The Dislocated

It's a funny thing, vacation.

We Americans are lousy at it, taking a day or two here and there.  Or we do the "staycation," in which we curl up in an exhausted heap next to the piles of laundry that will provide our entertainment for the week.

For the last eleven days, I've been on vacation.   By away, I mean, really, really away.  Genuinely and truly "vacated."  Not quite "Richard Dreyfuss at the end of Close Encounters" away, but close.  Along with much of my extended family, I was on a small craft navigating in and around the Galapagos Islands.

For eleven days, I was in places that I'd never seen before.  Every single day was a different place, a different environment, different faces, and different people.  And as tends to happen on long and wandery trips, my mind adapts.  I become used to everything changing, every single day.  I become acclimatized to a great wash of newness, to encountering things that I've never before encountered.

It's probably just some peculiarity of my brain's wiring, as it makes space for new experiences and the unfamiliar.  Whenever I take a long trip like this, home feels...different.

Oh, all the things are the same.  The house is right where we left it.  The things that were left undone in the pre-vacation life still need a-doing.  

But when I've gotten used to things being different, my old patterns broken, and old familiar paths set aside, coming back into the old and familiar routines just doesn't quite feel the same.  Familiar roads seem unfamiliar.  The scent of my home seems different.  The sprawl and stretch of the DC burbs just aren't quite as they were.  I do not perceive them in quite the same way.

I reflected on this as I walked back from dropping off our car at a service station, as the flat tire we conveniently got the night before we left was being fixed.  Here I was, still in this mind state where I didn't feel particularly connected to any place or any location.  Even walking down my familiar street felt like I was encountering it for the first time.

"Dislocated," I thought to myself.  That word hung in my mind.   "I'm dislocated."  Not in the bones-out-of-joint sense.  But in the self-out-of-place sense.

In these few days before I readapt, I have a brief respite from a sense of belonging anywhere.  Or of anywhere in particular belonging to me.  After a few days, it'll go back to being as it was, and I'll move easily through the re-established patterns of the familiar. 

I wondered, too, if perhaps it might help if we felt that way more often.  Less like things were ours, or that places were ours.

So much of the mess we've made of things seems to come from being unable to see that.

Cruise Ship Theology

As I look around at other pastors in the blogosphere, they're out there taking sabbaticals, or at least touring with church groups.

They're traveling through the Holy Land, treading out the very ground that the Apostles trod. They're feeling the brilliance of the Grecian sun as the dust from the ruins of Corinth fills their nostrils. They're feeling the water of the Jordan as it courses between their toes. They are establishing a deep sense of personal connection with the places and stories they know so well, so that they can tell them even more intimately upon their return.

Me? I went on a cruise.

To Behr-myoo-dah.

Me and the missus and the pups hopped on board the Explorer of the Seas last Friday, one of those great gleaming city-ships that stand as high above the water as Godzilla's armpits. It had four pools, and a seemingly infinite number of bars. It had so many bars that in some cases they were stacked on top of one another. In its immense gut, there was a mall...an actual mall...which was above the casino and right next to the ice-skating rink. It was a festival of gorging self-indulgence, from which I feel lucky to have returned only three pounds heavier. Urff.

Unlike a tour of the sacred sites of the Ancient Near East, it might seem that this seaborne temple of conspicuous consumption would be lacking any theological framework. This is not so. For me, everything is theological, even when my medications are working. This cruise was no exception.

There were a number of church groups in evidence. There was a gaggle of folks there to celebrate 170 years of "receiving God's blessings." That's what their t-shirts said, anyway. There was a cluster of men whose shirts were emblazoned with Jesus slogans which were either In Your Face For Jesus or suggesting that God Will Do Whatever You Ask Just Because He is so Awesome.

That first Sunday, there was a worship service on board. It wasn't in the chapel. The chapel, as best I can tell, is exclusively for on-board weddings, of which there appear to have been several. The worship service was described as "nondenominational," and was in the theater. Not the big theater. The slightly-less-big theater.

The worship service involved the ceremonial playing of a Joel Osteen DVD.

Perfect.

VBS: Christ's Convenient Summer Warehouse For Your Children

The signs have popped up everywhere now, in front of nearly every single one of the churches in the area. They're filled with grinning cartoon animals you've never seen before but that tie in to recent movie hits. They offer the promise of catchy, well-produced videos and perky counselors leading your kids through some good Jesus times. This year's crop of Vacation Bible School programs are now crankin' away.

VBS has always been something of an alien thing for me. I grew up going to an urban and very progressive congregation, and they just didn't do the VBS thing. It wasn't that VBS was viewed as unworthy. It was that it wasn't necessarily the best match for my church. First off, the church was downtown, which made getting there difficult. Second, the church ministered to an area that was mostly...in my youth...known for drug dealing, porn theaters, and prostitution.

After leaving church programs for the homeless, I had to actively run for my life on at least one occasion. As a teen, I found being part of ministry there...edgy. Interesting. Real. Most suburban parents, on the other hand, probably wouldn't have seen this as a big draw.

But then again, I'm not sure VBS was the same critter when I was a kid as it is now. A generation ago, VBS didn't seem like that big a deal. As a Christian phenomenon, it's been kicking around for just a bit over 100 years. Lately, though, my gut is that VBS is a very, very big deal. It's everywhere. It's one of the most visible church products out there. Why? Well, many reasons, but among them are several implicit purposes.

First, it's an "activity." It started as something that rose organically out of the life of churches to reinforce the basics of faith in their kids. It was also used to share the basic elements of the Good News with those for whom faith wasn't quite so well established. It still does that, but now it feels woven up into the culture of making sure our kids never have a single unscheduled moment.

Carefully packaged Jesus moments get scheduled into our children's tightly packed summer, along with swim team, SAT prep, Prep for SAT prep, soccer camp, math camp, scout camp, nature camp, full-day tae kwon do camp, and junior stress-management camp. My kids love that last one. Shaky the Stallion and Twitches the Turtle are seriously two of their favorite camp mascots.

While this is technically fine, and it's good that AmeriChrist Inc. is a presence in the professional parenting marketplace, something in me squirms at the "activity-ness" of it. It feels a wee bit like any other summer child-management option, just with a healthy dollop of ingredient J added in. And it shouldn't. Should it?

Second, there is the flawed assumption that many churches have: this will bring the precious families! The kids will come, and they will love the wonderfully designed program we bought from a publishing house just like all the other churches in a five mile radius. They will tell their parents, and their parents will come to church, and our church will finally, finally grow.

The truth of it is that healthy churches are ones that appeal to people as people, not to people as managers of progeny. If you run a great VBS program and a great program for kids, but your church doesn't resonate with adults who are seeking meaning and purpose in life, then you're not going to thrive. Once the kids grow, the parents will wander off.

Finally, having reviewed a good half-dozen of the slickityest VBS curricula around, I struggle with the idea that they really teach effectively. They're great at faith-o-tainment, and at teaching kids that following Jesus is super fun. This is fine if it's reinforcing the things a kid is already learning in a Christian community about the great sweeping story of the Gospel. It might be fine if it spurs an interest. And kids do like it. Then again, kids would try to subsist entirely on YooHoo and Slim Jims if you let 'em.

If it's a flitting moment, one thing to keep them occupied while spiritually disengaged parents juggle them and work...well...maybe it isn't all we think it is.

The songs sure are catchy, though.