hunter says, "Faith fades away / for idols with their feet of clay," life is something "caught on the fly."

On its face, it would seem that rock is not only distant from the Saint Dominic's of Father O'Malley but from the saint himself and the dominant Christian tradition. One could dismiss rock as mere paganism all over again. But if old paganism became new gospel, maybe there is something in the new Eleusinian mysteries worth recapturing for the Old Time Religion.

In Marcus's description of "Go Your Own Way," he tries to explain why an instrumental solo, normally a "rest" in the performance, is suddenly a burst of even greater energy:

"Building in any successful rock 'n' roll record is a sense of the power of the singer to say what he or she means, but also a realization that the words are inadequate to that task, and the feeling of fulfillment is never as strong as the feeling of frustration .... The singer still comes up short; the performance demands the absolute lucidity it has already promised ... and so an instrument takes over. It is a relief, a relief from the failure of language. The thrill is that of entering a world where anything can be said, even if no one can know what it means."

Having described how music finally transcends verbal message, Marcus goes on to discuss a hokey song called "(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding," as performed by English rocker Elvis Costello with some simple, nonsinging, chord changes on his
guitar.

Not only is the built-in hokiness of the tune diverted, the irony is boiled off; the guitar notes don't neutralize the pathos of the lyrics, they validate it. What's so funny about peace, love, and understanding? Now, nothing. For an instant, the search for peace, love and understanding is what life is all about. You come back into the ordinary world, the world of ordinary language, with a wonderful story: "I saw it! I heard it!" "What was it?" everyone asks, and you open your mouth, and begin to wave your hands in the air.

Imagine the Apostles preaching on the street corner, certain that peace, love, and understanding is what life is all about. "I saw it! I heard it!" Someone begins to write it out: the New Testament with lyrics by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. But suppose the original experience was validated where language broke down, and some elemental music of life allowed one to believe that even after an experience of defeat, betrayal, and death, "peace, love and understanding" is what life is all about.

Traditional Christian theology argued that the noble Greek virtues -- courage, temperance, justice -- were, after all, only "splendid vices" in comparison to the distinctly Christian virtues of faith, hope, and love. This is a defensible claim only if the life of the spirit is our fundamental human reality. The theologian John Dunne, in Time & Myth (University of Notre Dame Press, 1975), traces the life of the spirit in Dante's journey from Hell to Paradise. The stages of that journey reflect the basic possibilities of spirit. Somewhat revising Luther's characterization: Hell is despair; Purgatory is hope; Heaven is certainty. Spirit contains the fundamental "mood" of life.

The traditional moral virtues may have their place, but for the Christian the fundamental issue is whether they dwell within the spirit of despair, hope, or certainty. Macbeth despairs: life is "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing" but for all that, he is courageous. One may dispense justice as a futile gesture of despair, or with a certainty that the heavens rejoice in the doings of the just. Because despair, hope, certainty lie behind the acts of every day, setting the tone if not content of life, we can, as it were, fail to notice them;
we fail to recognize the life of the spirit.

Because the life of the spirit, the mood and music of life, is so fundamental, we properly label it as "mystery." I mean by mystery not something hidden from knowledge, like the cure for AIDS, but something so revealed, so present, that we cannot distance ourselves sufficiently for proper appraisal. Gabriel Marcel defines mystery as "a problem which encroaches on its own data." Assessing my spiritual state fits that description, am I hopeful examining my hope?

The contrast between Tin Pan Alley's Going My Way and the rock experience of "Go Your Own Way" is a contrast between morality and mystery. Going My Way as movie and song moves in the world defined by morality. Will stingy banker Gene Lockhart relent on the mortgage to the church? Sexual morality as sexual restraint is a central issue in the celibate state of the priests and the temptations of the runaway and her boyfriend. Father Chuck is ultimately a moral magician who shows everybody that if you don't care a feather or a fig, you
may grow up to be a pig. He is magical because conversion to proper conduct requires only a slight symbolic gesture. Since there is little enough morality these days to go around, I am not going to knock it no matter how it is achieved, but I do want to say a good word for mystery.

