Jesonian: Reverend Meningsbee (Part 12) Obsession… July 17th, 2016

 Jonathots Daily Blog

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A damnable itch, festering in the brain, simpering to be scratched.

Meningsbee was enraged.

He was wounded.

He couldn’t decide if he was more angry or hurt.

But on the drive home, grasping a moment of maturity, he decided to keep the events of the failed Bible study to himself. Yes, when asked about it, he would play dumb and refer all questions to the other parties involved.

And there would be questions. The congregation had great faith that Meningsbee would be able to come into the living room setting of Sammy Collins’ home and use his spirit and charm to initiate healing.

Maybe that’s what bothered him the most–a complete sense of failure; a rage over being out-foxed by this common possum, Swanson. How did he ever let himself be in such a vulnerable position that this upstart could make him look foolish and insignificant?

Even though he decided that the mature–or as he called it, the Jesonian–way of handling the event was to remain silent, his brain was inflamed with an inferno of retaliation.

And the more he considered his noble choice, to turn the other cheek and pretend it never happened, the more a self-righteous slime made him feel pious–superior to his adversary. Then an aching anger chased that religiosity, leaving him bound in a week-long fit of overwhelming obsession.

Fortunately, he succeeded in dodging all the phone calls from church members by proclaiming that he would share his findings on Sunday. This seemed reasonable to all of them. Why tell the story fifty times when you could tell it once, and have it done?

But what would he tell?

Even though Patrick Swanson did not ask him to keep their conversation in confidence, he knew that anything he would relate about the plans of this worship leader would come across petty–and of course, be easily denied.

He’d had such great hopes.

Meningsbee had come to Garsonville with the spirit of a servant, but now he was realizing that he still had a mind to be king.

Yes, in his more enlightened moments he was willing to be patient and wait for good things to come his way, but that damnable itch insisted on being recognized.

He got so worked up that he ended up with some sleepless nights that invited a common cold to further aggravate him. Sneezing, blowing his nose and sipping some tea and honey for a scratchy throat, he wondered if he could skip the Sunday service due to illness.

Implausible.

Things had to be handled, and unfortunately, it was his hands.

He didn’t pray enough, he didn’t study anything, he over-ate, over-thought and over-reacted.

He reluctantly dressed for Sunday morning and headed out the door. He had no message.

He had never come to spend time with the Heavenly Father so ill-prepared. All he had inside him was poison. But he drove to the church and stepped to the door.

A few people tried to hug him and he was able to maneuver away by explaining his contagious condition. Fortunately, the congregation easily handled prayers, offering, testimonies and even a song.

Then everybody grew quiet, the building completely still, waiting for Pastor Meningsbee to speak.

He stood to his feet, vacant of inspiration.

He walked slowly, as a man treading to an execution. He turned and looked into the hopeful faces of those who yearned for peace with their neighbors.

Suddenly tears filled his eyes. He feigned a sneeze and grabbed a Kleenex to draw attention away from his sudden emotional outburst.

Catching his breath, he picked up a Bible nearby and held it in the air. He stood there for a long moment, waiting for the Holy Spirit to give him utterance. There was none.

Yet the congregation was waiting.

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Ah-choo … September 10, 2012

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I like to sneeze. I didn’t used to like to do it. At one time in my life, I thought every sneeze was a precursor of the common cold, lending itself to bronchitis or even pneumonia. I now realize that a sneeze can be quite a pleasant experience–the body’s way of expelling something unnecessary in the nasal passages so the little troupers can work better. If you think about it, a sneeze feels good–clears the head and lends itself to an invigorating nose blowing. It’s not only healthy to sneeze, it’s also quite beneficial to accept the fact that sneezinghappens (although I don’t think you’ll ever see that on a bumper sticker).

Original caption: Not faked. I was trying to take a hankie photo cos I have a cold and sneezed! (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Here’s the question: what else happens? What other factors are so common to us as human beings–and needful–that they pepper our existence every day?I can immediately think of two: failure and fear.

Let me play prophet. I predict that you, sometime during this twenty-four-hour period, will experience a failure, and will need to deal first-hand with a fear cropping up in your life. You see? That’s a guarantee.

After all, chances are you won’t win the lottery. It’s unlikely someone will walk up on the street and tell you how beautiful you are. You probably won’t get that promotion. And rainbows are saved for special occasions–or we wouldn’t pull the car over to stop and look at them. What IS going to happen to every human being every single day is failure and fear.

