Don't fear the youth guy

New Horizons Community Church
Voorhees, NJ
November 18, 2007

In my prior post in the Visiting Churches series, I told the tale of visiting Discovery Church on November 11, 2007 by accident. I had originally planned to visit New Horizons, but it didn’t work out. Here’s why.

I had been visiting churches for seven months at that point, and had not yet been to a Southern Baptist church. Since Southern Baptists are the largest Protestant denomination in the country, this seemed like quite an oversight. I was determined to remedy the situation.

However, only one SBC church was listed in the yellow pages, New Horizons. Apparently the Southern Baptists are not all that popular in New Jersey.

New Horizons had an impressive website, with the slogan “A purpose-driven church changing lives on purpose.”

Aha – a purpose-driven church! I was aware of the huge popularity of Rick Warren’s book, The Purpose-Driven Church, and of the tremendous success of his megachurch, Saddleback. (Non-churchgoers might even be aware of it, since it was the site of the August 2008 Presidential debate between Senator Barack Obama and Senator John McCain.)

Lots of churches and church leaders have participated in seminars to learn how to use the materials and methods espoused by the purpose-driven movement. Lots of others are quite critical of Warren’s theology and methods. Although most people think of him as very conservative, he has taken quite a bit of criticism from the other side, for being too liberal. He was the only evangelical leader to sign the Global Warming Pact, and he has done lots of work with AIDS in Africa. (On the other hand, he has also taken a lot of criticism for not opposing homophobia in Africa, too. Not sure where he is on this issue right now.)

I looked up some information about Baptists. They were early immigrants to northern America, usually fleeing religious persecution in Europe. Unfortunately, they ran into quite a bit of religious persecution when they got to the colonies. In spite of that, Baptist congregations grew and spread rapidly, especially in the south. By the mid-1800s there were three main groups of Baptists in the US: the Triennial Convention, the Home Mission Society, and Southern Baptists.

All three groups had a big problem with slavery. Southern Baptists believed that slavery was Biblical, and they affirmed the rights of ministers to own slaves. Baptists in the north were opposed to slavery, and by 1845 differences were so pronounced that the Southern Baptists withdrew from all national organizations, officially forming the Southern Baptist Convention, mainly to defend the principle of slavery. Not, to put it mildly, an auspicious beginning.

This pro-slavery start had very long-lasting consequences for the denomination. As late as 1968 only 11% of Southern Baptist churches would allow African-Americans to join their churches. It was not until 1995 that the Southern Baptist Convention adopted a resolution renouncing its racist roots and apologizing for its past defense of slavery.

It would seem to most people that this apology took way too long, but on the other hand, they did it. I’m sure it wasn’t an easy thing to do. Plenty of other institutions with racism in their past have not formally apologized to this day.

The New Horizons website informed me that this church began in the mid-1960s, first meeting in the Moorestown Holiday Inn. By 1970 they were able to begin building at their current site. The original name was Emmanuel Baptist Church, but they changed the name in 1999 “to better impact [the] community and reach out to unchurched people.” (Many churches were trying to downplay denominational names during those years, believing that words like Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterian discouraged people from visiting – which may be true or not.)

The pastor, J. David Hoke, was chaplain for the Philadelphia Eagles for twelve seasons. According to the website, he was working on a PhD in Theology in 2007, is certified as a Consultant in Church Conflict Resolution, and has two children and six beautiful grandchildren.
So all right - I was prepared to attend a big Southern Baptist, purpose-driven church service, possibly filled with Eagles fans!

Fruit on the grill

Why have I never done this before? It is so very, very delicious - fruit grilled with a little marinade of oil, brown sugar, cinnamon, and fresh mint leaves. Oh my, oh my. We all loved it, and agreed that next time we will have it on top of ice cream. Yum!

Goodnight nobody, goodnight mush

Why do these pictures and words never get old? I must have read Goodnight Moon ten thousand times, and I still love it.

Goodnight stars. Goodnight air. Goodnight noises everywhere.

Summertime, and the living is easy

Tim put together our new grill, and we lit the charcoal enthusiastically.

I soaked mesquite chips in white wine, for the smokebox.

The kebabs tasted great.

And we even had a visit from the ice cream truck (didn't purchase anything, but I like to see and hear the trucks).

So hush, little baby, don't you cry.

June is almost here

Almost June - and we will be on vacation at the end of June. I'm glad I scheduled this months ago, because thinking about it coming up has been half the fun. Love having stuff to look forward to.