Sexual restraint is central to Going My Way not only as a good in itself and a sign of priestliness, but as the most striking example of gratification deferred in the formation of moral character. Post the rock revolution, sexuality is flaunted; "don't care a feather or a fig!" A morality of deferred gratification appears to put off the real me to another day, but I can't really postpone my life. No wonder that rock
appeals to teenagers, a stage on life's way when one seems to be full grown, yet stuck in a nest of economic and social deferrals and dependencies. Enter rock music as a statement of fullness now! The adoption of animal names for Rock groups--Eagles, Beatles, etc.--is not accidental. Animals, unlike humans, lack future pretensions; there are no fish striving to be archbishops. Animals are all in all, just what
they are; it is this "fullness of being" which rock seeks to recover.

Rock reminds critic Camille Paglia of the great mystery religions. It is mystery even on its surface. Tin Pan Alley types like myself complain that they can't understand the words. But that is the point; like the cries and shouts of the Bacchantes, these noises suggest more than they can say until finally even the words give out and the crash of sound prevails. Rudolf Otto described the holy as mysterium tremendum, et fascinans: a good description of a major rock event. The sound and the effects are tremendous and fascinating. The mystery evoked is a self, the Whatever-It-Is that is "going your own way." The rock n' roll self is not the moral self which is always beyond itself, deferring the present for the future, weighing and assessing the course of action. The rocker's self is the whole present reality, the very feel
of present existence.

If sexual deferral is an important symbol for the music of morality, flaunting sexuality is an important symbol for the mystery in rock 'n'
roll. Whatever else one might say about sex, it is an overwhelming experience of presentness. One of the reasons that moralists are so
suspicious of sex is its ability to waylay the distancing and appraisive stance which is required for moral effort. Rock aims to get moral
appraisal out of the way: Elvis Presley starts off the rock revolution on the proper note with his first big hit, "It's All Right, Momma!"
Momma's moral injunctions are put aside.

I would like to propose a proper synthesis of morality and mystery, but the exact synthesis eludes me. My initial sympathy is with the
rockers. I am inclined to believe that the spiritual journey is "rough, harsh, hard to follow," and that Father Chuck's world is only
charming fantasy. In the long run--and the short run--you have to "go your own way." As the old black spiritual puts it: "You got to walk
that lonesome valley by yourself; ain't nobody here gonna walk it for you...." There is something fundamentally out of kilter in a view
which translates Christianity into nothing but moral injunction. I tell you the story of Christianity: a zealous peasant preaches a message
of mercy and forgiveness, he is betrayed, abandoned, tortured, and put to a cruel and horrible death only to rise above death through God's
almighty hand--and by the way, he didn't approve of premarital sex. I fear that this is the religious distillation of Going My Way and all
too many traditional Sunday sermons.

Rock with all its excesses has the advantage of inhabiting spiritual territory, a territory where despair and hope, absolute loneliness and
transcending love can abide. It is easier to think of converting a sexually passionate Augustine to burning Christian belief, than turning
Father Chuck into Saint John of the Cross.

But if rock opens into the life of the spirit, while O'Malley's moral musical messages do not, one has to assess the spiritual life expressed.
There is certainly a strong current within rock of Sam Phillips's "disillusion." Death, like sex and drugs and the rocker's scream,
accomplishes the fullness of being-there is nothing yet to come.

If that is the final message of the music, it is certainly unacceptable to Christian belief. Nevertheless, rejecting the rocker's world is not
easy. The disillusion and despair which are everywhere expressed in the music only make sense in a world of hope and love denied. In the
back of the minds of the most disillusioning rock tune is a belief that "peace, love and understanding" is the real meaning of life. The
problem seems that there is no known way of getting there. Except for the music itself.

Except for the music itself: in the mystery which is at the center of the spirit, there is a paradox within anyone who creates and crashes out
a great hymn of despair. The lyric says despair," but the music can transcend despair in its very boldness and assertion. W.B. Yeats says that Lear is "gay" in the very depth of his suffering.

Finally, rock can only believe in artistic enactment; Christianity makes the bolder claim about reality. You can call yourself an Eagle,
Door, or Stone, but one remains, alas, merely human. Humans have to work themselves up (or down) to the fullness of animal intensity,
but the moment passes until the next dose or drum beat. Sexuality may be a symbol of fullness, but, unfortunately, humans cannot live in
the innocence of animal sexuality. The fullness has to be human sexuality. Humans finally have to deal with the fact that the sexual other is
a person--a category which transcends animal structures and the only one which validates a quest for peace, love, and understanding.