Now, nobody wants to talk about this because it sounds negative. But believing that failure and fear are negatives is similar to thinking that every sneeze is going to lead to death. Just as the common sneeze is available to us to expel unnecessary invaders in our sinuses, failure and fear come into our lives to excavate and evict emotional, spiritual and mental intruders. It’s just hard to understand that. It’s difficult when anticipation paints such a beautiful picture of what could be–to end up, in its place, with a smeared finger-painting done by a five-year-old.

Failure hurts. Then fear comes along to try to relieve the pain by replacing it with an ache of its own. And then, of course, we have the compounding situation that we begin to experience failure because we’re afraid. So on top of the natural conclusions that happen via time and chance, we add unnecessary decisions brought about by weakness and anxiety.

So how can we learn to be the kind of people who approach failure and fear like we do sneezing? After all, spirituality is not expressed through the amount of study we pursue, but through the confidence that is left behind through the graduation.

If you believe in God, your face should look more hopeful than the face of someone who doesn’t believe. It can’t be faked; it has to be real.

Since I am going to fail, what is my best reaction to the inevitable shortcoming that invites my long-suffering? Jesus said it was good cheer. Of course, good cheer sounds like something we wish people at Christmas time, as we are surrounded by bows, presents, pine trees and holly. But good cheer is the awareness that filure is our friend. Good cheer knows that most failure is the way to get rid of bad ideas, and if we stop resisting the natural conclusion to pursuing an inadequate path, we don’t have to waste time having our feelings hurt or wondering where we made a bad turn.

The only real certainty in life is uncertainty. So how can I co-exist with an uncertain life plan and still be of good cheer? It’s really quite plain: prepare to adjust.

For instance, when they repair your car, they tell you to come in later on to have it adjusted. We don’t question that–it makes sense. Driving down the road can shake things up, make things different and loosen up parts. We gladly comply. Yet when we make repairs on our lives, we think they should be air-tight and never need a good screw-down. Ridiculous.

Good cheer is the willingness to watch out for signs that tell us we need to adjust, and then to go ahead and do it without feeling loss or frustration over the revision. That is what keeps us from fear.

Fear is what comes into our lives when we lose love. What is love? Love is a committed affection. So fear enters our thoughts when we lose our commitment. And what should we be committed to do? Pursuing our plan and preparing to adjust. It’s not merely pursuing our plan. We must be willing to commit to the evolution that is inevitable in all things earth-bound.

And then we have to maintain the affection. You see, there are people who make corrections to their previous plans, but they do it in such a nasty, angry way that they abandon the joy and fun in the process. Is there anything uglier than feeling compelled to do good? Affection for life is what gives us passion for each other, ending up with yearning to have a closeness with God.

When we lose our commitment, the fear of what is going to happen next overwhelms us. When we walk away from our affection, the fear that we’ve placed our faith in the wrong project taunts us.

Ssince failure and fear are as common as sneezing, and we intelligently follow the action of sneezing with, “God bless you,” we should follow all failure with good cheer and all hints of fear with love–a committed affection.

In conclusion, I will tell you that in touring on the road, my plans are dashed dialy without apology or the courtesy of a phone call. I am often frightened by the mortality of aging and the limitations of my skill and finance.

What I do is maintain my sense of good cheer by fully being aware that God has nothing to gain by making me look like a fool. I overcome my fear by recommiting to quality ideas that are evolving and finding new reasons to give a big hug to why I do what I do in the first place.

Failure and fear are much like sneezing. They help us expel foreign objects from our being that intend us no good. If you can learn to at least understand them, if not enjoy them, you gain the control of your next move and brighten the countenance of your future.

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The Gesundheit Factor… November 26, 2011

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In Washington, D.C.

Maybe it’s because I’m in Chattanooga, Tennessee–a town known for its choo-choo–which made me think of “At-choo!”  Sneezing. Which prompted me towards the appropriate response when hearing a sneeze, culminating with “Gesundheit.” (Honestly, if you followed that logic, maybe you’ve read a few too many of my essays.)

