05 July 2004

Um, ah, the matter of my former pastor... We have a new vicar at church. Well, actually, he's been around about four or five months now, but he still feels "new". On the weekend I ummed and ahhed my way through a conversation with him. The topic? My former pastor. He mentioned they had spoken briefly on the phone, but had yet to meet in person, and he was eager to find out my opinion of the man. Where to begin? I honestly hate these situations where you feel whatever you say you'll be prejudicing someone from the offset. But he was pushing for my opinion. Luckily, it went the way of almost every other conversation I've had with people about my pastor: I ended up confirming what he already suspected. Insecure, controlling, zealous for building his own little empire. That was my pastor. Turned out the vicar had met enough pastors the same before, and my description reflected his first impressions anyway. I haven't seen him in over a year. When I first returned to this town eighteen months ago, he asked me to drop by the church, and I did. The conversation was inoccuous enough, though I didn't enjoy it one bit. He tried to coax me into coming back to the church, but he wasn't really pushy. I didn't want to visit, but for some daft reason I felt I owed it to him. It still makes me sick to the pit of my stomach to drive past that church. Frankly, I hate -- and avoid -- going downtown because that church is all it ever reminds me of. Its pastor is one of the last persons in the world I want ever to bump into. I know some folk would want to suggest all manner of explanation for that -- I'm unforgiving, I'm bitter. I don't think either of those are true. I just know how manipulative he was, how you could go to him and try to stand up to his ways, but how he would use words to turn the situation around onto you, convincing you that you were the problem, somehow managing to make you believe that you were the screwy one. Maybe deep down I'm scared that if I ever confront him with what I really think, he'll just do what he always did and turn things round to make me the culprit. I'm sure time will heal this, and eventually none of this will bother me a bit. Time's the big thing, isn't it? Dave 9:02:40 PM    Join the conversation [] A goatee beard does not a sage make Maggi Dawn has been registering her discontent with the "righteous boys". According to Peregrinatio, who starts to sweat when he sees "a goatee and a jc slogan t-shirt", the righteous boys are those young men "desperately avoiding their doubts by shouting down all possibilities except what will fit in the tiny boxes they call God." And Maggi writes: I know some of these righteous boys. Sometimes they come to my seminars on 19th century theological responses to the Higher Criticism; they sit with their pocket bibles open, quoting texts at me without registering their own circular reasoning or self-referential applications of the text, and wonder why I don't seem to understand that the Bible is "the Word Of God". I once knew a "righteous boy". He had the goatee and everything. He was young, a recent convert, not the brightest thinker, rather naive, and a zealous crusader for "truth". At Bible College he stopped me in the canteen one time and rebuked me for having a tatty Bible. "A soldier doesn't go into battle with a rusty sword," he said without a hint of irony registering on his face. I think I met the rebuke with silence, but now I'm wishing I'd challenged him about what kind of religion he'd swallowed that fed him such warped and twisted notions. Dave 10:18:38 AM    Join the conversation []

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