The story of Jesus claims that actual human life, not the bold artifice of rock, can express the fullness of being. The rock impulse recognizes
the superiority of the world of the spirit, but finally there is no incarnation, no daily bread. The spirit is reached only outside ordinary
daily life in drugs, ecstatic sex, overwhelming music. One longs for a world of peace and love, but there is no assurance that it can exist
anywhere except in the right riff and set of chord changes. Finally, rock is an aesthetic passing as religion--not the first or last time that
noble gesture has been tried!

T.S. Eliot, who of course knew nothing of rock 'n' roll, expresses in The Four Quartets a view which might encapsulate a Christian response to this music.

For most of us, there is only the unattended
Moment, the moment in and out of time,
The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,
The wild thyme unseen, or winter lightning,
Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, and you are the music
While the music lasts.
... The rest
Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought, and action.

Lacking incarnation, the spiritual world of some to-be-named rock group, Wild Thyme, cannot move to "prayer, observance, discipline, thought, and action."

How to resolve the dilemma presented by Going My [Moral] Way and "Go Your Own Way" As I read the gospel message, "Go Your Own Way" remains fundamental in the sense of that black gospel hymn. Each person lives and dies the one life that is his or hers alone. There is a fundamental aloneness to being human; an aloneness that makes the animal warmth of sex and heavy metal a seductive anodyne. It also makes the moral message of O'Malley seductive. I lose myself in moral earnestness. That may be a better path in so far as morality is a distinctively human trait. Chastity as a symbol of human freedom is better than sex as an ardent retreat from care. But common morality cannot be used as a shield for the aloneness of the spirit. Mary Gordon concludes her account of Father Chuck as follows:

[Father Chuck's] maleness is iconic, but it is a particular kind of maleness cut off from the implications of sexual demand. It is part of his vocation to make no demands, so he gives no ground, no place for anyone to stand. There is no there with Father Chuck.

If there is no there to Father Chuck, what is missing is the aloneness of the spirit. If sexual fulfillment is a traditional symbol of spiritual fulfillment, sexual demand, then, can be a symbol of spiritual need. Antiseptically cleansed of sexual demand, Father Chuck becomes spiritually neutered.

If the final word is "Go Your Own Way," a way that is "harsh, rough, hard to follow," Christianity at least says that one is accompanied on that way. Jesus is not the absent moralist who sets out the road map for life; Jesus is the one who comes with, on the same journey, living his own story which ends in loneliness and abandon. Yet he goes forward, and he goes forward alongside the Christian believer, so that his story of resurrection and my story exist for one another. There is a there to Jesus which is not present in the clerical figure of Father Chuck. Jesus and the lone believer are spiritually open for one another. In one of her mystical experiences, Teresa of Avila hears the question, "Who are you?" "I am Teresa of Jesus," she answers, "and who are you?" "I am Jesus -- of Teresa."

The implications of the pop culture of rock music for churches are ambiguous. The New York Times ran a feature article "Rock Finds Religion Again" (January 2, 1994.) The author, Guy Garcia, noted an almost apocalyptic denunciation of empty materialism -- themes which have been stated in more measured terms by John Paul 11. But the "salvation" sought by a rock singer like Michael McDermott in his album Gethsemane is strictly personal, outside if not against the churches. In a song called Leave It up to the Angels," McDermott sounds the broad theme of disillusion that runs through rock: "I'm frightened by the way I feel, maybe you are too/I'm losing faith in everything and everyone but you ... leave it to the angels."

The implication for official Catholicism may be contained in McDermott's personal history. A former altar boy, he contemplated entering the priesthood but, he say, "[I am] too weak a person to ever be a priest." The ghost of the omnipotent, invulnerable Father Chuck haunts the church: far from an image of sympathy or salvation, he is--in rock idiom--a "real turnoff!" Only a narrative responsive to passion, loneliness, and defeat responds to the rocker's urge. The Gospels have such a narrative (though with a startling twist at the conclusion). A God so vulnerable may require vulnerable ministers of grace.

As much as i dislike recommending reading that requires paying for print, it may be worth $4 or at least a trip to the library for the Dec. 2001 Atlantic, and the article referenced below, but not readable on-line:

* * * * * * *

http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2001/12/

One Nation, Slightly Divisible
The electoral map of the 2000 presidential race became famous—big blocks of Republican red stretched across the heartland, with brackets of Democratic blue along the coasts. Our differences are real, but how deep do they go?
by David Brooks

* * * * * * *

More than a simple "liberal/conservative" dichotomy, here is where i think the clash of world views between congregation and judicatory structures is played out. There is a very different way of seeing here, which can create great confusion of aims and purposes, but does not necessarily lead to hostility unless egos and power struggles provoke it. Any reactions along these lines would be of great interest to me...

