Church Bulletins

Eschatalogical Whoopjamboreehoo

Niels used to talk a lot about soulfulness. This was different than spirituality, which always seemed a little insipid to him, I think. I wish he was here to talk about it himself, but he isn’t. In his stead I offer this:

 

 

The Soul

    If you need to visualize the soul, think of it as a cross between a wolf howl, a photon, and a dribble of dark molasses. But what it really is, as near as I can tell, is a packet of information. It’s a program, a piece of hyperspatial software designed explicitly to interface with the Mystery. Not a mystery, mind you, the Mystery. The one that can never be solved.
   To one degree or another, everybody is connected to the Mystery, and everybody secretly yearns to expand the connection. That requires expanding the soul. These things can enlarge the soul: laughter, danger, imagination, meditation, wild nature, passion, compassion, psychedelics, beauty, iconoclasm, and driving around in the rain with the top down. These things can diminish it: fear, bitterness, blandness, trendiness, egotism, violence, corruption, ignorance, grasping, shining, and eating ketchup on cottage cheese.
   Data in our psychic program is often nonlinear, nonhierarchical, archaic, alive, and teeming with paradox. Simply booting up is a challenge, if for no other reason than that most of us find acknowledging the unknowable and monitoring its intrusions upon the familiar and mundane more than a little embarrassing.
   But say you’ve inflated your soul to the size of a beach ball and it’s soaking into the Mystery like wine into a mattress. What have you accomplished? Well, long term, you may have prepared yourself for a successful metamorphosis, an almost inconceivable transformation to be precipitated by your death or by some great worldwide eschatological whoopjamboreehoo. You may have. No one can say for sure.
   More immediately, by waxing soulful you will have granted yourself the possibility of ecstatic participation in what the ancients considered a divinely animated universe. And on a day to day basis, folks, it doesn’t get any better than that.

   Tom Robbins in Esquire

I want in on that eschatalogical whoopjamboreehoo.

If you like this one, see also: A Tom Robbins Page

Cheers,
BuFoon Steve Gillard

The Real Gospel

For those who see this and have not a scintilla of interest in a post about Christianity, let me begin with a disclaimer. The Church of BuVu, this website, social media associated with this website: none are intended to be apologizing or evangelizing for Christianity.

That said, some, like myself, who have spent time as a practicing Christian at some point in our lives, may still be compelled by the words of Jesus … even if we haven’t entered the sanctuary of a church in decades, except when someone we know insists on having a wedding or funeral there.

As one of these “recovering Christians” I am dismayed, even angered, by what passes for “The Gospel” (the “GOOD News”) that’s being “preached” in many churches. The only “good news” is that fewer people, especially young people, are showing up to hear it. Thank God.

 

 
A few years ago I discovered Brennan Manning, a renegade Catholic priest. That is, a Catholic priest who got married, then divorced, who spent awhile as a near blackout, several-times-relapsed alcoholic, who understood shame and self-hatred because they were his shadow. He wrote several wonderful books, but the one I discovered was The Ragamuffin Gospel.

Then there’s this:

 

 
“I think it’s OK to tell this story. U2 came to New Orleans and played in the Superdome. Brennan Manning (The Ragamuffin Gospel, Signature of Jesus) was in New Orleans, so they looked him up because they had read his books. Edge [guitarist] said, “OK, Brennan, I have two questions for you.” I forget the first one. The second one was: “Can I glorify God by being the best rock guitarist I can be?” And Brennan said, “Absolutely you can. If that’s your calling, you can.” Phillip Yancey, author of Vanishing Grace: What Ever Happened to the Good News among many other books.

Anyway, for the curious or otherwise interested, here’s Brennan Manning’s description of The Real Gospel:

 

 
Cheers,
BuFoon Steve Gillard

The End of Time

 
It’s Sunday Morning and time for our scripture reading and homily. This morning our scripture will be an excerpt from Tom Robbins’ Even Cowgirls Get the Blues.

Starting at p. 190 (I am reading from the May, 2003, trade paperback reissue version), Tom describes the Clock People, a community of Native Americans with an esoteric history, related to the April 18, 1906 San Francisco Earthquake, that we will bypass for now. The important thing to know about the Clock People is that they are maintaining, in a burrow beneath the surface of the Earth, the clockworks: the mechanism that holds Time and Space together for Earth dwellers. But, they look forward to the End of Time:

“Please do not construe … ‘the end of time’ to mean ‘the end of life’ or what is normally meant by the apocalyptically minded when they speak (almost wishfully, it seems) of the ‘end of the world.’ That is paranoiac rubbish, and however one may finally evaluate the Clock People, their philosophy must be appreciated on a higher plane than doomsday drivel.” (p. 190)

The Clock People have only one ritual: “The Checking of the Clockworks – the keeping/making of history. Likewise, they have but one legend or cultural myth: that of a continuum they call The Eternity of Joy. It is into the Eternity of Joy that they believe all men will pass once the clockworks is destroyed. … They are preparing for timelessness by eliminating from their culture all rules, schedules and moral standards other than those that are directly involved with the keeping of the clockworks. … (T)hey may be the first community so far in which anarchy has come close to working.” (p. 190)

(I’m weary of going back-and-forth between the text and the keyboard so, taking advantage of Amazon’s “Search Inside This Book” feature, I have taken a screenshot of the rest of our morning’s text, which appears on p. 191. I would have done the same for p. 190, but it was not available.)

 

 
Amen.

 
Cheers,
BuFoon Steve Gillard