A you a "nice Christian"? Get over it!

Have you ever been the subject of church gossip? Been charming to someone at coffee hour and then complained about their voice or their politics or their faith all the way home?

Are you a "nice" Christian?

Do you think the faithful are supposed to be genteel? Or are they just numbskulls like the rest of us?

Comments, puhleese...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/elizabeth-e-evans/the-christian-niceness-ep_b_717186.html

So who am I (or you) ... really?

I have this friend, an accomplished writer, who recently described herself in an email as a "stay-at-home mom."

I have a lot of respect for women (well, lots of women) I know who either have the time and money and/or make the financial sacrifice to be at home with their children while they are young.

But in this case, I threw in a caveat. I'd describe you as a writer with two kids who works at home, I told her.

Oh yeah, and a wife. A faithful laywoman who represents her denomination nationally.

And, of course, a good friend.

But who am I? How would others describe me?

It's possibly an inevitable question for those of us who stumble upon life in the public eye, even if in a small way, or have positions that place us under the lens, whether we are doctors, or lawyers, clergy or teachers.

Perhaps its also a question that women, who often treat parenting as a competive sport, ask one another -- and themself.

Am I the successful writer? Am I successful (published, paid, hard-working) enough?

What about that mix of skills and defects, history and aspiration, that I bring to mothering? Am I "there" enough when my children really need me?

Am I the dork, the thick-lensed introverted intellectual I recall from high school, that some men brush off as a possible date? Too old? Too conservative? Too much the mom?

Or am I the middle-aged hottie refracted by some others? I chuckle. This is purely impossible, I say to myself - - they need better specs.

Most baffling, at this point in my ecclesiastical career -- with my drive towards change, toward mission sans bricks and mortar, do I belong in the hierarchical, glacially-changing denomination in which I currently serve?

And who are you, anyway? What persona do you inhabit today? What dreams are you shelving? Which ones yet to be explored? What are your hopes? Regrets? Secrets that you haven't even told yourself?

It's so much easier to limn my friend, than to catch myself in flight, and say -- oh, THIS is who I am.

Can you nail the butterfly? Do you even want to?

Know-nothing, forget nothing

It's amazing what I have managed to forget in the process of something like 18 years of education. I can't even remember, this child of a professor of American intellectual history, taking that subject in college.



But out of some musty crevice of memory emerged, like a crocodile out of a Delta swamp, the phrase "know-nothing party."



And once I remembered it, of course, I was on the hunt. For if the climate of political discourse today isn't identical, then it has many similarities.



For the party, if the secretive groups could be called a party, emerged out of the anti-immigrant movements of that turbulent pre-Civil War period of United States history.



Here's what a blogger named Daphne (hat tip to her for figuring this out before me) has to say about the nativist party:

"Back in those days, a lot of people were upset at the large influx of immigrants, especially Irish and German Catholic, arriving here. Between 1820 and 1845, the number of newcomers had been steady - 10,000 to 100,000 a year. Then immigration surged: from 1845 to 1854, some 2.9 million people, most of them Irish and German, poured into cities like Boston and New York. That's more people arriving here than in the previous 70 years combined!"

Clearly that many immigrants arriving was going to tick some people off -- particularly when times were tough and there weren't enough jobs -- which isn't to say that native-born Americans (music and lyrics, folks) wanted the jobs that the immigrants had. In this area, we are only now uncovering the apparent brutal murder of Irish men who came over to work on laying tracks for the trains. Their ghosts are said to haunt the area where they were allegedly murdered.

But I digress -- this isn't a ghost story. Not in that sense, anyhow. My aim is to suggest that what we are undergoing, in terms of the anti-immigrant (and anti-Muslim) sentiment threaded through America right now, isn't anything particularly new. The Know-Nothings, as the Infoplease.com site reminds us, were kind of hard to pin down.

Many secret orders grew up, of which the Order of United Americans and the Order of the Star-spangled Banner came to be the most important. These organizations baffled political managers of the older parties, since efforts to learn something of the leaders or designs of the movement were futile; all their inquiries of supposed members were met with a statement to the effect that they knew nothing.

Guess what they wanted? Some nativists argued that only those who had lived in the U.S. for two and a half decades should have the vote. It may not be too surprising that the parties that emerged out of the original nativist movement endorsed slavery. Abraham Lincoln, for one, was a voice against the movement.

But they had many successes -- and in the North, including Delaware and Massachusetts. It's a rebuke to any who believe that, when it came to slavery and anti-immigrant fervor, the North had no blood in its hands.

Yet the parallels, while evocative, should not be taken too far. The Know-Nothings of the 1850s's aren't the Tea Party of today, with its focus on returning to an arguably more originalist perspective on the Constitution and on economic problems.

Anti-immigrant sentiment seems to come, in large measure, from outside the bounds of those political parties who have the microphone today -- although that doesn't prevent politicans within from using it for their own gain. And it may be no surprise that anti-immigrant sentiment surges when unemployment goes up.

Which doesn't mean that we shouldn't fight it -- but perhaps we might not act, again and again, as though it was something new.

Picture thanks to Wikimedia Commons.

Hospice or Health? Where is your parish?

Can clergy help congregations die -- or become healthier? Well, some can, and some can't. A conversation with the Lancaster, PA, Samaritan Center program director Linda Crockett.

http://articles.lancasteronline.com/local/4/282364

Clergy burnout or hands off the choirmaster

My first post for the Huffington Post...a slightly satirical look at the subject of clergy burnout.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/elizabeth-e-evans/clergy-burnout_b_692945.html#comments

Your house, my house, lakeside version

Here's my latest post on The Smartly about the benefits of a relatively healthy split family.

Read, debate and comment, please!

http://thesmartly.com/?p=1367

What of the poorhouses?

Trade deficits. Unemployment. Deflation.

The vaunted recovery is now a tricklet. Britain is changing its fiscal forecast.

China, as this New York Times story recounts, is moving from boil to simmer.

Have you noticed?

I'm sure you have, if you are unemployed. Surely you aren't trying to find a job? You prefer welfare benefits. People like you always would rather take money from those who pay taxes.

Or underemployed. If you were only willing to take a position at CVS or a fast-food eatery, you and your family would be doing just fine.

Or have just surrendered seeking a position -- as the months tick, tick, tick, without a job you gave in to anomie. I mean, where's your sense of enterprise?

I suspect the folks who sling names at the almost ten percent of Americans out of work don't know a lot of the unemployed.

But many of us do. I've not seen this kind of frustration and depression for a long time. And it's not solely the working-class who are trying to support their families on benefits -- when the Congress decides to allow them benefits.

It's middle-class Americans -- teachers, computer geeks, social workers.

Someone said recently on the radio that recoveries were taking longer and longer.

And while no one seems to have the alchemical pill that cures, one thing is predictable -- safe in their historic chambers, Democrats and Republicans will blame each other. And then they will go home to their comfortable houses and apartments.

They don't have to stare fear in the face each night -- and then get up, against most odds, and try again to make meaning out of thin gruel in the morning.

Surely...there are poorhouses?