In Grace & Peace,
Jeff

A little update on the situation Enid Ray has been dealing with and that we've been praying for about her grandson Jon Columbini and great-grandson Jonathan: the news is good, and probably won't be publicized as widely as it ought. Seems the "kidnapping" mother decided that years in jail in America looked better than a lifetime in the self-proclaimed "Worker's Paradise".....

The Miami Herald (www.miami.com/herald)
Published Friday, August 17, 2001

6-year-old taken to Cuba by mom is back in U.S.

BY GAIL EPSTEIN NIEVES
gepstein@herald.com

With tears that quickly melted into hugs, 6-year-old Jonathon Colombini was reunited with his father in Miami on Thursday, nine months after the boy's Cuban-born mother spirited him to her homeland in a 21-foot boat and refused to let him return.

Jon Colombini of Homestead greeted his son at Miami International Airport laden with Christmas presents that the boy wasn't here to open last December.

``He's doing great,'' Colombini said later from his car as he and his family headed for an out-of-town vacation. ``We've got a lot of things to work through, but it's going to work out pretty good.'' After some initial anxiety and crying -- mostly out of concern for his mother -- Jonathon was busy playing with a new Gameboy and ``a bunch of little finger bikes that you can take apart and put together,'' his dad said.

Federal agents arrested Jonathon's mother, Arletis Blanco, 29, of Key Largo, shortly after she stepped off the 5:10 p.m. flight from Cuba with her boyfriend, Agustín Lemus, 37, and their 2 1/2-year-old daughter, Jessica. She was wanted on a warrant for international parental child kidnapping and also faces state theft charges. Lemus, who was not arrested, left with little Jessica. Blanco knew she would be arrested, but said she wouldn't allow her son to return to the United States unless she and her new family were permitted to come back as well, said Colombini's lawyer, Michael C. Berry of Clearwater, who specializes in international abduction cases and escorted the family back from Cuba. Berry flew to Havana on Wednesday for the second time in recent weeks hoping that months of delicate negotiations wouldn't blow up and send him home empty-handed again. After meeting with lawyers for Blanco and Cuba's Foreign Ministry, he received word about 10:30 a.m. Thursday that the entire group had been cleared for travel, he said. They raced to the airport with crossed fingers and got seats on a 4 p.m. direct flight. ``It was a normal flight, nothing out of the ordinary except for some air-sickness by Jonathon,'' Berry said. ``It was a traumatic time for him, being reunited with his father, not speaking the language anymore.'' Jonathon, who was 5 when Blanco took him to live in Pinar del Río last November, now speaks only Spanish although he still understands English, his father said.

Berry complimented the Cuban government for its handling of the case. Even though negotiations were complicated by the lack of diplomatic relations between Cuba and the United States, and even though ``everything in Cuba is on a `maybe' basis,'' Cuban diplomats treated it as ``a family matter and not political football,'' he said.
``I had an understanding with Ambassador [Fernando] Remírez at the Cuban Interests Section in Washington, D.C.,'' he said. ``We were able to avoid a long court battle. They did not impede progress; they were a conduit.''

In the end, before granting final travel permission, the Cuban government asked for a meeting to get a ``clear understanding'' of why Blanco was leaving the country, Berry said. ``They wanted to make sure she wasn't leaving under duress or coercion, and as long as she was leaving of her own free will, that was it,'' he said.

Blanco's explanation was put in writing and she and the lawyers had to sign the document, he said. In it, Blanco said she recognized that she would be going to jail but she was ready to return anyway.
``This was her home,'' Berry said of the United States. ``Even though she was born in Cuba she lived here all her life.''

Last year, Blanco told the Communist Party daily Granma she left the United States because she wanted a better life for her son and she had uncovered an anti-Castro plot developed by her former boss. Blanco said she fled, fearing for her life. Her employer has denied her story.

Blanco is wanted on a grand theft charge in Monroe County for allegedly stealing close to $150,000 from McKenzie Petroleum, where she was an office manager. In February, a federal grand jury indicted her for kidnapping.

