The Importance of Curing Hiccups

It was a beautiful warm spring night, and I was riding my trusty little Yamaha home from a church meeting on familiar but glorious country roads.   The flower-sweetened wind was in my face, the stars were bright in a moonless sky, everything was a dream of serene motoring bliss, and all of a sudden, I had the hiccups.

"You have got (hic) to be kidding me," I said, aloud, into the inside of my helmet.  How could such a sublime moment be interrupted every ten seconds by (hic) this incongruous and irritating spasm?

I couldn't, honestly, remember the last time I'd had the hiccups.  Many (hic) months?  A year or so?  

When I was younger, in my late teens and early college years, they'd (hic) show up on the regular.  Sometimes, they'd stick around for a couple of hours, which was as frustrating as any tic (hic) can be.

Fortunately, I knew how to fix it.  Not with that glass of water upside down trick, which 1) had never ever worked for me and 2) might be a little technical while (hic) riding a scooter at fifty five miles an hour down darkened roads.

Defeating hiccups is simple.  The trick, or so I discovered years ago after researching the mechanism causing the error, is control over one's diaphragm.  The hiccough itself is nothing more than a spasm of the muscles that control that membrane.  The semiautonomous organic subroutine that involuntarily breathes for us glitches out, and you get this (hic) twitch in the system.  It needs to be reset.

To fix it, I breathe all the way out.  Not just a little, but (hic) all the way, forcing every last possible cubic centimeter of air out of my lungs, putting intense and conscious demand on the processes that manage my breathing, flooding the system with demand input and the resultant neurotransmitters.  Then, with my lungs fully voided, I attempt to breathe in, while at the same time closing my mouth and not allowing air through my nose.  Again, I put as much effort into that as I can, while simultaneously resisting the intake of breath.  The nervous system that serves the diaphragm is overwhelmed with input, washing away the errant process with the outflow of conscious demands, and the glitching hic tic is...wait for it...wait for it...gone.  

Erased. Reset.  Fixed.

It works, thank the Maker, even when riding.   Before the lights of the next town came into view, I was fine.

Much of the anxiety that pervades our modern and technological existence comes from our overwhelming sense of that we can't fix anything or do anything meaningful, this gnawing awareness that we have no understanding of how even the most basic elements of our existences work.   

Every waking moment of our day, that ignorance is pressed upon us and whispered in our ears by consumer culture.  Do you really know how your phone works?  How does the fuel that comes to you get there?  How does your food get produced?  How are you warmed on a cold night?  And if any of the myriad socioeconomic processes on which we depend failed or glitched out, could you even begin to know how to fix it?  How would we even live?

That extends to the state of our souls.  Why do we struggle so?  Why are we so quick to anger, so quick to misunderstand, so paralyzed by fear, so overwhelmed by even the smallest thing?

Everything around us is obscured from comprehension by systems that have been designed to be irreducibly complex, utterly beyond our ability to influence or repair.  The box is closed and sealed, and we're not even allowed to see how it works lest the observer effect voids our warranty.  It sabotages our resilience, and undermines our sense of ourselves.

Which is why we need to, insofar as we can and wherever we can, reclaim our sense of agency.  Learn to garden or how to stitch a garment.  Figure out how to replace an outlet or a fixture.  Change the brake pads on your car.   Replace the wheels on your mower.

Or know, with certainty, that you can stop those hiccups.

The Perfect Clerk

My Presbytery (meaning the regional denominational body that governs my church) is hiring.

It's looking for a Stated Clerk, which is a very particular pastoral position.  Stated Clerks are responsible for managing the policies, procedures, and protocols that we Presbyterians are prone to inflicting on ourselves.  They've got to keep track of everything, be versed in parliamentary procedure, know the Presbyterian Book of Order backwards and forwards, and be able to graciously interpret the byzantine and endlessly emergent thicket of well-meant and impeccably wordsmithed regulations we Reformed-types generate.

That, and be responsive to the needs of scores of congregations, all of which are filled with their own complex interpersonal and organizational dynamics.  That, and know the histories of those communities, and the relationships between them, and their connections to and within Presbytery.

Being an effective Stated Clerk requires a very particular set of skills, with which I myself am not blessed.  That doesn't mean I don't appreciate the souls who've performed that task, because they're rare gems.  

Thirty years ago, when I entered the journey of ministry, there was a bench of folks who had that skillset.  They were process thinkers who enjoyed and found intellectual satisfaction in the intricacies of the systems we Presbyterians built. They had lawyerly minds, which I say as a positive thing.  And they'd spent time studying the process, because someone needed to know what the heck was going on when we fielded a motion from the floor to call the question on an amendment to an amendment to a motion.

This sort of person increasingly does not exist.  As the Presbyterian Church USA continues to contract, the souls whose lived experience and gathered wisdom lent themselves to the requirements of Stated Clerkdom are aging out.  There are some younger folk in the church, sure, but their interests don't tend to bend towards the care and tending of the aforementioned policies, procedures, and protocols.

Thing is, you need those gifts to manage the life of a complex organization.  In a small church, that's less the case, which is why I prefer the organic character of the intimate community.  

But in larger and more complex communities, the absence of clear decision-making processes can be catastrophic.  Where there's crisis or conflict, poorly designed or hazily understood policies can paralyze systems and deepen antagonisms.  Like faulty code in a program, the whole thing can crash.  Ever see a meeting go off the rails because literally no-one knew what to do next?  Or get trapped in a bureaucratic sinkhole that's as merciless as something out of Gilliam's Brazil?  Lord have mercy, do we not want that to be our future.

So I had this thought.  Perhaps the optimal Stated Clerk would be a cyborg.  

Meaning, a person willing to use fully agentic artificial intelligence to support their work.  Where a handful of years ago such systems were clumsy and prone to full-on Carlos Casteneda peyote hallucinations, AI is starting to become a more reliable partner.  It's particularly good at interpreting and operationalizing complex structural data, meaning legal and regulatory systems.  It can respond, via email or verbally over the phone, immediately to queries.  It can juggle a functional infinity of varying demands and tasks, and do so twenty four hours a day.  It can update itself instantly, as processes shift and change. It would never ever burn out or get frustrated.  Such a system could be remarkably useful.

Yes, it's impersonal.  Perhaps a weensy bit on the creepy side, assuming you're get the heebie jeebies around semisentient machines.  That's why you'd not go full AI, but have an adequately experienced homo sapiens sapiens partnering with an intelligent and optimally-pretrained system.

I'm not sure, given the increasingly reflexive resistance to AI, if my progressive siblings would be open to that.  Many might not, as AI crowds into the spaces where labor and creativity once met, and drinks all the water, and .

But what is AI good at, if not doing those things that require endless patience, granular detail, and a superhuman tolerance for oft-maddening complexity?  

At a bare minimum, someone should start a committee to discuss it, which I'm sure would result in swift and decisive action and clear policy.  

Ahem.