I like “Gesundheit.” It is some sort of German derivation of “God bless you.” Yet, I’m not so sure it was a German who first said it, but rather, some forward-thinking, sensitive human being who realized that every time he or she said “God bless you,” there were those NOT part of the faithful sheep-fold who might have been a little offended by the reference to the Divine in the midst of their normal, bodily function of sneezing. So rather than offend people who did not have a spiritual sensibility, he or she decided to place the context of the message in another language, which would still convey the essence, but perhaps beg the question: “Gesundheit? What does that mean?”

Because to be quite blunt, dear folks, if you can’t get people questioning, answers are somewhat useless, lying dormant on a side shelf, collecting dust. It is contingent on those who have discovered peace of mind through emotional health and spiritual well-being to find ways to communicate the principles of their great bonanza of revelation in the most creative ways possible. It is certainly why Jesus spoke in parables instead of pulling out old scrolls and reading the same material that people had heard over and over again.

It’s why he told us to “bury the leaven in the lump.” Yes–to take things that are truly eternal and completely absorb them and dissolve them into the practical world around us. For after all, if things truly are spiritual, they will be like yeast, giving rise to any project in which they are placed. It’s religion that ticks people off. It is the notion that one book or one doctrine is sufficient to cover every human need–with no particular sensitivity given to individual preference. That’s why I like “Gesundheit.” It is clever, communicates a message and also begs the question which lends itself to further enlightenment.

I am very weary of ministers and people who attend worship services lamenting why the masses don’t come filing through the door to find inner peace and salvation. Here’s a clue:  it’s boring. And truthfully, if 90% of the people who attend these times with God can get out of them, they do. It’s not exactly that there’s a mad rush by the fervently faithful to attend worship services, either. They are boring, they are predictable, they take pride in the fact that they do not change and possess more tradition than relevance, and they are geared to the taste of the members who attend instead of to the need of the community where they live.

There’s a certain amount of pomposity that accompanies the decision to be irrelevant. Unfortunately, that particular approach to spirituality is very Old Testament and has absolutely nothing to do with a young Nazarene who lived with the masses, communicated with the masses, told stories to the masses and spoke the language of the masses.

We must find a way to bury the leaven in the lump. We must “Gesundheit” our theology. I have five personal beliefs from the philosophy of Jesus that I hold dear. I never share them as blatant quotations from the holy book. Why? Because people have an aversion to religion that comes from pages instead of people. Here are my favorite five:

1. Love your neighbor as yourself. It’s so easy to change this into the “me factor.” People don’t mind talking about themselves, and all you have to do is allow them to do that and merely guide them to give that same courtesy to other folks.

2. Don’t judge, lest you be judged. All of my art and expressions of creativity are peppered with the notion that we cannot expect to get back any different than what we give. The reason I have mercy on other people is that MY lifestyle demands mercy.

3. Go the second mile. In a generation that has trained itself to settle for second-best, we can still rejoice in the fact that those who exceed expectation are not only appreciated but revered. Finding ways to go the second mile is a fun little journey for all of us–as long as you don’t quote book, chapter and verse.

4. Whenever you’ve done it unto the least of these, my brethren, you’ve done it unto me. Projecting God into the face of those who are less fortunate is a simple concept for people to grasp. It is much easier than the plan of salvation and it is certainly more fruitful than another discussion on the rapture or the second coming of Christ. And finally…

5. You are the salt of the earth and the light of the world. People really want to believe that their lives mean more than a pile of bills hopefully paid each and every month. Quietly give people a sense of mission and their spirits will soar, their emotions clean up and their minds clear. Empower people to believe they were created by God instead of constantly reminding them of their depravity.

I just believe in the “Gesundheit factor.” I’m not trying to water down the truth of the Bible–I’m trying to put its ingredients into the recipe of life, and then allow those flavors to expand the dish for all the world to enjoy.

So you can feel free to say “God bless you,” but understand that you are communicating immediately that you are a religious person. No one likes religion. We tolerate it. That’s why we always talk about “religious tolerance.”

But everyone can use ideas that benefit their souls, enhance their feelings and maybe even sweeten their pots. So it’s up to you. As for me, I will take my favorite five and stir them into the daily coffee of American life. It’s worked for me–and when people sneeze, I say, “Gesundheit!” Those who know what it means hear “God bless you,” and those who don’t get a chance to know why God wants to bless them.

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Here comes Christmas! For your listening pleasure, below is Manger Medley, Jonathan’s arrangement of Away in the Manger, which closes with him singing his gorgeous song, Messiah.  Looking forward to the holidays with you!