Blanco was taken to the Federal Detention Center in Miami and is scheduled to have her first court appearance today, FBI spokesman Judy Orihuela said. If convicted of kidnapping, Blanco faces a maximum three years in prison. Colombini and Blanco originally had joint custody of their son, but after shetook him to Cuba a Monroe County circuit judge gave Colombini full custody.``We're going to go ride the big Scooby Doo roller coaster,'' Colombini said en route to an Ohio theme park that features Jonathon's favorite cartoon character.

``We're just going to spend some time together and do some bonding and
have some fun.''

With this Friday, Aug. 3rd, our local edition of "Fair Season" kicks into full gear.
The Ohio State Fair in Columbus, including displays by Aaron Dunkle and Tracy Wildermuth, starts before and ends after our own Hartford Fair Aug. 5th through the 11th. Prime Producers and Stablemates 4-H will be well represented up in Croton, along with livestock from many of our farm families. I had the pleasure of dropping in on the last 4-H meeting of the season last Sunday night where a slight 7-year-old girl demonstrated (in case I ever need to know!) how to show a Black Angus, a skill that she clearly mastered "oh, years and years ago!" Then there's the Sweetcorn Festival parade Aug. 29th and the next few days in Millersport, and finally the Lancaster Fair as the air grows crisp of an evening -- a blessed thought!

These festivals are a piece of community building that we all have a stake in: whether we ourselves are deep frying doughnuts, ripping tickets, showing sheep, or just sitting in a folding chair as the parade passes by, our participation is a piece of real life and actual contact that sustains the event and can be an invitation to others to join in. Most of you reading this know that I feel the "bad side" of the internet has been over-emphasized and hyped up, and that on-line tools like e-mail and web pages are just that -- tools, that can be handled for good or ill, just as a hammer can't properly set a screw and a screwdriver handle is not right for driving nails. In the right time and place, the web can build community. For example, have you seen the pictures of VBS, Badger Camp, or Family Camp at our web site: http://go.to/Hebron_Christian ? But more and better pictures can be seen on the bulletin board on the back wall of the sanctuary if you actually come to church...

We need to keep alive our community festivals and gatherings because that's where real - not virtual! - human community can happen, and we need to be active about extending invitations to worship and fellowship to those around us because that's where real Christian community is formed as well.

These are our ministry team goals suggested by the working groups at last November's Program Planning Retreat; we closed by intending to review the status and relevance of these goals by June at this board meeting for revisiting and perhaps reframing.
~ - in progress; * - done; > - for later in this year

Worship -- John D. Slater, advising elder
1. Family door greeters; More involvement in worship ~
2. Fewer announcements
3. Sunday afternoon sing-a-long/open house, perhaps to dedicate
4. Getting a new organ *

Stewardship -- Ila Mason, advising elder
1. Ask people more directly to give & serve */~
2. Spir. Gift inventory in worship *
3. "pledges" of time & effort; compare goals & gifts to budget priorities
4. Contact CCF/other gp. To look at Memorial Fund, policies
5. Prioritize expansion of the sanctuary

Missions & Benevolences -- Cheryl Maslowski, advising elder
1. Find different approaches to inform the congregation of the many current missions, and
2. Try an e-mail reminder system for special offerings ~
3. Take on a new mission project: "adopt-a-child"; Hebron UMC Heifer Project, school supplies for Hebron, Palestine…

Christian Education -- Martha Cable, advising elder
1. VBS: look at intergenerational teaching/learning approaches ~
2. Have input meetings (quarterly?) during assembly time */~
3. Harvest Party next Fall >
4. Use Family Life Center/604 W. Main for comm. ministry: afterschool, latchkey, or child care ~
5. Create program/retreat/support group for women who have lost a spouse [n.b. Health Fair]

Evangelism -- Mike Halter, advising elder
1. Develop a distinctive flyer, suitable for mass mailing purposes
2. Use advertising -- Advocate special section, GBLCC booklet [banners at Evans!] *
3. Do a Pictorial Directory *
4. Hold an Open House around a themed event [organ dedication/recital, sing-a-long, etc.]

Vision 2020 is working on a comprehensive timeline of goals with the Trustees, which began with the professional inspection of the 610 & 612 W. Main properties, and will continue with planning based on anticipated growth in both worship attendance and community outreach. I.e.; by 2010, we anticipate combined worship attendance to triple -- 324 -- and small group ministries to triple with that -- from 12 non-committee groups/classes per week/month to 36 groups/classes.

