Deconstructing Me?

Back to the Little Black Book.

By now, the "100 Things About Me" is winding down. Interestingly, I used a different #31 when I published the list. There are also more notes from the McLaren weekend I mentioned before, which I'm remembering now they called, "Project Mayhem," in a tasty Fight Club homage. Fight Club was another one that helped give a vocabulary to What Was Going On and convince us that we weren't alone or (ironically) crazy. Apparently McLaren quoted three people whose names I wrote down and then never came back to:

Wendell Berry

Os Guinness

Joe Meyer

Some of you will have heard of those people -- Guinness means something else entirely around here, and I'm guessing by now we were creeping up on the time in my Life when I took a break/walked away forever from "Christian non-fiction," (which is such an F'd up description that it'd take all day to take it apart and put it back correctly).

Here we find the line I quoted at the time where McLaren compared what he called the "Christian Public," which I took to mean "media," to the dome in The Truman Show. I still like that -- surprised? He also described something (probably he was referring to what he calls the Emerging Church) as, "Monastic," "Missional," "Urban," "Catholic," and "Communal," using none of those words the way I'm used to hearing them used. Okay.

The List continues to wind down. Numbers 20-11 follow the Project Mayhem notes and #14 is probably my favorite in the page. (Hi Mom!) Still a pig (20). Still don't like to drive (17). Still just the one tat (13). Still love my dad (18).

Facing that page is a list of the Lectionary Readings for a talk I was supposed to give -- I can't find anything on file for that Gospel reading, so maybe we rescheduled or something. My approach at the time, (I was "preaching" about once a month, give or take,) was to take the Gospel reading for the Sunday in question and handle that, rather than pull something out of my butt, which had always been stressful, (what do I pick?) and lent itself to my talking about the same thing every time (which I think ended up happening anyway). My approach now is to stay home and have conversations with people.

Next is a wine we'd had at the Macaroni Grill (we like it there) and had liked:

Coppola Diamond Series Claret

Caberet Sauvignon

No telling if we'd like it now -- our tastes have changed significantly.

And then the title of a book which caught my eye in a Barnes & Noble:

Wicked, by Gregory Maguire

Which (witch?) has since been turned into a hit Broadway musical. I still hope to get around to reading it one of these days.

Of the next five List entries, only 7 & 8 seem interesting. I used to tell people all the time that I wanted what came after house churches, and maybe we've found it. It all still feels more like a journey than a destination, but I've found something I can Live with after nearly thirty years of balled-up frustration. For the record, (some of you seem interested,) our official group (a concept that feels hypocritical to me but only bothers me when I talk about it -- something about a label...) continues to meet officially on Tuesdays and Sundays and unofficially nearly daily in one combination or another, (though it's been entirely too long since the members of our Sushi Ministry had a meeting *ahem.*) We eat each other's food, dig each other's music, drive each other's trucks, move each other's stuff, buy each other's groceries, love each other's children (okay, so far just Mr. Hoo-Hoo,) feel each other's pain, gawk at each other's pictures. We do what we can and we don't generally feel compelled to call It anything. We're good for each other. Tasha said it better than I, (go figure).

Regarding #6, Ruthie and I have reached a compromise and we enjoy it very much. :)

Turn the page and we conclude the List with numbers 5-1. #2 reminds me of this, which still kills me (no pun intended). After that, there a phone number of a guy we may or may not have bought firewood from, and a question,

What would it look like in a world w/o clearly defined "small groups"?

(This progression of ideas from thoughts and scribblings in notebooks to the Reality of my Life is fascinating to review. Oh...this is why people journal.)

And something I heard that a woman had told the man she wanted to marry:

Find your place in this world and take me with you.

Liked that.

I was tempted to write until Little G. awoke from his nap, but this is getting lenghty and really I should put some laundry, and that seems like a good place to quit.

More later.