And I LOVE vacations, probably because we didn't travel much for the longest time. When I was a kid our summer vacations were to the farm in Michigan, which I loved, but it wasn't really travel, in a sense, because we were always with family, always in the same place.

After I was married and had kids, our vacations were driving up to northern Illinois to visit our parents. Cheap and pleasant - but, again, not a vacation in some sense, because we weren't seeing anything new.

Not until we were in our thirties did we take vacations in the sense of visiting a new place. We went to England and Scotland. We took the kids camping in Colorado and Utah. We camped in Canada. And boy, did I feel grown up when we finally flew somewhere, rented a car, and drove around on a real vacation!

It helped that Neil's parents sometimes invited us along with them. The picture above is from a trip to Boston with them in 1985. This is Tim, looking at Boston Harbor, on a boat, on vacation.

Small Comfort

Coffee and cigarettes in a clean cafe,
forsythia lit like a damp match against
a thundery sky drunk on its own ozone,

the laundry cool and crisp and folded away
again in the lavender closet -- too late to find
comfort enough in such small daily moments

of beauty, renewal, calm, too late to imagine
people would rather be happy than suffering
and inflicting suffering. We're near the end,

but O before the end, as the sparrows wing
each night to their secret nests in the elm's green dome
O let the last bus bring

love to lover, let the starveling
dog turn the corner and lope suddenly
miraculously, down its own street, home.

Katha Pollitt

Heel should not be an insult

The true humility of heels:
pale, battered, wrinkled, swollen.
We may paint our toes, but naked
heels are dumb as cows' behinds.

Patient, stubborn, vulnerable
they follow us looking back
like children in cars making faces
through the rear view window.

In undressing a lover, even
foot fetishists must blink;
the sock, the stocking peeled,
the unappetizing bony fruit.

We are always landing on them
slamming them into pavement,
jumping out of trucks, forcing
them into stirrups and pedals.

Cats walk on their toes like ballerinas
but we, ape cousin, go shuffling
and what we leave in the sand
is the imprint of our heels coming home.

They are the periods under the leaping
exclamation point, gravity's mooning,
our anchor to earth, the callused
blind familiar of soil, rock, root.

Let me rub your angular barnacled
hull with unguents and massage you
tenderly, my little flatiron shaped
heroes, my hard laboring heels.

Marge Piercy

Ashleigh Brilliant

Are you familiar with the work of Ashleigh Brilliant? I've liked it for many years. The "Brilliant thought" above is from this book. It's one of my favorites. His web site is here.

He originally published these brief pieces (also called Pot Shots) as postcards. None is longer than 17 words (an arbitrary decision, but I think it turned out quite well). He has dubbed himself "history's only full-time, professional, published epigrammatist."

Dysfunctional, dystopian, disturbing families

Watched three movies last weekend: Black Swan, The Fighter, and Winter's Bone. What a trio. A marathon of ugly, sad, dysfunctional families.

Thinking about them, I realized that I enjoyed Winter's Bone the most, but that the people in that film would be my very LAST choice if I had to actually live among any of these fictional (or semi-fictional) families.

The Fighter was also good, but yikes - what a miserable bunch of people! Fun to watch, but not if it were real life. Still, better than living in the Ozarks of Winter's Bone, if only because it seemed like there might be a chance to escape.

Did not like Black Swan, which I found pretentious and artsy and over-hyped. Again, a group of really terrible people - and yet if I had to choose one group among which to live, it would be these ridiculous artistes. Mainly because at least I would be in New York City, and anything is possible there.

And therefore it might be possible to leave those folks far, far behind.

I should try to think of three films with fictional families that I would like to be part of - almost any three films at random would yield better options. Maybe. You know, we must really like movies about miserable, unhappy people. There are so many of them.

News of the weekend

What a fine, lazy weekend. Did a little gardening, a little grocery shopping, a little laundry. Made fresh asparagus soup. Watched some Parks and Recreation and Big Bang Theory. Won a game in Zuma. Watched Black Swan (and did not like it). Skipped church, which, after so many decades of being a pastor's wife, seems a tad luxurious. Hung a mirror. Read a few more chapters in A Game of Thrones (okay so far, but not enthralling). Didn't do all that much, in fact, but it was still just fine.

The white irises began to bloom this weekend.

And I played with the color settings a little.

It was that kind of weekend.