So, any feedback? The board received this update May 14, the elders will June 2, and we will restate our goals through the year at the next board meeting June 10th.

an interesting essay i copied from a church vitality website:

"Writing in Harper's magazine, Fenton Johnson reflects on
North America's search for vessels to shape their spiritual hunger. He
describes the "comfortable mediocrity" of congregations which feed on a
diet of religious consumables that never touch the heart of their longings.
The very congregations that pastors and denominational leaders strive so
hard to shape become barriers to encountering God in transformative
ways.

In light of Mr. Johnson's insight, it's no wonder that a
palpable dissatisfaction characterizes North American mainstream
Christianity. The impulse toward mystery and the desire to encounter the
sacred are stirrings that churches seem unable to satisfy. People hunger
for ways to resist the ubiquitous dominance of money, power, and sex as
signs of a fulfilled life, aware at some level that, in reality, they leave
our souls empty. So instead we search for a connection with something
that can't be bought, packaged, or marketed as a product. We want a way
of restoring-or discovering-order and values larger than the consumer
market or self-actualization.

This desire for genuine and meaningful connection
shapes the hunger of the people coming into our churches. But how do
we feed it? Christian leaders are bereft of a way. People do not need more
programs or propositions about the nature of the world. They need a new
way of life, the way of community defined in God's Word.

But welcoming people into a way of life requires
leadership that is radically different from simple competence in managing
programs, caring for people's needs, or preaching sermons. Such skills
are not unimportant, but they alone will not form a community that is
an institutionalized contradiction to the wearing, tearing, fragmenting
living that exists at the dawn of the twenty-first century. When we
manage our congregational systems through care processes and programs
designed for various age-and-stage points, we only lay a religious
covering over fragmented lives. Leaders are needed who call people into a
way of life. The comfortable mediocrity of congregational life and
pastoral leadership cannot address the unarticulated stirring in the soul of
North America.

Something else is required, and it must be both local and
institutionalized. Missional communities must be people living a certain
way of life in a particular place. Such missional communities will
require something more than the voluntary associations which currently
characterize congregational life, associations which only deepen the sense
that Christian life is an individualized spiritual experience supported by
local churches. What is required is the refounding of Christian life in
North America, the metamorphosis of congregational identity. Fenton
Johnson continues: "Life is like water: it takes the shape of the vessels
into which it is poured; remove the vessel and it's lost. What we are
seeking are vessels into which to pour the chaos of life, what we are
seeking are models of discipline." The vessels formed by the shaping of
middle-class, suburban life in North America since the middle of the
century are increasingly incapable of shaping the emergent forms of
social life that Christian identity must take in the decades ahead.

What vessels point to this reforming of Christian
identity? Monastic Christianity offers hints of what contradictory living
might become, but specific details will not be in our purview for some
time to come because ours is a period of gestation. We are seeing the
unraveling of one world, but not yet the emergence of what might be
woven from its threads. We are reaching for images, stretching
tentatively toward an unformed future that lies ahead. Nevertheless, some
general outlines of this gestation can be described, and we know that the
church now requires leaders who will commit their passions and lifelong
habits to developing and living into those contours.

Now the idea of monastic communities may be
misleading. We are not calling for a Christian identity removed from life
hidden in cloisters. We are instead reaching toward a form of secular
orders in which a Christian identity, as a distinct and contradictory
option, is lived out within this culture, not apart from it. The church can
only be a sign of hope if it once again offers an alternative way of living
that is in sharp contrast to society at large. This kind of identity can only
be shaped by commitments and practices that will result in an alternative
way of life in neighborhoods and cities.

In a society that extols the power of personal choice and
perpetual open-endedness, for instance, churches would become like
orders that voluntarily place limits on choice due to its conviction that
meaning and purpose greater than the accumulation of goods and the
actualization of self prevail in this world. People would be invited to
participate in a local order that witnesses to the alternative way of Christ
through lives shaped by common practices and commitments.

Critical to the formation of this witness are leaders who
can form such communities, and we have arrived at the point where this
leadership is essential. If the church in North America is to have a
meaningful role in the 21st century it will be discovered through the
missional engagement of local church communities. This discovery will
require a journey of faith on an untraveled road, with a horizon obscured
by clouds. If we are to start strong in this new century, leaders must
break from the familiar motions of the past and step onto this road."

A test before beginning...could this be a useful adjunct to newsletter, bulletin, & e-mail? We shall see...