But is that choice–government death panels or private death panels, in the language of the day–really what we’re stuck with?

Means-testing really seems like the way to go with health care. I don't understand why no politicians seem to be behind this. I hope Micky Kaus is right.

Make your future blinding??

I flip through the pages of the Metro in the morning during my commute to Philadelphia by train, and I usually read the daily horoscope for Capricorn. I do NOT believe in astrology. But I'm always hoping the horoscope will contain something more than the typical bland, generic good advice. Something worth reading. Something worth pondering.

Up till today, no such luck.

Today, however, I read this:

Begin moving on things you personally manage or control, because they have excellent chances of turning out exactly as you envision. Make your future blinding.

Make your future blinding??!!

Now that is a good horoscope message. Enigmatic, hopeful, a little scary . . . . so I did make sure to work part of the day on a project that may or may not change my future.

I don't think there is any possibility that it will result in my literal blindness - that would be ironic.

Rural New Jersey in the eighties

Today was rainy, again, and there was a good deal of talk around the office about Little League games being cancelled. Ah, Little League. Those were the years we lived in a manse next door to a country church in New Jersey. Ah, rural New Jersey. People in the rest of the country usually don't realize how beautiful it is. There we were, only about an hour from New York City, and an hour or so from Philadelphia, but in the middle of rolling hills, farms, lush pastures filled with thoroughbred horses, and lots of Little League games. Here is Tim in our back yard, learning to hit the ball - which I somehow managed to catch in mid-flight. His childhood flew away almost as fast as a fastball, it seems now - even though at the time it often seemed that everything was happening in slow motion.

Graduation 1922: We build the ladder by which we climb

I think of June as graduation month, but several friends have graduated recently, in May. And so did my relatives, in 1922, in the little farming community of Daggett, Michigan.

I take it all the people with initials are men, and thus Miss Elle Winkle stands out in the crowd.

Love is a Trojan horse for misery.

I don't know who said that, and I apologize for being so gloomy. But it's true, it's true.

And all the other stuff about love is also true, about how it's the only thing worth having, etc.

Still, entails misery. Just no doubt about it.

An invisible . . . country cake

"I would turn to and fro between the prayer-desk and the stamped velvet armchairs, each one always draped in its crocheted antimacassar, while the fire, baking like a pie the appetising smells with which the air of the room was thickly clotted, which the dewy and sunny freshness of the morning had already 'raised' and started to 'set,' puffed them and glazed them and fluted them and swelled them into an invisible though not impalpable country cake, an immense puff-pastry, in which, barely waiting to savour the crustier, more delicate, more respectable, but also drier smells of the cupboard, the chest-of-drawers, and the patterned wall-paper I always returned with an unconfessed gluttony to bury myself in the nondescript, resinous, dull, indigestible, and fruity smell of the flowered quilt."

Narrator describing the aromas of his aunt's house. Proust, Swann's Way

Tulip grand finale

New petunias, New Hope, and The Way We Live Now

Last weekend, I planted yellow petunias.

This weekend, white:

The tulips continue to fade away beautifully.

After lunch we drove to New Hope, where I wandered through a gallery of whimsical painted furniture.

Not sure I would want to live with furniture constantly admonishing me to laugh, live life to the fullest, etc. But it's nice to visit these chatty, cheerful pieces in a town named New Hope.

And after that, a poetry reading featuring 86-year-old Gerald Stern. The reading began outdoors and was moved inside the bookstore sponsoring it when a few raindrops began to fall.

Mr. Stern seems filled with hope, living life to the fullest, and was certainly quick to laugh. So the poetry and the painted furniture kind of rhymed.

Tonight, we will watch part 2 of the BBC miniseries based on Trollope's The Way We Live Now, which we are viewing for the second time. I love it when movies and miniseries are so good you can watch them more than once.

A Girl Named Zippy

This book, by Haven Kimmel, is so great. I just finished reading it for the second time, and I feel like I could immediately start all over again on page one. A truly original and wonderful memoir.

Here's Zippy encountering poetry for the first time:

Mrs. Denver made us memorize and recite poetry, another thing I'd never experienced. The first poem I chose was Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," and when I stood up to recite it I got through it marvelously, right up until the last line, "and miles to go before I sleep," repeats itself, and then I got intensely moved and just had to stand there with my throat aching while thirty-seven unsympathetic eyes stared at me. Finally I just ran over to my desk and put my head down, and Mrs. Denver walked over behind my desk and put her hand on my shoulder. The rest of the room stayed blisteringly silent.
"Why does he do that?" I asked in a tight, mad voice, meaning why does he repeat the last line in that devilish way?

Here's Zippy encountering chopped liver for the first time:

One crystal bowl held a gray paste that Rose swore to me was made of goose liver; she would not deny it even after I hit her for lying. For the rest of the evening I walked around giving myself the hookey-spooks by repeating the phrase "goose liver, goose liver, goose liver."

I want to go back in time and live in Mooreland, Indiana, and live on the same block as Zippy.

So how are those dying tulips doing?

They look fabulous!

Especially at night:

Long day

Long day, not helped by the fact that I wore panty hose and heels, which I rarely do. My own choice, my own fault.

 Watching the new Masterpiece Theatre Sherlock Holmes opener tonight. Very nice. "You're not haunted by the war, Dr. Watson. You miss it."

Flash revelations

Nightime photography reveals - well, reveals what was obvious in the daytime, but it's somehow sort of cool and exciting to reveal the same thing in the dark. Maybe not to everyone, but I'm easily amused.

Case in point: I walked out into the back yard last night and saw mysterious spots of light in the neighbor's yard. The photo I took without flash is exactly what I saw.

With flash, though, things become clearer:

Even stone benches look a little startled when subjected to sudden pops of illumination.

Happy Mother's Day, 1960

With matching envelope:

I seem to have addressed my mom in an oddly formal manner, but I do remember thinking for a long time that mail could not be delivered without an official "Mr/Mrs" addressee (including hand-delivered mail with a crayoned postage stamp).

Pink, pink, pink

This house is about half a block from ours, and it was for sale at the same time that we bought ours, and one of the reasons we did not choose it is because it is very pink.

Pink siding, striped pink awnings all around. There is a matching pink garage. It's actually very pretty, and I'm reasonably fond of pink, and I have to say that it looks terrific surrounded by pink and red and white azaleas in full bloom.

Even so, too much pink for me. But I'm very, very glad it's in the neighborhood, and I always like to walk by.

Dying tulips

I will always remember the former receptionist at work, Jerri, who loved flowers. She usually had a vase of flowers at her desk in the lobby. That is not so unusual, but what was unusual is that she particularly liked to keep tulips on her desk long after most other people would have thrown them away. She said she thought they were almost more beautiful as the petals curled and turned dark than when new and intact, and she even kept the fallen petals around the base of the vase. It sounds odd, but I came to see what she meant.

So this morning I took a photo of a pink tulip just beginning to die, in the early morning light.

And a red tulip in the same imperfect but very interesting state.

Then tonight I went back outside and shot some photos in the dark, using flash. This was interesting because I couldn't see what I was aiming at very well at all, and the results were a big surprise.

The red tulip has decayed quite a bit since this morning, and also has taken on a new kind of beauty. Thank you, Jerri, for opening my eyes.

Owl flight

I don't know where this came from. I hope it's OK to post here. I love it.

Lunchtime shopping trip

I didn't buy anything; I usually don't. But I do like to check out the wares at Urban Outfitters.

Lunchtime with Ben

The University of Pennsylvania was founded by Benjamin Franklin, so naturally Ben is popular. For example, you can find him sitting in the middle of one of the quadrangles.

What is Ben looking at? A giant broken button.

Split Button - Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen.

If Ben could turn his head a little to his left, he would see an iconic Philadelphia work of art.

Love - Robert Indiana.

If he could look a tiny bit to the right of Love, he would see an enormous silver peace sign.

I didn't see a plaque with the title and name of the sculptor for this one. However, if you look closely you will see a little Tupperware container behind the base of the peace sign. I opened it up, and there seemed to be some sort of tickets or chits related to a scavenger hunt or other type of search game in there.

Walking back to the office, I strolled down a walkway decorated with Ben's aphorisms. For example:

Finally, here's Ben again, sitting on a bench reading a newspaper with some friendly visitors who said yes when I asked if I could take their photo.

Always something to see in Philadelphia.

Charles Addams Fine Arts Hall

Lovely day - slightly overcast, but what I consider a perfect temperature, in the high 60s, with a light breeze. Air that feels like cool water, or like cool fresh sheets. So I had to go for a walk on the lunch hour.

I always enjoy walking past the gates to Charles Addams Hall at the University of Pennsylvania.

Yes, it's named after that Charles Addams, a Penn grad.